The Senate’s passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill is a welcome sight, but even if the House approves and President Joe Biden signs it, the legislation will tackle only part of the country’s infrastructure dilemma.
To round out the recovery and build sustainable economic growth, federal investments in human infrastructure, like skill-building and job training, must complement physical infrastructure upgrades.
This isn’t just about measuring a return on investment. Poor or insufficient funding for human infrastructure will also exacerbate the economic and political divides recent elections vividly demonstrated, further harming our societal and national health.
Perhaps nowhere is this widening political-economic divide clearer than in the Midwest, where communities are increasingly marked by those succeeding in a globalized economy and those falling further behind.
Some of these trends go back to at least 2016, and are reflected in presidential election results.
Major economic hubs like Indianapolis (Marion County) and dynamic Midwest cities with large universities, such as Madison, Wisconsin (Dane County), broke for Biden by margins similar to those enjoyed by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
At the same time, in both struggling former industrial cities and rural Midwestern counties that have seen economic opportunity dry up for decades, Donald Trump won or competed in 2020 by margins reminiscent of 2016.
The 2020 election also highlighted how economically vibrant, smaller cities in the Midwest, like Bloomington, Illinois, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, are beginning to reflect this trend. County-level election data demonstrate that Biden surpassed Clinton’s 2016 performance by over 5 percentage points on average (46% to 51.4%) in this subset of cities, while Trump’s percentage slightly decreased.
What’s different about these cities that moved toward the Democrats? For one, they are home to local economies built around growing business sectors such as health care (Rochester, Minnesota) and insurance (Bloomington-Normal, Illinois). But these cities are also home to jobs that often require more skills and training than the stable, living-wage positions available to previous generations.
While the source of this political-economic divide is complex, it is partly due to a narrow and uncoordinated view of how we build — and have built — for the economy of tomorrow. Physical infrastructure investments are certainly necessary, but they are not sufficient for sustained economic growth.
For example, expanding broadband access and reliability doesn’t prepare workers to effectively utilize its potential, just as electric grid modernization won’t train workers for high-skilled manufacturing positions.
As argued in a recent report from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, infrastructure has the unique ability to — and therefore must — drive convergence between communities on different economic paths. This can be accomplished through place-based economic development policies, which target areas with the most extreme and long-lasting equity gaps, and job training that shifts skill-building from reacting to the last economic crisis to building for the jobs of tomorrow.
Ironically, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act just passed by the Senate fails to include much of any investment in job training core to President Biden’s $100 billion proposal in the American Jobs Plan.
A separate, $3.5 trillion funding bill that may be passed through reconciliation in the coming months has provisions that address workforce development, but faces an uphill battle in the Senate, even among Democrats. It would also only fund existing programs, not create new training programs that have the chance to be far more targeted and effective in meeting workforce needs for a changing economy.
Underfunded and uncoordinated programs will not be sufficient in any case. Success in driving economic convergence between communities in the Midwest and elsewhere will require local economic development policies that are supplemented by robust state and federal workforce development and retraining assistance programs that take advantage of upgrades to physical infrastructure. Only then will we level the playing field for communities and workers falling further behind.
The alternative of hardening political-economic divides that threaten the core of democracy itself is far too much to risk. To prevent an uneven recovery and further economic inequality, policies that narrow the gap between communities succeeding and those struggling must move to center stage.
Hard infrastructure is a start — it will build the potential. But federal and state investments in workforce training and upskilling will bring long-term growth and economic convergence.
Alexander Hitch is a research associate for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Global Cities Team.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
