Last Friday, I wrote here on the "uselessness of economic development." Using The New York Times’s new database on state and local economic development incentives, I found no association between these incentives and key measures of economic performance and found virtually no association for the fifty states.
One thing is clear about this topic: it gets people talking. The Times’s series itself sparked an onslaught of debate, and my analysis here on Cities prompted a lively debate in the comments as well as some illuminating email exchanges from various experts in the field.
