The American Heartland is doing better than many think on an array of socioeconomic
indicators but faces serious human capital and innovation deficits
Washington, D.C. – The Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program and the Walton Family Foundation
(WFF) today released new research that benchmarks the economic growth, prosperity, and inclusion of
America’s Heartland region. The report offers Heartland and U.S. leaders and citizens a baseline fact set
for assessing and understanding the region’s current condition and future prospects. Overall, the report
finds that the region is belying its “flyover country” reputation by outperforming the rest of the nation
on several key socioeconomic indicators, notwithstanding a set of serious challenges associated with
its weak human capital and low innovation capacity.
State of the Heartland: Factbook 2018—authored by Brookings scholars Mark Muro, Robert Maxim,
and Jacob Whiton and WFF’s Ross DeVol—employs a novel state-based definition of the Heartland,
developed by the WFF, to benchmark how 19 mostly inland, non-coastal states are doing
economically compared to the coastal “rest of the nation” as well as with each other, using multiple
metrics and maps and charts.
Progress is tracked across nine top-line “outcome” measures of inclusive growth, while 17 other
economic indicators are used to benchmark the region’s standard on four types of “drivers” of strong
outcomes. In addition, the report’s accompanying web interactive tool provides readers with the
opportunity to actively explore how the region and their local communities are doing.
The authors note three overarching takeaways:
1. The Heartland economy is doing better than is often portrayed, as evidenced by steady job and
output growth, rising median wages that exceed those in the rest of the country, and decreasing
rates of poverty. Importantly, every Heartland state had a cost of living-adjusted median wage
that was greater than in the non-Heartland.
2. The Heartland economy varies widely across place, with strong performance gaps between the
western and eastern states, and between the northern and southern states, on key indicators
such as labor market performance. Areas such as the Black Belt (running from Louisiana through
Mississippi and Alabama), Appalachia, and Indian Country struggle with emergencies of elevated
poverty and high rates of obesity and addiction.
3. Serious deficits in the region’s workforce, education, and innovation capacities pose the most
difficult challenges to improving future prosperity for all Heartland residents. These findings
represent the most challenging findings of the factbook.
“Far from what the ‘Rust Belt wasteland’ or ‘American carnage’ storylines imply, jobs are broadly
available in the Heartland, and many people can live more comfortably there than in the rest of the
country given the region’s affordable cost of living and strong industrial and export sectors,” said Mark
Muro, co-author and Brookings senior fellow. “With that said, the region needs to do more to support
entrepreneurship and increase its digital skills to support further high-value growth in advanced
manufacturing and especially tech.”
“Many will be surprised that the Heartland’s performance exceeds that of the rest of the nation on
many metrics such as standard of living and employment rate, and that the Nashville, Tenn.
metropolitan area is among the fastest growing in the nation,” said Ross DeVol, co-author and Walton
Family Foundation fellow. “The Heartland must implement policies to enhance research, build
entrepreneurial capacity, and invest in post-secondary education.”
Encouragingly, the American Heartland outperforms the rest of the country on several core economic
indicators such as employment rate, median wage, advanced manufacturing, export concentration, and
alternative energy production. The Heartland region economy produced $4.9 trillion in goods and
services, and also generated nearly 55 percent of the country’s agricultural output in 2016.
Altogether the report notes that the Heartland economy is bigger than Germany’s and just a bit smaller
than Japan’s, making it the fourth largest economy in the world.
The report emphasizes that human capital and innovation shortcomings are the most pressing long-term
challenges facing the Heartland region and its residents. Relatively slow population growth, low
bachelor’s degree attainment, a racial degree gap, and productivity-sapping obesity and opioid use all
threaten to depress the Heartland’s future productivity. At the same time, less dynamic metropolitan
areas, weak R&D, spotty tech transfer from universities, and nearly non-existent venture capital flows
limit the region’s innovation potential.
READ THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Heartland_Factbook_2018_Executive_Summary
