![rust belt revival rust belt revival](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/metro_20171215_cover-rust-belt-map.png)
If innovation has in fact been happening, then what continues to hold the Rust Belt back from becoming the powerhouse it once was?
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In reality, lots of innovation has taken place-American manufacturing has grown far more efficient and, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost doubled its output during the last 30 years. However, the narrative surrounding the role of innovation in the region’s decline doesn’t tell the whole story. Unsurprisingly then, many hope that an injection of innovation into the economy will cure the area’s malaise. Because competition within the American manufacturing industry was weak, the thinking goes, firms failed to innovate and rendered themselves unprepared to compete with foreign manufacturing firms later on when globalization began to accelerate. One particularly common theme among explanations is the lack of innovation. People have pointed fingers at everything from poor political leadership and shortsightedness to the inexorable march of globalization and automation in an effort to find someone or something to blame for the Rust Belt’s collapse. A global economic recession in the early 1970s kicked off a sustained economic decline from which the region has never recovered.
![rust belt revival rust belt revival](https://i.pinimg.com/280x280_RS/c6/1e/12/c61e128570bf41a734fff4c79964cf2e.jpg)
However, the clock was ticking on America’s “Golden Age” of manufacturing. The region served as the central hub of the United State’s manufacturing industry, and by the 1950s it was home to almost half of all American jobs. For most of the 20th century, America’s “Rust Belt”-stretching across the Great Lakes region and areas in the Midwest-was an economic powerhouse.