With two assembly plants and a leading research facility, Illinois has positioned itself to become a center of the technology transforming the automotive industry. As automakers move to replace internal combustion engines with electric powertrains over the next decade or two, states are racing to stake their claims to electric vehicle manufacturing and the jobs it will create.
So far, established automakers are primarily concentrating production in Michigan, Tennessee, Indiana and South Carolina. Newcomers such as Tesla and Lucid have chosen Nevada, Texas and Arizona.
Illinois beat out Texas and Michigan for the Lion plant, a sign of the state s competitiveness in the industry. If it can lure a flock of electric vehicle parts suppliers, Illinois will hang on to its role as one of about a dozen states that account for most U.S. auto production, preserving a key source of high-paying manufacturing employment as well as advanced technical jobs.
Is Congress Ready to Invest in Regional Economies?
The Senate is considering a bill that would devote billions to create new tech hubs around the country. It faces an uncertain future, since picking winners makes other regions jealous.
May 12, 2021 •
(Shutterstock) A few parts of the country have made out like bandits in recent years. In the decade between the Great Recession and the pandemic plunge, 90 percent of the job growth in technology and innovation sectors occurred in just five major metropolitan areas. In any given year, roughly 80 percent of the nation’s venture capital funding flows to just three states: California, Massachusetts and New York. The pandemic didn’t change that.
As a plot twist, the concept of reversing roles, or undergoing major and unexpected transformations, is hardly new. Tom Hanks’s breakthrough role was in
Big, the 1988 film in which he played a little boy who wished he could be an adult, only to wake up the next day in the body of a grown man (the role won Hanks an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor). The same theme was used in
13 Going on 30 with Jennifer Garner as the teenage girl who made the leap in age. Then of course there was the 2003 movie
Freaky Friday, in which Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan played a mother and daughter with a difficult relationship who one day find themselves having traded bodies and lives.
Can the Biden Agenda Fix Middle Americaâs Deepest Problem?
One key economic goal is to create the virtuous cycles of innovation and jobs that already occur in many coastal cities.
A farm near Allen, Neb., last year. In much of the middle of the country, population loss and economic decline have fed on each other, a cycle the Biden administration hopes to break. Credit.Brian Lehmann for The New York Times
May 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Last week, the Census Bureau said that the last decadeâs population growth was the slowest in generations. Also last week, President Biden addressed Congress and laid out a wide-ranging, multi-trillion dollar economic agenda.