AHC: Keep the Northeast and Midwest the largest economic center of the US

[Nightingale]

Your challenge, with a POD just after WWII, is to fulfill what the title says. Keep the Midwest and Northeast from rusting, and the electoral college should be similar to 1952, but there are restrictions:

1. A larger US economy.
2. Open to free and fair trade. But they support downscale people even with increased globalization.
3. China becomes a powerhouse, and the rest of the world is far wealthier, e.g. Southeast Asia.

Scenarios screwing China are iffy. Don't sacrifice millions of lives just to pull the challenge off.

4. No laissez-faire stuff. As much as possible, keep the New Deal intact and expand it.

5. A Democratic Revolution in the 1980s.

6.The South, Southeast and West US become powerhouses. Bonus points if their population is still the same or not that different from ITTL, but I can obviously expect that they would have smaller populations.

7. Might wanna use Deming's techniques. But make sure Japan does so as well.

P.S. Please put your source material, links, books, etc.

 

[Nightingale]

No tryers?

 

[1940LaSalle]

Not to be too simplistic, but one possibility is to have Ike declare the 1959 steel strike as inimical to national defense interests early on--say, after three or four weeks tops (debatable whether or not he would have done that, but what the heck...). He then assigns VP Richard Nixon as the chair of a mediation panel that includes (say) Adlai Stevenson and Theodore McKeldin among others. The mediation panel manages to bring about a settlement at about the six- or seven week mark, with the mills going back into operation as soon as the equipment can be brought up to temperature again. In that event, Detroit doesn't start to look abroad for steel (although the stockpiles would be getting low), and the American steel industry is preserved, as is the automotive and shipbuilding industries. That should delay the transformation of the northeast / Midwest into the post-industrial Rust Belt by (my guess) a couple of decades at a minimum.

Couple that with a nascent civil rights movement--that is, major industrial metro areas with plenty of jobs--and you probably slow / postpone decline of many major metro areas, like Baltimore. Might also accelerate the progress of civil rights given more prosperous (economically) minorities...

 

[Viriato]

A while back remember reading articles from the early 1960s where manufacturing was already moving out of what would become the rust belt to the south. It seems that this movement was accelerated by the economic downturns of the 1970s, and continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By the 1970s it also seemed that manufacturing was beginning to increasingly shift overseas, or at least American firms were facing growing competition from Europe and Japan.

Lower wages of course were of course an important impetus, but it would be hard to get factory workers to accept lower wages. The only way I can see a change would be a much stricter regulatory environment, such as one where companies would be penalised heavily for laying off workers. Another might be to forestall economic growth elsewhere in the world, or to simply make the U.S. so protectionist that the internal market relies almost exclusively on domestic goods, though this of course comes with another set of issues.

 

[I want to learn]

I feel like the title of your post is true in OTL. GDP in the United States is concentrated along the Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-D.C. axis. There's smaller clusters of economic power around Chicago and in Texas and California. The factories aren't the same as they used to be, but even if you exclude D.C. and define Chicago, NYC, Boston and Philadelphia all as mid-west or northeast, the region is the largest economic center of the US.

http://metrocosm.com/map-us-economy/

 

[CaliGuy]

Your challenge, with a POD just after WWII, is to fulfill what the title says. Keep the Midwest and Northeast from rusting, and the electoral college should be similar to 1952, but there are restrictions:

1. A larger US economy.
2. Open to free and fair trade. But they support downscale people even with increased globalization.
3. China becomes a powerhouse, and the rest of the world is far wealthier, e.g. Southeast Asia.

Scenarios screwing China are iffy. Don't sacrifice millions of lives just to pull the challenge off.

4. No laissez-faire stuff. As much as possible, keep the New Deal intact and expand it.

5. A Democratic Revolution in the 1980s.

6.The South, Southeast and West US become powerhouses. Bonus points if their population is still the same or not that different from ITTL, but I can obviously expect that they would have smaller populations.

7. Might wanna use Deming's techniques. But make sure Japan does so as well.

P.S. Please put your source material, links, books, etc.

Based on the information here:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=222172

What about having the U.S. government aggressively intervene to promote and protect U.S. industry in the Northeast, thus giving it enough of a stimulus and boost to strengthen the economy there and to prevent some of the jobs there from becoming outsourced (and also to ensure that more new jobs are created there)?

 

[big-click]

No Taft-Hartley Act might help. If the South can't pass the so-called "right to work laws" that kept their labor force unorganized and cheap, there will be less of an incentive for Northern companies to move manufacturing south in the 60s and 70s. I'll dredge up some sources in a bit.