Manuel Pastor: St. Louis research

Summary

In this engaging video recording, Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at USC, shares insights from his recent visit to St. Louis. Hosted by the McDonnell Foundation, Pastor outlines the importance of centering equity as a key to prosperity. He shares observations from St. Louis, including shifting demographics and persistent racial inequalities, and suggests that regional collaboration and data-driven strategies are crucial for equitable growth. Pastor emphasizes that St. Louis, like many Midwestern cities, is at the crossroads of recovery, seeking a balance between equity and economic prosperity.

Highlights

• Manuel Pastor discusses the importance of centering equity for overall prosperity 🌟.
• There's a shifting geography in St. Louis, with growing ethnic populations in the suburbs 🏘️.
• St. Louis sees economic recovery, but local residents need more job opportunities 🚀.
• Persistent racial inequality affects wage gaps across education levels 📊.
• A call for regional collaboration and data-driven strategies to foster equitable growth 🔍.
• Equity is a key prosperity tool, not just a fairness issue 🌱.
• Regional dynamics make dealing with inequality more pressing and effective 🤝.
• Deliberation, data, and shared destiny are keys to regional growth and unity 🔧.
• St. Louis is highlighted as a central, influential hub with potential for impactful change 🔄.
• Encouragement for St. Louis to emerge as a model for other Midwest regions 🌆.

Key Takeaways

• Equity should be central to prosperity; it's not just about fairness but enhancing economic growth too.
• Regional collaboration is vital—change happens best at the regional level where impacts are more visible.
• St. Louis's suburbs face rapid demographic changes, demanding a new approach to poverty and infrastructure.
• Data-driven strategies are crucial for addressing persistent racial inequalities and fostering equitable growth.
• St. Louis is at a critical intersection where effective equity strategies can serve as a model for the Midwest.

Overview

In a recent video presentation, Manuel Pastor, renowned director of the Equity Research Institute, shared his observations and insights from a recent collaborative research trip to St. Louis. Emphasizing the significance of equity in driving economic prosperity, Pastor's analysis highlights the complex dynamics within St. Louis, such as shifting demographics and enduring racial inequalities. His central thesis is that addressing equity is not merely a matter of justice but a fundamental growth strategy for the region.

Pastor notes that regional approaches are key in dealing with systemic inequalities. As he recaps his research findings, he points out the striking demographic shifts in St. Louis, where suburban areas are experiencing significant ethnic and economic changes. This transformation necessitates an updated approach to issues like poverty and civic infrastructure. He observes that while the city itself recovers economically, local communities must be integrated into this growth to prevent widening disparities and tensions.

Besides presenting a compelling dataset that highlights the persistent racial wage gap in St. Louis, Pastor underscores the power of regional collaboration. By utilizing data, fostering deliberation, and creating a sense of shared destiny, he believes regions like St. Louis can forge a path towards inclusive growth. His message to St. Louis—and the broader Midwest—is clear: embrace equity not just as a moral imperative but as a strategic advantage that can position the city as a beacon of transformative economic development.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction The chapter introduces Manuel P. from the Equity Research Institute at USC, who has collaborated with Chris Spenner on various books about regional economic development. The latest focus is on 'Solidarity Economics,' emphasizing the importance of mutuality and movements.
• 01:00 - 03:00: Visit to St. Louis Chris and I visited St. Louis in late 2023, hosted by the McDonald Foundation. We had conversations about our research, its implications for your work, and our suggestions for future actions. The video features just me discussing this.
• 03:00 - 08:00: Challenges in St. Louis The speaker shares an introduction about their friend Chris, who is on a vacation in the woods. This type of vacation is unusual for the speaker, who is accustomed to urban environments, having been born in New York and grown up in Los Angeles. The speaker humorously notes that Chris's vacations lack cell service and martinis, highlighting a contrast in their vacation preferences.
• 08:00 - 12:00: Importance of Regional Action The chapter titled 'Importance of Regional Action' discusses a visit to Los Angeles by members of the Biden Administration and the White House, in relation to the 'Justice 40' initiative. This initiative aims to direct 40% of certain climate reinvestments to communities historically underserved or neglected. The text highlights the importance of regional collaboration and community engagement in implementing such equitable climate programs. The emphasis is on ensuring these communities are involved and benefit from reinvestment efforts.
• 12:00 - 16:00: Strategies for Improvement The chapter titled 'Strategies for Improvement' delves into the idea that economic development can be significantly driven by centering equity. The speaker suggests that equity is not just about inclusion, fairness, or justice, although these are important aspects. Instead, equity should be viewed as integral to achieving overall prosperity.
• 16:00 - 18:00: Conclusion The conclusion chapter discusses the importance of investing in closing gaps, emphasizing that doing so not only addresses inequalities but also creates opportunities for future prosperity. Additionally, the chapter highlights that significant action occurs at regional levels, suggesting that addressing issues at these levels can have substantial national impacts in terms of equity.

Manuel Pastor: St. Louis research Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hi St Louis good to be with you through this video recording today I'm Manel PUD I'm director of the equity research institute at USC and along with my colleague Chris spenner the author of several books on Regional Economic Development the most recent of which is solidarity economics why mutuality and movements matter an earlier volume was
• 00:30 - 01:00 Equity growth and community and uh together Chris and I uh visited St Louis in late 2023 hosted by the McDonald Foundation to have a series of conversations about our research some of the implications for what you all are doing and some of our thoughts for what you might do moving ahead uh you might ask why it's just me and why it's just me by a video
• 01:00 - 01:30 recording rather than even Zoom live well my friend Chris is not available why well he's off on a vacation uh and he tends to go on these vacations that are like in the woods with uh no celles service and you know uh no martinis you know I don't actually understand that kind of a vacation I was born in New York I grew up in La I'm a completely
• 01:30 - 02:00 Urban guy need to be in contact so he's not available and then I'm unfortunately not available to talk to you live because we're having a visit in Los Angeles from members of the Biden Administration and the White House about Justus as 40 uh an initiative as many of you know to take about 40% of the climate certain climate uh reinvestments and make sure that they're stirred to communities that have long been left
• 02:00 - 02:30 behind and kept behind in order to stir more economic uh development and actually that serves as a pretty good entry point to the three points I'm eventually going to make today which is that this kind of notion of centering Equity is actually key to overall Prosperity that is that we sometimes think about Equity as a kind of inclusion or fairness or justice issue and while certainly there are elements
• 02:30 - 03:00 of that that are true it's also the case that uh when we invest in closing gaps we actually are also creating opportunities for Prosperity uh going forward the second uh point that I'm going to try to make in just a few minutes is that the action where that's really taking place is Regions turns out that at a national level it's probably true as well that if we were more equitable
• 03:00 - 03:30 we would Prosper better as a nation but it's harder sometimes to see that in DC where Congress people from One region face off Congress people from another region don't see their Mutual interests anyone who'd be arguing right now that Congress is functional might be stretching themselves just a little bit but what we argue is that at a regional level people come together uh face to face uh race to race place to place and
• 03:30 - 04:00 they're better able to see their common interests and the third thing I want to lift up is that there's actually techniques to make that happen and those techniques focus in on getting forward data ensuring that you've got deliberation and creating a sense of a shared Regional Destiny now before getting to those more General points what is it that we found by coming to St Louis
• 04:00 - 04:30 uh before coming we did a lot of uh data work uh we actually then spent some time on the ground taking a look around and there's a couple of striking things which I think are somewhat typical of a lot of places in the country but maybe a little bit on steroids in St Louis head in the St Louis metropolitan area the first is the shifting geography of your demography in the past when we thought about about where the black population
• 04:30 - 05:00 lived where immigrants might reside we often thought of the main Central City but as you know including from the uh flare up around police brutality in Ferguson it's really a lot of your suburbs now that are experiencing the most rapid growth in ethnic populations and actually also in poverty that shifting of the uh geography of demography is critical it argues for a
• 05:00 - 05:30 much more Regional lens particularly to Poverty eradication particularly because a lot of these new Suburban areas lack the Civic infrastructure the community organizing infrastructure the social services infrastructure that would be key for dealing with these levels of poverty and inequality second big thing that jumped out at us was the fact that the city of St Louis is actually doing much better than it used to for example the earnings per job has been way up and actually
• 05:30 - 06:00 Above the Rest of the country that suggests that some of your heads and meds particularly meds strategy is uh working but one of the things beneath the data is that it's working by importing people into St Louis that is that a lot of the local residents who stuck it out over generations and generations are not uh onboarding into those new sources of employment but are instead finding themselves uh stuck uh even as the city
• 06:00 - 06:30 recoveries recovers and that is kind of a recipe for furthering resentment for furthering polarization for further separation the third thing that was pretty striking both in the uh data and then certainly on the ground was the Persistence of racial inequality that degree of racial inequality quite sharp uh it's something that's not purely explained by education one of the charts
• 06:30 - 07:00 we showed was that even when you control the level of Education certainly being more educated leads to a higher wage but if you uh look at each and every level of Education less than High School degree High School degrees some college and AA degree a ba or better there's a wage penalty for black jobs black workers in particular at every level of Education that has to do with continuing discrimination with network effects in ter of who you know what kind of jobs
• 07:00 - 07:30 you would get into Etc and you could see that level of racial inequality particularly sharp when you look at households when you look at median household income by race and ethnicity in the same Louis metro area pretty big gaps between white black and Latino households when you look at households with children under the age of five those gaps Skyrocket so that for white households with children under the age
• 07:30 - 08:00 of five median household income above 100,000 for black households with children under the age of five about 38,000 that's almost three to one and that means that really what you're doing is baking inequality into the future particularly when you also look at the percent of kids who are of color who go to High poverty schools or when you look at the racial wealth cap so these are some big data Trends what can you do
• 08:00 - 08:30 about it well one of the things that we found in the rest of the country through our studies in a book called just growth and Equity growth in community where we looked at literally about 24 different Metropolitan regions in the United States or a couple of things first we found that centering Equity can actually be quite key to Prosperity now
• 08:30 - 09:00 uh what's interesting about that is in most of Economics we often teach that you know if you try to equalize things too much you're going to wind up reducing incentives and savings and damaging growth now that's probably true meaning that if you were way too interventionist Soviet Union style you would wind up actually smothering uh economic growth but it's also possible to have so much inequality that that actually also disin sense growth that is
• 09:00 - 09:30 that you ought to be thinking about it as a U-shaped function too much equality might damage growth too much inequality might damage growth and we're to have been in the United States on the wrong side of that function where we're really with too much uh inequality uh now you know that this is true you know that when you've got a population racked by over incarceration lots of talent goes a wasting you know
• 09:30 - 10:00 that when you've got an immigration system that's broken and folks find it difficult to start businesses employ others and work that that's going to wind up taking away economic activity and you know when you under invest in black and brown Youth and low-income white youth that what you're going to wind up doing is shipwreck your economy in the future by short changing the productivity potential of those young people so we know that Equity can be key to prosperity and
• 10:00 - 10:30 I think this is really important because it means that those of you who fought on the equity side stop yourselves needing to think about it as just Justice or inclusion or fairness issue but to think about it as a Prosperity tool as well the second thing uh that I think is really crucial that we found out in our books is that this actually really hold most at a regional or Metropolitan level
• 10:30 - 11:00 where the cor costs of you know short changing your labor force by underinvestment turn out to be the most dilar to your firms uh and businesses where the political polarization from too much inequality too much racial tension makes it difficult to agree on a growth strategy going forward that these effects really happen at a regional level for example when we did our study
• 11:00 - 11:30 uh in equity growth and Community looking at 200 metropolitan areas we found out that the single biggest impediments to Regions being able to sustain job growth over time where the initial level of inequality the level of racial segregation and a little bit less so the level of political fragmentation or political polarization but that all happened at a regional level because the costs of inequality are far more
• 11:30 - 12:00 Apparent at a regional level so it's really key to work at a regional level but to work at a regional level what it means is that you need to figure out what are the steps forward to bring a region together now in our book Equity growth in community we use the term diverse and dynamic epistemic communities I know it's only it's a term that only academic could love and in fact academics did
• 12:00 - 12:30 love it there were a number of studies that were launched after our book looking at diverse and dynamic epidemic communities and of course we wanted to get the book published with the University of California press and so we needed to use a lot of multi slabic and somewhat complicated words but it's actually not that complicated epistemic Community is what you know epistemic and who you know it with your community diverse means you bring together people from
• 12:30 - 13:00 multiple sectors dynamic means you're able to adjust when there's a shock and what we found out was that for people to create such a diverse and dynamic epistemic community and knowledge Community they needed three things one is some kind of data project that actually centered Equity that actually brought Equity indicators into the mix and made sure that we weren't just focused on median household income or
• 13:00 - 13:30 Regional GDP but also on disparities on unequal opportunities and things like that because when people could at least agree that that was a problem they might disagree about the strategies or remedies whether to go more interventionist with you know local hiring programs uh or to go more uh Market oriented but at least they would have the same data on which they were operating the the third piece of it was
• 13:30 - 14:00 deliberation that is creating opportunities for repeated conversations so that you don't have a sort of One-Shot conference on the future of St Louis but instead create a series of repeated conversations where people get to know one another know each other's interests and learn how to compromise and come together in Los Angeles we wanted to do a big effort on immigrant integration and one of the things that we did was to bring together people from
• 14:00 - 14:30 multiple sectors including some that didn't think they had anything to do with immigration and after our first meeting the main order of business was take someone out to breakfast you didn't know and it turned out that from those breakfasts came a multitude of unusual alliances of people beginning to see themselves in the other and see the other in themselves in ways that made for human connection and really made come alive face to face race to race
• 14:30 - 15:00 place to place so deliberation third is a sense of destiny that is creating projects that make people feel like they are part of the region that they have something in common again comes from these conversations so data deliberation Destiny these are the methods to bring people together I hope that's useful I want to thank the uh McDonald foundation for inviting me
• 15:00 - 15:30 to tape record this or Zoom record this and uh make it available to you uh sorry that Chris couldn't be here again he's off kaying or some darn thing someplace in the middle of the country with no cell phone coverage uh but I'm here and I should note that while he's off in the middle of somewhere off in the middle of the country as I said St Louis is the Cent of the country you are the crossroads
• 15:30 - 16:00 and you are important people say that what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas that's probably good given what happens in Las Vegas but what happens in St Louis should not stay in St Louis you are like a lot of other Midwest areas grappling with long-term de-industrialization and
• 16:00 - 16:30 decline with some recovery of your Central City with some dispersion of your people of color and poor populations with some need to really bring together the equity and prosperity message with a compelling uh necessity to try to shrink the political polarization and come together on a common Vision the eyes of the world are on St Louis hope you all
• 16:30 - 17:00 get it right we'll be writing about you soon and hopefully with the support of the McDonald Foundation be working with you to make this Vision a reality thanks