Larry Summers Makes the Case for a Government Bailout of the American Heartland

In 2016, only 5 percent of men ages 25 to 54 in Alexandria, Virginia (a rich DC suburb), were not working. In Flint, Michigan, the share was 51 percent.

That staggering fact frames a new paper by three Harvard economists — Benjamin Austin, Ed Glaeser, and former Treasury secretary/chief Obama economic adviser Larry Summers — released on Thursday as part of the Brookings Institution’s Papers on Economic Activity series.

Austin, Glaeser, and Summers argue that particular areas of the United States (specifically what they call the “Eastern Heartland,” defined as Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia) have fallen behind on a number of economic indicators, but especially male joblessness.

Jobless rates among working-age men have been growing nationwide for decades now; the share of men ages 25 to 54 in the labor force fell from 97.1 percent at the start of 1960 to 89 percent at the end of 2017. Without that fall, there’d be 5 million more men in the workforce. The share of women working increased for most of that period, due to broader cultural changes, but has been stagnant since the mid-1990s.