Ripping The Ranking

 

Your article "Can Chicago Be Saved?" not only asks an irrelevant question, but bases its argument on questionable criteria with a bias toward defining success as entrepreneurial. An entrepreneurial climate has nothing to do with the overall economic health of a city. Rather, it favors high-risk companies over proven enterprises that can adapt to changing economic conditions. This is a recipe for volatility, rather than vitality. Your own ranking demonstrates the point. Just look at the changes from year to year. Can Chicago be saved? Certainly there is much work to be done -- not the least of which involves correcting misinformation published by a magazine that suffers from myopia.

EDITOR-NOTE:

Speaking of the right places, we heard from a number of cities about our annual ranking of America's fastest-growing metropolitan economies in March:

We may be myopic from time to time, but we're not blind. Mr. Birnberg is living in a world that no longer exists. What companies does he have in mind when he writes about "proven enterprises that can adapt to changing economic conditions"? General Motors? International Harvester? Bethlehem Steel? Volatility is not a statistical aberration in today's economy; it is a fundamental business condition, and it affects every company, large and small, proven and unproven.

Given that fact, cities can no longer rely on "proven enterprises" to guarantee their economic health -- as Chicago and Cleveland have learned the hard way. Big companies are shrinking. The Fortune 500 have lost more than 3 million jobs since 1980. Yet, during that same period, the U.S. economy as a whole has added more than 14 million jobs. And who has created those jobs? Why, those same "high-risk" companies that Mr. Birnberg scorns. That's why our ranking has "a bias toward defining success as entrepreneurial." An entrepreneurial business climate is precisely what a city needs to provide jobs and opportunities for its citizens.

As for Mr. Hermann, he raises an interesting point, but he has his facts wrong. As David L. Birch pointed out in last year's Metro Report ("The Q Factor," April 1987), virtually every city experiences about the same degree of job loss each year -- 7% to 8% of its job base -- due to layoffs and shutdowns. That goes for Dallas and Orlando as well as Chicago and Cleveland. So our methodology does not discriminate against older cities in general. Indeed, it was an older city that outperformed all others over the past year -- Lansing, Mich., which rose 65 places, from #132 in 1987 to #67 in 1988.