Kevin Klowden, executive director of the Milken Institute's Center for Regional Economics, says a decline in the manufacturing sector takes a large share of the blame. “A factory or an operation that exists now might only need to employ one-fifth of the people that it did a number of years ago. That has a real impact."
A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.