ABSTRACT
The industrial heartland has lost ground to a "trade and defense" perimeter in the United States. The deindustrialization of the Midwest was shared by many communities in the rapid growth states of California, Florida, and Texas. The nation's industrial heartland is a vast region producing most of the nation's metals, machinery, and consumer durables, as well as a large share of its agricultural output. The evidence of severe net job loss, a product both of heavy industrial losses and of the absence of compensating gains in either manufacturing or other employment sectors, explains the phenomenon of rising out-migration from the states of the industrial core. In an analysis of the Great Lakes states, one group of authors concluded that they had identified regional deindustrialization throughout the 1970s and acceleration since 1979. The classic theory of the business cycle states that businesses naturally begin, grow, mature, and die, and that area economic viability can be sustained through steady new business formation.
