Your community of focus– 2040! As we finish the semester, it is appropriate to look ahead with some creative visioning. Given your perceptions, knowledge, and personal insight/intuition regarding the present status, how do you see your region evolving over the next two decades? More specifically, take two approaches.
a) identify some of the typical and conventional models of socioeconomic development, and track what you believe is a LIKELY path of evolution for your region of focus.
b) after completing scenario “a”, then break from the conventional and propose some new paradigms tracking through their potential effects and implications on the socioeconomic outcome for your region in 2040. The key is to keep in mind the forces of reality that bear on the outcome, while at the same time seeing how shifts in our paradigms (both individual and collective) could alter the outcome. I look forward to your original thinking.
. The Tiebout hypothesis suggests that people vote with their feet. To this end, indicators of social well-being may hint about an area’s quality of life. There are several indicators of community well being available on the internet (cost of living (for example, https://www.salary.com/research/cost-of-living/nd Links to an external site. ), unemployment rate, net migration (https://netmigration.wisc.edu/), median house value, median rent, poverty level, employment rate, high speed internet, distressed community index (https://eig.org/dci/interactive-map), etc. Explore them, then compare the information collected about your community with another “rival” community (the community where locals usually leave in search of a better life). How is your community doing compared to the rival community? How might this information affect current and future policy proposals? Your answer to this question should be based on data and facts.
