Brandt's Notes

Speak to any Houstonian about the threat of climate change to the city and you'll get a similar response: Houston's economy isn't based on oil like it once was.  It's diversified.  We have the medical center, we have many Fortune 500 companies, NASA, the shipchannel, as well as manufacturing and retail.  The city survived the oil price slump of the 1980s and came out better for it. But was it enough? Maybe not,  according to the Dallas Fed .  Looking at employment change percentages, author Jesse Thompson points to the areas of most significant decline during the pandemic: oil/gas, construction, manufacturing, and information services fared the worst.  That oil and gas (and support industries) still make up 1/3rd of employment in the Houston metro area, and that it alone accounts for nearly that percent in wages is evidence to it's continued importance. Further, the charts he presents show how many of these lost jobs in the pandemic (1/5th of all those in o...

  " The city of Cleveland has had a colorful history. The Cuyahoga River, which runs through the city, famously caught fire in 1969 thanks to rampant pollution, and it wasn't the first time. In 1978 it became the first U.S. city to default on its debts since the Great Depression. Cleveland sports fans have had to endure more anguish than those in any other city. The city has been dubbed with a less than endearing nickname: the Mistake by the Lake.  This year Cleveland takes the top spot in our third annual ranking of America's Most Miserable Cities. " -Forbes Magazine, 2010 This post is part of a series on the future of Houston, Texas (the "energy capital of the world") as it faces climate change and a changing world economy. In the last post I started analyzing a claim that Houston may end up like Cleveland, a city that once was among America's largest but has now shed more than half of its population in the last 50 years. The two major trends worth con...