Economic Impacts of GO TO 2040

The economy of the Chicago metropolitan region has reached a critical juncture. On the one hand, Chicagoland is currently a highly successful global region with extraordinary assets and outputs. The region successfully made the transition in the 1980s and 1990s from a primarily industrial to a knowledge and service-based economy. It has high levels of human capital, with strong concentrations in information-sector industries and knowledge-based functional clusters -- a headquarters region with thriving finance, business services, law, IT and emerging bioscience, advanced manufacturing and similar high-growth sectors. It combines multiple deep areas of specialization, providing the resilience that comes from economic diversity. It is home to the abundant quality-of-life amenities that flow from business and household prosperity.On the other hand, beneath this static portrait of our strengths lie disturbing signs of a potential loss of momentum. Trends in the last decade reveal slowing rates, compared to other regions, of growth in productivity and gross metropolitan product. Trends in innovation, new firm creation and employment are comparably lagging. The region also faces emerging challenges with respect to both spatial efficiency and governance.In this context, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) has just released GO TO 2040, its comprehensive, long-term plan for the Chicago metropolitan area. The plan contains recommendations aimed at shaping a wide range of regional characteristics over the next 30 years, during which time more than 2 million new residents are anticipated. Among the chief goals of GO TO 2040 are increasing the region's long-term economic prosperity, sustaining a high quality of life for the region's current and future residents and making the most effective use of public investments. To this end, the plan addresses a broad scope of interrelated issues which, in aggregate, will shape the long-term physical, economic, institutional and social character of the region.This report by RW Ventures, LLC is an independent assessment of the plan from a purely economic perspective, addressing the impacts that GO TO 2040's recommendations can be expected to have on the future of the regional economy. The assessment begins by describing how implementation of GO TO 2040's recommendations would affect the economic landscape of the region; reviews economic research and practice about the factors that influence regional economic growth; and, given both of these, articulates and illustrates the likely economic impacts that will flow from implementation of the plan. In the course of reviewing the economic implications of the plan, the assessment also provides recommendations of further steps, as the plan is implemented, for increasing its positive impact on economic growth

Connectional architecture of a mouse hypothalamic circuit node controlling social behavior

Type 1 estrogen receptor-expressing neurons in the ventrolateral subdivision of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl^(Esr1)) play a causal role in the control of social behaviors, including aggression. Here we use six different viral-genetic tracing methods to systematically map the connectional architecture of VMHvl^(Esr1) neurons. These data reveal a high level of input convergence and output divergence (“fan-in/fan-out”) from and to over 30 distinct brain regions, with a high degree (∼90%) of bidirectionality, including both direct as well as indirect feedback. Unbiased collateralization mapping experiments indicate that VMHvl^(Esr1) neurons project to multiple targets. However, we identify two anatomically distinct subpopulations with anterior vs. posterior biases in their collateralization targets. Nevertheless, these two subpopulations receive indistinguishable inputs. These studies suggest an overall system architecture in which an anatomically feed-forward sensory-to-motor processing stream is integrated with a dense, highly recurrent central processing circuit. This architecture differs from the “brain-inspired,” hierarchical feed-forward circuits used in certain types of artificial intelligence networks

Connectional architecture of a mouse hypothalamic circuit node controlling social behavior

Type 1 estrogen receptor-expressing neurons in the ventrolateral subdivision of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl^(Esr1)) play a causal role in the control of social behaviors, including aggression. Here we use six different viral-genetic tracing methods to systematically map the connectional architecture of VMHvl^(Esr1) neurons. These data reveal a high level of input convergence and output divergence (“fan-in/fan-out”) from and to over 30 distinct brain regions, with a high degree (∼90%) of bidirectionality, including both direct as well as indirect feedback. Unbiased collateralization mapping experiments indicate that VMHvl^(Esr1) neurons project to multiple targets. However, we identify two anatomically distinct subpopulations with anterior vs. posterior biases in their collateralization targets. Nevertheless, these two subpopulations receive indistinguishable inputs. These studies suggest an overall system architecture in which an anatomically feed-forward sensory-to-motor processing stream is integrated with a dense, highly recurrent central processing circuit. This architecture differs from the “brain-inspired,” hierarchical feed-forward circuits used in certain types of artificial intelligence networks

Success from Satisficing and Imitation: Entrepreneurs’ Location Choice and Implications of Heuristics for Local Economic Development

Decisions about location choice provide an opportunity to compare the predictions of optimization models, which require exhaustive search through very large choice sets, against the actual decision processes used by entrepreneurs choosing where to allocate investment capital. This paper presents new data on entrepreneurs’ self-described decision processes when choosing where to locate, based on scripted interviews with 49 well-placed business owners and senior managers in charge of location choice. Consideration sets are surprisingly small, especially among those who are successful. According to entrepreneurs’ own accounts, locations are frequently discovered by chance rather than systematic search. Few describe decision processes that bear any resemblance to equating marginal benefit with marginal cost as prescribed by standard optimization theory. Nearly all interviewees describe location choice decisions based on threshold conditions, providing direct evidence of satisficing rather than optimization. Imitation is beneficial for small investment projects. Decision process data collected here suggests a need to rethink standard policy tools used to stimulate local economic development

Transnational genealogies: Jews, blacks and moors in early modern English and Spanish literature, 1547–1642

This dissertation is a comparative study of early modern English and Spanish literature and historical documents. It focuses on representations of blackness, purity of blood and intersections of theories of purity of blood with those of rank, gender and inheritance. Scholars of English and Spanish literature and history have increasingly emphasized the centrality of Spain to the development of racial ideologies in the early modern period, focusing on the legacy of the reconquista and Spain\u27s pure blood statutes, which discriminated against those of Jewish and Muslim descent and thus began to define religion as an inherited, quasi-racial characteristic. I take this interest in early modern Spain as my starting point, comparing English and Spanish texts to show significant variations among English and Spanish representations of race as well as the complex ways that early modern English literature repeatedly evokes Spain as a site of racial difference. Specifically, I show that Spanish representations of purity of blood revolve around social mobility and class identity, and are often harshly critical of rigid definitions of pure blood. Further, English discourses of blood difference do not simply absorb these Spanish discourses of purity of blood, as has been posited; on the contrary, they alter them to offer more essentializing representations of racial difference. I also attend to representations of Iberia\u27s slave population, which by the late sixteenth century was predominantly (though not entirely) black, in both Spanish and English literature. In part because Spain has been so closely linked with one kind of racial discourse (that of purity of blood), another significant influence on developing discourses of race in early modern Spain and England has remained occluded: Spain\u27s substantial sub-Saharan slave population, which was a frequent subject of early modern Spanish drama and which also influences early modern English representations of blackness. By drawing on early modern Spanish as well as English literature, my project reorients our understanding of the role played by Spain in developing discourses of race in early modern Europe