This week’s podcast is with someone I’ve known for years and is one of the best scholars I know at understanding the deep economic, demographic, and geographic structure of Rust Belt America. He’s Chris Briem, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh, and he joined me to discuss his book Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation.
The book is an economic history of Pittsburgh, which suffered America’s most extreme Rust Belt collapse during the 1980s, all but wiping out its signature steel industry and causing hundreds of thousands of people to leave the region. Yet Pittsburgh today is viewed as a success story in economic transformation.
With so much of America struggling to reinvent itself economically - including pretty much the entire Midwest and Northeast - leaders around the country can learn a lot of looking at what happened in Pittsburgh.
