Boston’s Rank in the U.S. Economic Standings
Cities have always been in competition for economic supremacy. For most of history, keeping score was haphazard. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, an American city’s population was considered by many to be the leading indicator of its economic success. One reason people felt that Boston was in decline after World War II was that its population dropped every decade from 1950 through 1980 (even while its suburbs were growing rapidly).
In recent years, urban score-keeping has become much more fine-grained, comparable to the transformation of baseball statistics by Bill James, Bill Beane, and other sabremetricians. As in big league sports, more elaborate score-keeping reflects more intensive competition between cities. A plethora of magazines, websites, government agencies, and think tanks comprises a cottage industry ranking cities across the nation and the globe on a broad range of indicators.
A recent study to appear is the McKinsey Global Institute’s Urban America: US Cities in the Global Economy (April, 2012)—http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/urbanization/us_cities_in_the_global_economy. Boston fans might search the document to find out where their city stands. In the terminology of McKinsey, an international consulting firm, Boston is a “middleweight” city, one of 257 such cities (actually their metropolitan areas) in the country. Middleweight metro areas have populations between 150,000 and 10 million. The U.S. has two “megacities,” with over 10 million population: New York and Los Angeles. One might think that the “middleweight” class is a bit too broad to be meaningful.
To McKinsey, the great strength of the U.S. economy is its strong and varied base of middleweight cities, which no other country can match (China has the large number of middleweight cities, but they lack the economic output and infrastructure of the U.S.). American cities have various strengths. Some Sunbelt cities, such as Atlanta and Houston, use their low cost of living to attract business and residents. Rapidly growing urban “gazelles,” such as Austin and Raleigh, build on their technology industries, universities, state government, and warm weather. Boston, with Washington, DC, is considered an “alpha middleweight.” They are established cities that innovate from their knowledge-based economies and outperform competitors with significant above-average per capita GDP.
The most telling statistic in the McKinsey study traces the changes in metropolitan GDP between 1978 and 2010. Boston ranked #9 in 1978 with a GDP of $113 billion. In 2010, Boston had moved up to #8 with a GDP of $296 billion. This placed Beantown between Philadelphia and San Francisco in the rankings. The big changes in the urban standings came from a strong rise by such Sunbelt cities as Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Jose, while the Rust Belt localities of Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Milwaukee took a tumble.
The interesting thing to note about Boston was its 9th place ranking in 1978. Boston was thought to be in steep decline during the post-war era. The 1970s were an especially tough decade, marked by the busing crisis, high unemployment, and the city’s deepest decadal population decline. Boston’s showing in 1978 reflected the economic vitality of its suburbs, particularly the Route 128 technology corridor.
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