It was May 2012. I was at my desk, working for a think tank in Washington state.

An email hit my inbox. A recruiter shared a job announcement from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. She asked if I knew of anyone who might be a fit.

Now, I was not looking for a new job. I was a young lawyer, married, with three children. We had just bought a house. I enjoyed my work and my colleagues. Most of my wife’s extended family lived in the Pacific Northwest. Neither of us had any connection to Michigan.

I emailed my wife: “What do you think about Michigan?”

She replied: “I hear it is the Innovation Hub of the Midwest and America’s Scale-up State!”

OK, I made up that last line. But I imagined the scene after reading the Growing Michigan

Together Council’s 86-page report on how to grow Michigan’s population. (The Innovation Hub is a prominent idea.)

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is wise to focus on population growth. She asked her council to recommend “concrete, data-driven, and evidenced- based goals” to grow the population.

The council’s report discusses several trends: Michigan’s population is falling relative to other states; our education system is antiquated; Michigan’s highways and bridges are in poor condition; and the percentage of Michiganders with college degrees is lower than it is in some other states.

Scattered throughout the report are many things the council thinks Michigan should do. Among them:

• Brand Michigan the “Innovation Hub of the Midwest and America’s Scale-up State”


• Develop public transit systems


• Increase and revitalize the housing supply


• Expand taxpayer-funded support for child care and elder care


• Offer new economic development incentives


• Spend more on postsecondary education and training


• Give tax credits for student loans


• Develop incentives to attract talent (first-time homebuyer, relocation, etc.)


• Offer a 13th year of schooling if K-12 is insufficient


• Have taxpayers fund two years of free college for everyone

More central planning is in our future if we follow the recommendations of the council. The council says we should: develop an economic growth plan while addressing governance and funding; form a workgroup for the Michigan Education Guarantee; design a governance model for education; and design a new funding model for K-12 schools. All this will require, it says, “a complete retooling of government systems and institutions” — though details are scarce.

This report uses the word “funding” 54 times and “investment” another 42 times. The council fails to discuss how the state would pay for these programs, or what the price tag would be.

For all this, the Growing Michigan Together Council report fails to address the key question:

Why are other states eating our lunch?

The report barely looks at what other states are doing successfully. It does not show how its Christmas list of ideas improved population growth elsewhere. It gives little attention to why people move away from Michigan. (To find some of these answers, look instead to the Mackinac Center’s recent study, How to Make Michigan Grow.)

Astonishingly, after publishing the report, the co-chair of the council admitted that its recommendations would not grow Michigan’s population by 2050, which was the stated reason for this process.

This is like deciding you want to lose weight. And then you go out and buy new clothes, a new car and upgrade the landscaping at your home. When someone asks how your weight loss is going, you point to all your recent activities and purchases.

The Growing Michigan Together Council had one job. But it offered little to address an important challenge.