Ramstad: Readers say we need ‘reasonable’ growth, more babies and to keep the downtowns connected

I write often about ideas for kick-starting Minnesota’s slow economic growth. Whenever I do, some readers will write me to question why we need to grow more quickly than we are.

Economic growth is the grease that makes other desirable things possible, like comprehensive social services, a clean environment and terrific schools. Minnesota outgrew most other states for decades, but for the past 20 years, it has lagged more often than led in many data comparisons.

Last year, Minnesota’s per capita economic output fell below the nation’s for the first time, a development John Phelan, economist at the Center of the American Experiment, noted first on the center’s website earlier this month.

And nearly every day, the Star Tribune writes about an effect of Minnesota’s slowing population and economic growth. Last Sunday’s front page held a story describing how so many of the state’s school districts face budget shortfalls. On the next day’s front page came news that a big Minneapolis hospital closed its special care nursery.

I wrote a column in March expressing some exasperation with state and local political leaders of both stripes doing unnecessary harm to the Minnesota economy when we should be trying to spur growth. Some readers noted that economic growth used to be the thing that united political leaders.

“When I headed development in the City of Minneapolis, an ethic of growth was beyond debate. Now, we don’t act like it’s even a priority,” Mike Christenson, who joined the city’s economic development unit in 2003 and led it from 2007 to 2011, wrote in an email to me.

Another reader, Owen Brown of Minneapolis, channeled the people who worry about the harms and damage that come with growth. Then, he landed where I usually do.

“There’s always room for restraint, but in Minnesota (and, I must admit, in the rest of the U.S.) we seem to have gone beyond the reasonable far too often,” Brown wrote me. “We need to support growth, compassionately, while understanding what’s at stake.”

After that same column in March, David Uppgaard of New Brighton wrote that I was too mild with the analogy I used, comparing the actions of local leaders with the teasing that children do when they force a friend to hit themselves. “A better analogy is we’ve shot ourselves in the foot and the wound has become gangrenous,” Uppgaard wrote.

He challenged me to “write an article about a subject you and many others seem afraid to acknowledge, the proverbial elephant in the room. I’m talking about suggesting attempts to increase the birth rate as the best solution to solve the worker shortage crisis our state is facing.”

I noted in my very first column at the start of 2023 that it seems ugly to appeal to people to have more children for the sake of the economy. South Korea, which has the world’s lowest birthrate and where I recently visited, is endeavoring to make life better for parents, especially women.

Other countries have tried other measures, such as offering a tax break for having a baby, providing free pre-kindergarten and child care. Nothing has worked.

Demographer Jennifer Sciubba summed up the dilemma this way on a recent podcast with Ezra Klein of the New York Times: “In the U.S., the conversation is starting to trend toward, ‘OK, we are a low fertility society. Uh-oh, how do we change that?’ That’s the rhetoric, but the question we need to ask ... is, are we really a society that values children and families? And I think, in a lot of cases, the answer really is no.”

Minnesota is trying to make parenthood and childhood more affordable. I don’t think parents are seeing much of a payoff except in free school lunches. And government leaders would have an easier time selling such efforts by tying them to reviving the state’s economic growth.

On other topics, the column this spring I received the most feedback on was the one in which I subsequently realized I had used data incorrectly, drawing an erroneous conclusion about the movement of retirees to Minnesota. I quickly published a column that explained how I made the mistake. Many of you forgave me, and I’m grateful. A few of you did not, and told me so, and I’ll keep trying to re-earn your trust.

The second-highest amount of feedback was on my column about the odd idea of removing Interstate 94 between the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul when residential development has ground to a halt in St. Paul because of rent control. By far, most readers focused on the prospect of losing the highway rather than my fear that nothing might go in its place.

“If I-94 is ripped out, what’s next?” Sue Sanger of Minneapolis asked. “Couldn’t the same type of arguments be made by those who were, and still are, impacted by the construction of I-35 and other freeways? The costs of setting this type of precedent are astronomical.”