Post Carbon Fellow Michael Shuman was interviewed about regional economies on NCPR.

From the interview:

MF: And so you match that with like, what do you need? What do you produce? So, we have some surpluses and we have some deficiencies, I guess you could say.

MS: Right, and I think one of that people overlook, and certainly economic developers overlook this, is that most of what constitutes an economy these days is not that making of stuff; it’s services. You know, when I was a kid in the 1950s, the typical American household was spending about two-thirds of its money on goods and one-third on services and today that’s flipped. And what that means, then, is that the service economy, getting the service economy right by hiring more good-wage professionals actually may be far more important to your economic wellbeing than a few smokestack industries.