In an article in MLive, Michigan Future President Lou Glazer says that Michigan needs to attract more talent. “Michigan won’t be a high-prosperity state unless metro Detroit and metro Grand Rapids are able to compete with national talent magnets like Chicago and Minneapolis for mobile talent,” he told the paper. He should have checked the numbers first since Grand Rapids is the leader of this group and Chicago is shedding people to other places.

From 2010 to 2016, the Grand Rapids area led that group of four cities by attracting an additional 2 percent of its population from other places in the U.S. Minneapolis came second, adding 1.5 percent of its population. Metro Detroit lost 1.4 percent of its population through domestic migration. The Chicago area, however, lost 2.8 percent of its population to other areas in the U.S.

The policies Glazer recommends are especially suspect when the economic trends he bases them on are misstated.

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