This is the summary. The full white paper (v2.0)— with sources, bill numbers, and the evidence behind every claim — is available here:
📄 Download the full white paper: Look About You (PDF, 34 pages, v2.0)
Substantially revised from v1.1 — see the note at the end.
Earlier this year, pollsters asked six hundred Michigan voters a simple question: out of fifty states, where does Michigan rank?
The answers came back between 25th and 29th. Average. And nearly identical across party lines.
In July, U.S. News ranked Michigan 46th of 50 — ahead of only New Mexico, Mississippi, Alaska and Louisiana. The categories were weighted by a national survey asking residents what matters most in their own lives. Michigan wasn’t graded on a stranger’s priorities. It was graded on what people say they care about.
We ranked 33rd in 2017.
The record
Income. 39th per person, last in the Midwest. Michigan was 8th in the nation in 1953 and still 16th in 1999. In 2022 the average Michigander earned 87.1 cents for every dollar the average American earned — the lowest ratio ever recorded.
Education. 45th. One in four fourth graders reads proficiently, the same share as in 1998. September’s state test showed 38.2 percent of third graders proficient — a new low in that exam’s twelve-year history. The 2026 Kids Count report puts Michigan 42nd in education, and notes the decline started before the pandemic — and that other states went through the same pandemic without it.
Energy. Michigan households paid 22.99 cents per kilowatt-hour in June, the highest residential rate in the Midwest and 25 percent above the national average. The state ranks about 45th in reliability. High price, poor performance, at the same time.
Jobs. 44th in unemployment at 5.0 percent, when Indiana and Wisconsin stood at 3.3.
Roads. 47th in pavement condition, on above-median funding. The state stopped collecting engineering-grade road data in 2019 to save money.
Before anyone reaches for the weather
Minnesota ranked third this year. South Dakota, North Dakota and Nebraska joined it in the top five.
Whatever is happening to Michigan is not happening to states that share our winters.
And one contradiction worth holding onto
Three weeks before that 46th-place finish, CNBC ranked Michigan 6th in the nation for business.
Both rankings are real. They measure different customers. CNBC asks what a company needs — cost, sites, utilities, permitting speed. U.S. News asks how well a state serves the people who live in it.
The editor of the Midland Daily News described the pair as an excellent recruiting brochure attached to a two-and-ten record.
Hold that one. It turns out to explain a great deal.
The fact that makes it fixable
Michiganders aged 18 to 29 were offered a choice: a job here, or a similar job at similar pay somewhere else.
Eighty-nine percent chose Michigan over California. Eighty-seven percent over Chicago. Eighty percent over Texas. Those margins held across every party.
Only 64 percent expect to still be here in ten years. The ones with bachelor’s degrees are the least likely to stay.
This is not a state people are fleeing. It is a state people are leaving reluctantly, for work.
Asked what would decide where they take a job, they put housing cost first, low crime second, affordable training third. Public transit and walkable communities finished near the bottom, with the weather.
They are not asking for amenities. They are asking for a place to live and a job that pays for it.
Who gets paid to say yes
This is what’s new in version 2.0, and it changed how I argue everything else.
The usual way to describe Michigan’s trouble is that somebody holds a veto — a zoning board, a licensing commission, a utility. The usual remedy is to take the veto away.
Sometimes that’s right. It’s also the hardest available route, because it puts every veto-holder on the other side at once, and they’ll be back next session.
There’s a better question. After the change passes, who has a reason to want it to work?
Look at almost any rule and the same arrangement appears. Whoever must approve the thing bears costs that are immediate, local, and delivered by people who can phone him. The benefits arrive years later, spread thin, landing largely on people who don’t live there yet.
He doesn’t have to be hostile to the outcome. He only has to be rational.
And Michigan’s version is worse than most states’, for a reason almost nobody talks about.
In most of the country, a community simply captures none of the upside when an existing neighborhood grows. Michigan goes further. The state pays communities to prevent it.
A township that lets its existing homes change hands watches Headlee cut its millage rate until that new value produces no new revenue at all. The same township can put the same value on a cornfield and keep every dollar. A 1994 implementing statute — not the constitution, not Proposal A itself — attached that penalty to filling in a neighborhood, and it has been compounding for thirty-two years.
Picture two identical townships. Each holds $500 million in taxable value, each levies 10 mills, and each gains $10 million this year beyond inflation. In one, houses changed hands. In the other, a subdivision went up on a cornfield.
New construction is subtracted out before the Headlee test runs, so the cornfield township keeps its rate and collects $100,000 more. Nothing is subtracted for houses that merely sold, so the other township’s rate is cut from 10 mills to 9.81 — landing its revenue exactly where it would have been if not one house had sold.
Same growth. One township is $100,000 a year better off, every year, and the other’s rate is now permanently lower than its neighbor’s.
One west Michigan township’s tax base has grown more than 550 percent since 1994. Pontiac’s grew 8 percent.
Nobody chose that. The formula did.
This also settles the CNBC problem. A state tends to get good at whatever it is graded and congratulated on. We have spent decades being measured on the first number.
Twelve changes. None of them original.
Every item below is already law somewhere else, passed by legislatures of both parties, with results anyone can look up. Michigan is not being asked to invent anything.
But they are not all equally sturdy, and version 2.0 says so. Some change what somebody is paid for. Those outlast the legislature that passed them. Others remove a discretion without changing anyone’s incentive, which means they get re-fought every session.
I have marked which is which.
Beat the reading deadline. July’s science-of-reading law was right. It doesn’t take effect until 2032. A child starting kindergarten this fall reaches fifth grade before her teacher must know how to teach her. Mississippi did it in two to three years and now outreads us. The unused lever: Michigan has School of Choice. Publish completion rates district by district and finishing early becomes a competitive advantage.
Report school results honestly. The state test and the national test differ by thirteen points on the same children. And a law penalizing districts that use unapproved reading curricula cannot be enforced — the Education Department has no authority to ask what curriculum districts use.
Stop taxing improvement. The purest case in the paper, and the highest-leverage item in it. Rehab an empty storefront and your taxes rise. Leave it rotting and they don’t. Fix this one and communities start wanting the growth they now resist.
Let people build. Michigan is short somewhere between 97,000 and 190,000 homes — but a unit count is the wrong measure. In 2025 this state passed the point of having more residents over 65 than children under 18, and its median home was built in 1973 for a family with children in it. The local officials fighting the pending reform aren’t obstacles. They’re doing the arithmetic the state handed them, and getting it right.
Honor other states’ licenses. We license about 180 occupations. A family moves here, the job is real, and the spouse can’t work for six months. More than twenty states have fixed this. Weakest on the incentive test: a licensing board is funded by the people it admits and governed by the people already inside. Restricting entry isn’t a flaw in that design. It’s what the design pays for.
Let clinicians practice to their training. Michigan’s nurse practitioner rules are the most restrictive in the Midwest. Some counties have fewer than ten primary care physicians per hundred thousand people. More than forty states have fixed this.
Make quitting legal again. Detroit became the auto capital because men kept leaving to start rivals. In 1985 Michigan made non-compete agreements enforceable, and inventor mobility fell about a fifth.
Stop writing off the adults. Michigan already spent thirteen years educating the people now working below capacity, and they never left. Of Michiganders who completed apprenticeships in 2022, 94 percent were working here a year later, earning a median $80,700.
Pay the utility for reliability, not for building. In an August letter to the governor, the chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission wrote that it should come as no surprise when utilities choose to build new assets even when cheaper options exist — because shareholders earn a return on what gets built and nothing on tree-trimming. Realigning that incentive, he said, may be the single most impactful opportunity to improve affordability. That is the state’s own lead regulator, making this paper’s argument.
Stop buying strangers. A Bay County plant took a state grant, $6 million in incentives and a federal loan facility up to $544 million. It opened to a governor’s ribbon-cutting and a presidential visit. In July, all 140 jobs ended. Subsidies persist because they pay in a currency officials can spend: a name, a date, a photograph.
Keep Michigan companies Michigan-owned. The firms that quietly lead world markets from small Michigan towns were mostly founded between 1945 and 1985. Their owners are retiring now. A conversion credit orders nobody to do anything. It changes which offer is worth more on the day a founder decides.
Publish the scorecard. Michigan has no standing, state-produced accounting of where it ranks. And version 2.0 turns the test on this one too: who is paid to publish it accurately? An office reporting to legislators will eventually produce a report legislators can live with. The paper names that risk and proposes guardrails rather than pretending it away.
What’s deliberately not here
Two items in Michigan’s policy debate are genuinely contested between the parties, and the paper leaves them out rather than smuggling them in: the state’s labor law, and the timetable of the emissions mandate.
Reading is not conservative. Housing is not liberal. A power bill is not a political party.
Asked whether Michigan’s two parties should compromise to solve the state’s problems, residents said yes by 91 percent to 4.
What to ask
To any candidate, of either party, at any level. Accept no answer without a number and a date.
Which of the twelve will you deliver, and when?
And then the thirteenth question, which is the one version 2.0 added:
After your proposal passes, who has a reason to want it to work?
A candidate who can answer that has thought about the problem. A candidate who cannot is describing an intention, not a policy.
One more number
In 2025, for the first time since record-keeping began, more Americans moved into Michigan than out.
The margin was under two thousand people. A rounding error, and a signal.
None of the twelve changes above requires a tax increase, a constitutional amendment, or a rescue from Washington. Every one is already law somewhere else. Michigan isn’t being asked to invent a future. It’s being asked to get out of the way of one.
And the deepest of them ask for something narrower even than that. Not that anyone in this state work harder or care more. Only that the rules stop paying people to do the opposite of what the state needs.
A township is paid to pave a cornfield and penalized for filling in a neighborhood. A utility earns on what it builds and nothing on what it maintains. A licensing board is funded by the people it keeps out.
None of that required bad faith to produce. None of it will be undone by good intentions either.
Michigan does not need to be talked out of where it is. It needs to stop paying itself to stay there.
📄 Download the full white paper (PDF, 34 pages, v2.0 — October 2026)
Twelve items, each with the Michigan problem, the evidence, which states already did it, and the specific ask. Includes the opposition’s case where it is strong, a note on what the paper deliberately leaves out, sources, method, and a record of corrections made during research.
What changed in version 2.0
This is a larger revision than 1.1 was, and it is a re-grounding rather than an addition. Nothing was withdrawn. No figure changed. But the paper is now organized around a question it did not ask before.
The new question is in Part One, Section 5: who gets paid to say yes?
Version 1.1 diagnosed why nothing gets done — organized interests defending rules they know by name, against costs spread across people who mostly don’t live here yet. That diagnosis sat in the front of the paper and never became a test applied to the recommendations.
Now it is one. Every item was examined against it, and the results were uncomfortable enough to be worth publishing.
Five of the twelve have no constituency after passage. Items 1, 4, 5, 6 and 7 remove a discretion without changing what anyone is paid for. They are still worth doing and several are urgent. But they will be contested every session, and saying otherwise would be selling something.
Four of them change what somebody earns. Those are the ones likely to still be law in ten years.
Three specific things changed as a result.
The local officials fighting housing reform got a fairer hearing. Under this framework they are not obstacles. They are responding correctly to a formula the state wrote, in which approving a duplex can lower their millage rate while the sewer hookups and school seats are theirs to pay for. Their counter-proposal, the Municipal League’s MI Home Program, got a better hearing too: incentives paired with local implementation is the more durable approach, not the softer one. The strongest version pairs both. Preemption sets a floor; the tax fix makes communities want to exceed it.
The infrastructure objection turns out to be partly self-solving. Local officials say the pipes cannot carry the growth, and they are right. But capacity is a cost a community bears with no revenue upside — which is the tax distortion in Item 3 wearing different clothes.
Item 1 has a lever nobody is pulling. Michigan has School of Choice. A district that completes its reading training four years early has something to tell parents that its neighbors cannot — but only if completion rates are published.
New evidence in this version: the Michigan Public Service Commission chair’s August letter to the governor, identifying utility incentive realignment as the most impactful affordability opportunity available; the 2026 Kids Count data, including the finding that Michigan’s score declines began before the pandemic; the CNBC and U.S. News contradiction; and 2026 housing affordability polling.
And one limit on the framework itself, stated in the paper. A test asking who benefits can be misused to explain away any objection as self-interest. That is a cheap move and a wrong one. Several of the local officials quoted in Item 4 are making arguments that would be correct even if they had no stake at all. The test predicts what survives. It is not a theory of who is right.
Version 1.1’s demographic material on housing — the 2025 crossover to more residents over 65 than children under 18, and the mismatch between Michigan’s housing stock and its households — is unchanged and remains in Item 4. That framing draws on Mike Hathorne’s work on the Great Housing Reversal.
David Maness writes The Centaur Desk. He is a geophysicist and was a small business owner in Michigan for 38 years. He served on the Mt. Pleasant Public Schools Board of Education, as chairman of Isabella Bank Corporation, on the Michigan Oil and Gas Association board, and on Michigan’s first Environmental Rules Review Committee. He writes only for himself.
Corrections welcome. This paper is versioned, and errors brought to my attention will be fixed in the next release, with the change recorded in the version history. If you find something wrong, please say so.