These remarks were prepared for Accelerator forAmerica’s Spring 2026 gathering in Riverside CA and partially delivered on a panel entitled “Skating to Where the Economic Puck is Going.” The panel, expertly moderated by Accelerator’s CEO, Mary Ellen Wiederwohl, included Montgomery AL Mayor Steven Reed, Laurel Blatchford of Delivery Associates and Donald Jones of Next Street.
The title of this panel perfectly captures this volatile moment. The US is experiencing not only a profound political upheaval but, relatedly, a radical restructuring of the economy.
It has long been understood that cities and counties are creatures of state law. In the same vein, city and metropolitan economies are derivative of macro political and economic orders. These larger orders create winners and losers by shaping urban and metropolitan economies and the actions of public, private and civic institutions.
To this end, Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order is a must read. Gerstle, a Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge, brilliantly describes the New Deal Order, that ascended in the early 1930s and imploded in the mid-to-late 1970s, and the Neoliberal Order, which rose in the late 1970s-to-early-80s and began to disintegrate in the mid-2010s during Obama’s second term in office and the first election of Donald Trump.
We are now moving from the Neoliberal Order that prized globalization to one predicated on Economic Nationalism. This will require a fundamental rethinking of local economic governance and strategy.
From 1980 to 2015, the Neoliberal Order dominated the American political and economic systems. The U.S. economy was simultaneously globalized, financialized and de-industrialized. Price and efficiency were the driving forces, allocating the manufacture of goods to those parts of the world where labor costs were cheap and production expansion was frictionless. In Thomas Friedman’s indelible phrase, The World is Flat.
For mature economies like the US, the result was a wave of offshoring and outsourcing, with enormous spatial and societal consequences. The Neoliberal Order decimated manufacturing hubs of the country and hollowed out the middle class. It also cemented a small group of superstar cities (e.g., New York City, San Francisco, Boston) as the epicenter of economic growth, financial services, and the allocation of private venture capital. US cities were told to “plan for a postindustrial future” and given few resources to adjust and adapt.
Beginning in the mid-2010s, however, a new order began to emerge. This new paradigm put Economic Nationalism as its core. On one level, Economic Nationalism was a revolt against the obvious failings of neoliberalism as vast numbers of people and places were left behind. But Economic Nationalism also reflected the rise of geopolitical tensions, technological competition and the pandemic revelation of the fragility of supply chains.
This period has centered on reindustrializing, remilitarizing and re-energizing, driven by the relentless acceleration of technological innovation. Artificial intelligence is not the only technological advancement in play, but it is by far the most important, given the level of private investment, the critical role it plays in national security and the technology’s excessive demands for physical infrastructure and industrial data centers and disruption of whole occupations and the energy sector. Rather than price and efficiency, security and resilience have become the new drivers, as policymakers have sought to ensure national sovereignty at any cost.
The world may still be flat in many respects, but it has become, once again, a dangerous place given the re-emergence of great power rivalries, the global implications of “regional” conflicts and the retreat of the US from the international structures it created in the aftermath of the Second World War.
As with neoliberalism, economic nationalism will profoundly alter the fortunes of places. This new order, however, will not lead to the hyper concentration of growth and capital in a few places but precipitate the reshuffling of economic relevance across a broader set of cities and metropolitan areas.
Given the chaos surrounding the Trump presidency, it is difficult to discern that central aspects of the new political and economic order have deep support across our partisan divisions.
But consider this.
Biden and Trump both pushed defense budgets to new heights, Biden largely due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s threat to Taiwan and Trump due to a new era of American aggression. The DOD budget rose from $800 billion in FY 2023 to $960 billion in FY 2026. President Trump has now requested a budget of $1.5 trillion for FY 2027.
Biden and Trump have also promoted the reshoring of industries, albeit through radically different means, i.e., Biden’s support of the CHIPS and Science Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act and Trump’s erratic application of tariffs and transactional foreign and trade policy.
There are, of course, intense, almost existential differences between our political parties around issues that fundamentally shape the economy such as climate change, clean energy, market regulation, scientific research, immigration, the social safety net, tax and fiscal policy, governmental capacity, just to name a few.
But the goal of strengthening the U.S. industrial base and supporting domestic manufacturing and the technological innovation that comes with it represent bipartisan foundations of the emerging order. (Economists, of course, differ markedly on what is happening in the manufacturing sector, but deciphering the complex data is for a different newsletter)!
What does this portend?
At the most basic level, the U.S. is going through an industrial transformation, including a renewed and growing importance of defense production. The emphasis on defense production and advanced manufacturing more generally is accompanied by an exceptional period of technological innovation. A broad array of next generation technologies — artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, robotics, quantum computing, additive manufacturing, advanced materials, digital engineering, chief among them — are moving from design to deployment across multiple sectors of the economy at breakneck speed.
The industrial and technological revolutions are fundamentally intertwined and fusing the defense and civilian economies in unprecedented ways. And these revolutions have major implications for the energy sector, given the demands for increased generation, enhanced security and no-room-for-error reliability.
We are living in unchartered waters.
Some elements of this period harken back to the Cold War Science era of the 1950s, which gave birth to Silicon Valley in the first place. Other elements feel like a New Gilded Age, as the Big 7 tech companies create unparallel levels of private wealth and exert disturbing levels of political power.
So how does a city and metro even begin to “Skate to Where the Economic Puck is Going” given this complexity and the daily, if not hourly, noise and distraction.
Three things are paramount.
Places need new ways to read their economy.
Cities and metropolitan areas have radically different economic assets and advantages, which provide different radically starting points as the US transitions to a next economy characterized by remilitarization, re-shoring, energy security and advanced technologies. Places need new methods and metrics to understand their position in the shifting economy – fast.
To that end, I have spent the past few years working with Victoria Orozco and her remarkable firm, Punto Data, to create new diagnostic tools that can assess a metro’s starting point with respect to (a) federal and defense procurement; (b) next generation technologies; and (c) key elements of the energy transition. One part of our diagnostic: a unique database of more than 70,000 separate assets to give us precise information on the comparative role of different metro areas in the growth of the defense economy.
This is not an academic exercise. The smart reading of an economy enables a city and metro to create a customized roadmap that aligns (a) the market demand for technologies that support advanced production; (b) the locally based supply of innovation firms and research institutions that can be leveraged to respond to market signals and provide the necessary technologies; (c) the state, national or global supply of critical firms and institutions that can be recruited to a particular place; and (d) and the spatial location of innovation districts and corridors that can efficiently co-locate manufacturing companies, technology firms, applied researchers and others.
This is a new world. The traditional manufacturing sector had its own supply chains of firms that made components that fit seamlessly into a finished product. The new industrial order is creating new technology-driven supply chains, given the ways technologies transform what we make and how we make them.
Places need new strategies and projects to unleash their economic edge
Understanding the distinctive strengths of a place is just a critical first step to identifying concrete strategies and projects that leverage an economy’s distinctive position and enhance growth in the short- and long-term. If history is any guide, the dual use effects of next generation technologies could be game changing for first mover metros.
Given the radically different starting point of urban and metropolitan economies, it follows that transformative strategies and projects differ markedly. No one size fits all.
Places with a strong manufacturing aspiration must make available industrial real estate that can serve production firms that are expanding or want to become part of an industrial ecosystem. Metros as diverse as Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth and Columbus OH are prospering because they are meeting this demand for land with speed and precision.
Places with a strong production platform must bulk up aligned technological strengths so they can move up the value chain. With federal, state and corporate funds, St Louis, Missouri has established an Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center to serve the needs of Boeing and its suppliers in the defense aerospace sector.
Places with a strong innovation base must augment their technology capabilities by growing new research centers and attracting relevant technology firms. Vanderbilt University and EPB, the public electric utility, have partnered to create an Institute for Quantum Computing in Chattanooga.
Places must leverage the potential of organic innovation districts and corridors that naturally co-locate their special production and innovation assets. Pittsburgh is building an AI Innovation Corridor near Carnegie Mellon University around mature tech companies like Google and Duolingo, rapidly growing Physical AI firms and the U.S. Army Artificial Intelligence Integration Center.
Places must seek companies and capital, including new levels of foreign direct investment, to spur their distinctive growth. As part of a larger Investment Playbook, Hampton Roads is creating partnerships with key UK and Australian defense metros and companies, building on the AUKUS treaty.
Places must design workforce initiatives that align closely with their distinctive economic needs. SENEDIA (the Southeastern New England Defense Industry Alliance) aims to train over 5,000 workers for the submarine industrial base, with close to $100 million in DOD funding.
In other words, first mover cities, metros and states understand that the economy is shifting and responding accordingly.
Places need to radically collaborate, alone and together, to realize the full potential of their economies
The challenges and opportunities facing communities today cross disciplinary, sectoral, and jurisdictional lines, requiring solutions that are multi-dimensional and implicate multiple actors both within and outside government. This is particularly true as economies restructure in the aftermath of the pandemic and in the shadow of geo-political tensions.
The reshoring of manufacturing, for example, requires a new kind of industrial governance that integrates interventions around the location decisions and workforce, technology, energy and infrastructure demands of major production companies and small-and-medium sized firms. Advancing innovation, in turn, requires close collaboration among industry, universities, entrepreneurs, investors and intermediaries. Upgrading the skills of workers requires joined-up efforts between firms, community colleges, skills providers, local governments, philanthropies and others. And so on.
It is clear from the outset that the traditional organizing of government into vertical silos and stovepipes is inadequate to respond to challenges that are quintessentially horizontal and cross-disciplinary in nature. For that reason, the most exciting and durable responses to the new political and economic order emanate from examples of network governance — an AI Strike Team in Pittsburgh, an Investment Playbook in Hampton Roads, new industrial and workforce partnerships in Phoenix and Philadelphia, new capital partnerships in Alabama and Ohio.
But every city and metro cannot do this on their own. There is urgency to organize cities in the collective. We are living in a period where societal tensions between the large and the small have markedly grown. The rise of Big Tech and Big Finance dramatically distorts how markets function and cities perform. Prior generations in the US met this challenge by establishing independent federal agencies like the ICC, FTC and SEC, to curb the excesses of concentrated power in the economy. In the absence of federal leadership, coalitions of cities and metropolitan areas must aggregate their market and purchasing power and find new means of influencing an economy dominated by a few large firms.
Examples of collective power exist at the national and global scales, particularly in the climate arena with municipal consortia like Kommuninvest in Sweden and C40 more broadly. These examples must be applied to economic development and critical areas like housing.
To conclude, a new political and economic order is reshaping economies on the ground. Navigating this messy and complex period requires a new level of economic intelligence, strategy and project design and collective organizing. The economic puck is moving, and cities and metropolitan areas must move with it.