Better, Stronger, Faster by Daniel Gross

Author:Daniel Gross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

CHAPTER 10

More Like North Dakota

The economic gloom that pervades the Washington, D.C.–New York corridor, where I spend most of my time, has been so thick since 2008 that I’ve found it necessary to travel to some rather exotic locales in my search for economic optimism. In Xi’an, deep inside China, I marveled at dioramas depicting massive new industrial parks that were already under construction. In Bogotá, Colombia, the spirit of a country liberated from fear and relishing rising prosperity is palpable. I got the same feeling when I got off the plane in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Those who believe that the United States no longer has the ability to compete and that it lacks the potential to reverse seemingly inevitable decline should really visit North Dakota. If the rest of the country were a little more like the thinly populated Peace Garden State, we’d all be more sanguine about the future.

North Dakota is easily overlooked by the political, financial, and media establishment. It’s very hard to check off the bucket list of states to visit, because it isn’t really on the way to anywhere. The few airlines that fly there charge an arm and a leg. Delta charges more for a New York–to-Bismarck round trip (about $1,300) than it does for a jaunt to Europe. So go ahead, make your Fargo and Coen brothers jokes, and then go visit Fargo, or Bismarck, or the booming oil fields around Williston in the western part of the state. What you’ll find is an upside-down mirror image of the United States.

The U.S. economy’s growth may have resumed in July 2009. But two years later, in the summer of 2011, the nation’s hotbeds of innovation, lifestyle, and population growth still suffered double-digit unemployment: in California the rate was 12.1 percent; in Florida it was 10.7 percent; and in Nevada it was 13.4 percent. But the Plains states, bypassed by population growth, urbanism, and Whole Foods outlets, had extremely low rates. North Dakota enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, at 3.5 percent in August 2011. In several counties the rate was below 1 percent. In August 2011 the state boasted 395,000 payroll jobs, up 18,900, or 5 percent, from the year before. If the other forty-nine states had been able to match this pace, the country would have created 6.5 million jobs in a year.

North Dakota is one of the smallest states by population (about 670,000) and one of the largest geographically, with 70,000 square miles. It had 0.7 unemployed persons for every job opening, compared with 4.25 for the United States at large. In May 2011 the state jobs office had 15,205 listings, up 64 percent from May 2010. In the entire United States the labor force participation rate—the proportion of able-bodied adults between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five who are working or seeking work—was an anemic 64.2 percent. In North Dakota it stood at a high-octane 74 percent. 1 But while its citizens are more hardy, friendly, and prone to using

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