My dad was a millwright at LTV Steel in Hennepin, Illinois.
For families like mine, the steel mill was not some abstract piece of the economy. It was where people went to work. It put food on tables, paid mortgages and sent kids to school. A mill job was the kind of job you could build a life around.
I grew up in that world, and after leaving the Marine Corps, I followed my dad into the trades and became a millwright myself, eventually working at Keystone Steel & Wire in Bartonvillle, Illinois.
Then the world changed.
The Hennepin mill changed owners a couple of times, then eventually shut down. The equipment was removed, and later the enormous building itself came down.
Today, that same industrial ground is part of a very different economy. Marquis operates a massive ethanol operation in Hennepin, Marquis XT brought another generation of manufacturing to the area, and the former mill site continues to be positioned for new industrial development. Illinois has invested in rail improvements there, and a data center has even been proposed for the site.
Think about that progression.
Steel gave way to ethanol, advanced manufacturing and potentially digital infrastructure.
The land did not stop being valuable when the steel mill disappeared. The rail did not suddenly become useless. The electrical infrastructure still mattered. The industrial knowledge embedded in the region did not evaporate.
What changed was what we build.
That is creative destruction in a form I understand personally.
For much of the twentieth century, the Rust Belt built America. Detroit built the cars. Pittsburgh and Youngstown made the steel. Rochester made the cameras. Cleveland, Buffalo, Akron, Toledo and dozens of other cities produced the machine tools, rubber, glass, chemicals and manufactured goods that powered the largest industrial economy the world had ever seen.
Those industries created much more than products. They created communities. They built middle-class neighborhoods, filled schools and churches, supported Main Streets and gave generations of families a degree of economic certainty that is difficult to imagine today.
Then the economy changed.
Some places adapted faster than others. Some companies recognized what was happening and reinvented themselves. Others tried to protect systems that had worked extraordinarily well for generations.
Across the Rust Belt, communities learned one of the hardest lessons in economics: creative destruction does not distribute the creation and the destruction evenly.
Some places capture a tremendous amount of the creation. Others get more than their fair share of the destruction.
There Is Nothing Elegant About Creative Destruction
Economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the term “creative destruction” to describe the process by which innovation continually replaces older industries, businesses and ways of working.
It sounds almost elegant in a textbook.
There is nothing elegant about living through it.
Creative destruction closes factories, eliminates jobs people thought they would have for life, hollows out neighborhoods and destroys tax bases. It can make skills that took decades to develop suddenly less valuable. In the worst cases, it tears apart communities built around an industry everyone assumed would always be there.
But destruction is only half of the equation. The other half is creative. New industries emerge, new jobs appear, new skills become valuable, new companies grow and new infrastructure gets built.
The mistake is assuming all of that creation will happen in the same place where the destruction occurred.
History tells us a very different story.
Detroit Got More Than Its Share of the Destruction
Few American cities illustrate this better than Detroit.
For much of the twentieth century, Detroit did not simply participate in the automobile industry. Detroit was the automobile industry. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler created an economic machine that supported hundreds of thousands of workers directly and countless others throughout the region.
At its postwar peak, Detroit had roughly 1.85 million residents. By December 2012, that population had fallen to about 685,000. Between 1947 and 1963 alone, Detroit lost approximately 150,000 manufacturing jobs as smaller automakers disappeared and the Big Three automated facilities and moved operations outside the city. Detroit automakers controlled about 95 percent of the U.S. automobile market in 1955. By 2008, their share had fallen to 47 percent.
Detroit's decline cannot be blamed on a single cause. Unions, management, automation, globalization, suburbanization, foreign competition, public policy, labor relations and changing consumer preferences all played a role.
The lesson is much simpler: the world changed faster than Detroit did.
Japanese and European automakers did not wait for Detroit to become comfortable with new manufacturing systems, better quality control, automation, lean production or different approaches to labor and management. They competed, and American consumers responded.
Detroit eventually adapted too. American automakers automated, modernized and became dramatically more productive and competitive. But the adjustment came after decades of extraordinary economic pain.
Detroit did not escape creative destruction by resisting or delaying change. It simply ended up receiving far more of the destruction than the creation.
The Robots Did Not Empty the Factory
This is where Detroit's story becomes particularly relevant to the conversation we are having today about artificial intelligence.
For decades, workers heard that robots were coming for their jobs. Some of those fears were justified. Repetitive tasks disappeared. Plants closed. Parts of the supply chain contracted. Workers who had built their lives around a particular skill sometimes discovered that the market no longer valued that skill the way it once had.
That was real, and it should not be minimized.
But the story is more complicated than “robots took the jobs.”
In motor-vehicle manufacturing itself, employment was approximately 292,000 in 2000. In 2025, after another quarter-century of robotics, computerized manufacturing, industrial controls and automation, it was roughly 286,000. Meanwhile, real motor-vehicle manufacturing output increased from an index of 82.3 to 125.5, an increase of more than 50 percent.
But the pain was not distributed evenly.
Motor-vehicle parts manufacturing employed roughly 847,000 people in 2000. By 2025, that number had fallen to about 530,000. More than 300,000 jobs disappeared from that part of the industry.
Some jobs survived and became dramatically more productive. Some changed. Some disappeared entirely. And the new technical jobs did not necessarily appear in the same factories, supply chains or communities where the old ones were lost.
That is exactly the uneven distribution of creation and destruction we are talking about.
The modern factory did not become empty. The factory became different.
There are still assembly workers on automotive production lines, but beside them are industrial engineers, electricians, software developers, mechanics, controls technicians, network specialists and other highly skilled workers whose jobs exist because a modern factory is an extraordinarily complicated technological system.
Someone has to install and program the robot. Someone has to maintain it when it fails. Someone has to design the production line, configure the control system, analyze the data and secure the industrial networks connecting everything together.
Technology destroys some tasks and creates others. Sometimes the entire job disappears. Sometimes the job changes. Sometimes an occupation appears that barely existed a generation earlier.
The important question is who is prepared for what comes next.
Youngstown Shows How Fast the Destruction Can Come
Sometimes economic change happens slowly enough that people can convince themselves it is temporary.
Sometimes it arrives on a Monday morning.
September 19, 1977 became known in Youngstown, Ohio as Black Monday. Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced the closure of a major portion of its operations, and roughly 5,000 workers were suddenly out of work. More closures followed.
That kind of economic shock does not stay inside the factory gates.
When thousands of workers lose their jobs, they buy fewer cars, eat out less, postpone replacing roofs and spend less at local businesses. Some leave town entirely. The businesses that depended on those workers begin to struggle. Property values drop. Schools lose students. Local governments lose tax revenue.
The destruction moves outward in circles.
That is easy to miss when creative destruction is discussed academically. The collapse of one industry can reshape an entire community.
Pittsburgh Got Hit Too
Pittsburgh was built around steel in much the same way Detroit was built around automobiles. Then the steel industry collapsed.
Western Pennsylvania lost roughly 130,000 manufacturing jobs, unemployment approached 18 percent and communities throughout the region were devastated.
Pittsburgh got hammered.
The difference is not that Pittsburgh somehow avoided creative destruction. It did not. The difference is that Pittsburgh was willing to reinvent itself faster than Detroit was.
That transformation did not happen overnight, and it certainly did not happen without pain. A steelworker who lost his job in 1982 did not magically become a robotics technician the next morning. Families suffered, workers left and communities had to deal with the aftermath of losing the industries that had defined them.
But Pittsburgh began looking seriously at what it still had: universities, engineering talent, medical institutions, research capability and generations of industrial knowledge.
Those assets became the foundation of something new.
Carnegie Mellon grew into a global center for robotics and computer science. The University of Pittsburgh and its medical system became enormous economic engines. Technology, healthcare, research and advanced manufacturing began occupying some of the economic space once dominated by steel.
Pittsburgh never got its old economy back.
It built a new one.
Detroit is reinventing itself too, but Pittsburgh began making that transition sooner and built institutions around the economy it believed was coming instead of waiting for the economy it had lost to return.
Speed matters in creative destruction. The longer a community spends trying to preserve an economic model that is already disappearing, the longer it risks remaining trapped in the destructive half of the equation.
Kodak Invented the Future and Still Missed It
Rochester, New York offers another lesson.
In 1975, Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first digital camera. The company that would eventually be devastated by digital photography had the technology sitting inside its own laboratory.
At its peak, Kodak employed roughly 62,000 people in the Rochester area. It was not simply an employer. It was one of the pillars of the regional economy.
Then photography changed.
Digital cameras eliminated the need for film, and smartphones eventually began eliminating the need for standalone cameras altogether. Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012.
There may be no better illustration of the danger of protecting yesterday at the expense of tomorrow.
Kodak invented its own disruption and still managed to be crushed by it.
That does not mean the people running Kodak were stupid. Their existing business was phenomenally profitable. Film made money. Processing made money. Photographic paper made money. An enormous ecosystem had grown around the way photography had worked for generations.
Moving aggressively toward digital photography meant threatening the very products that had made Kodak one of America's great companies.
That is exactly what makes disruption so difficult. The old system is usually not worthless when the new one arrives. Quite the opposite. It is often still making money. People still depend on it. Careers are built around it. Communities depend on it.
Defending it can feel perfectly rational.
Until suddenly it isn't.
We Have Seen This Movie Before
Today the technology is artificial intelligence.
Once again, we are hearing that machines will eliminate jobs, automation will replace workers and technological change is happening too quickly. Some of those fears are completely justified.
Artificial intelligence will eliminate some jobs. It will eliminate pieces of many more. Some skills that are valuable today will become less valuable, while other skills will become dramatically more valuable.
We do ourselves no favors by pretending there will be no destruction.
Creative destruction contains both words for a reason.
Trying to stop technological change does not guarantee that you keep what you already have. Detroit could not stop Toyota from building better cars by resisting changes to the factory. Youngstown could not preserve an old steel economy simply because generations of families depended on it. Kodak could not make digital photography disappear by protecting film.
A community today cannot stop artificial intelligence by refusing to build a data center either. The real question is where the creation happens.
If We Say No, What Are We Saying No To?
Someone can reasonably look at a proposed data center and say, “Fine. Let them build it somewhere else.”
That is absolutely a choice.
But communities should understand what “somewhere else” can mean before making it.
The conversation around data centers often gets reduced to a single number: how many permanent employees will work inside the building? That number matters, but it is not the entire economic footprint.
Loudoun County, Virginia is an extreme example and certainly not a model every community can or should try to replicate. But it demonstrates how large the broader footprint can become. Loudoun County reports more than 17,000 direct and indirect data-center-related jobs. In fiscal year 2026, data centers generated approximately $1.2 billion in real and personal property tax revenue, representing 39 percent of the county's overall budget.
That does not mean every data center is a good deal.
It does not mean every community will see anything remotely resembling Loudoun's results.
It means the question is bigger than how many people badge into the building every morning.
There is construction and trades work. There are substations, transmission systems, fiber networks, cooling systems, generators and UPS systems that have to be built and maintained. There are engineering firms, contractors, utilities, security companies and other suppliers around them.
There can also be tax revenue, infrastructure improvements and workforce investment.
The operative word is can.
Communities should not assume those benefits will simply appear because somebody shows up with a billion-dollar project.
They should demand to know what they are actually getting.
Who pays for the utility upgrades? What happens to existing ratepayers? What are the water requirements, and are they sustainable? What happens if only the first phase gets built? What workforce commitments are real? Is the developer willing to help fund community-college programs, apprenticeships and training before construction starts? What infrastructure remains useful to the community if the project changes hands twenty years from now?
Those are not anti-development questions.
They are good-governance questions.
Some projects deserve to be rejected. Some sites are wrong. Some communities simply do not have the power, water, land or infrastructure to support what is being proposed. Some deals will not offer enough value in exchange for the impacts they create.
Rejecting a project is always an option.
Rejecting the economic transition is not.
The job of a community is to understand what it needs to capture from the creation before accepting its share of the disruption.
The Next Economy Requires Two Kinds of Infrastructure
The Rust Belt also teaches us that communities cannot wait until old jobs disappear to begin preparing people for the new ones.
By then, they are already behind.
I have lived that transition myself.
After the Marine Corps, I became a millwright. As the systems around me changed, I changed with them. I eventually moved from the trades into information technology and then into operational technology cybersecurity.
Millwright > IT > OT cybersecurity.
On paper, those might look like three different careers. I don't see them that way. They are different generations of the same industrial world.
As a millwright, I had to understand how machines worked. In IT, I had to understand computers and networks. In OT cybersecurity, those worlds came together: computers and networks controlling the machines that run power grids, water systems and industrial facilities.
The industrial knowledge never stopped mattering. I just had to keep adding to it.
Understanding pumps, motors, valves, conveyors, drives and process systems still matters. What changed is that those physical systems are increasingly controlled by software, connected by networks and dependent on digital infrastructure.
That is what workforce adaptation actually looks like. It is not always a worker throwing away everything he knows and starting over. Often it is someone building new skills on top of old ones as technology evolves around them.
That is why workforce development has to be treated as infrastructure.
The next economy requires two kinds of infrastructure: physical and human.
The physical side includes generation, transmission, substations, fiber, roads, water systems, industrial sites and digital infrastructure.
The human side is the electrician who understands high-voltage equipment, the technician who can troubleshoot a PLC, the mechanic who keeps automated machinery running, the engineer who designs the system and the cybersecurity professional protecting the industrial network connecting all of it together.
Communities have to build both.
That means community colleges talking to employers before facilities are built, not after companies arrive and discover they cannot find qualified workers. It means high schools showing students that technical careers can lead to excellent jobs without requiring everyone to follow the same four-year path. It means apprenticeships that connect people directly with industry and opportunities for existing workers to add new skills before their current jobs disappear.
It also means doing a much better job with veterans leaving the military.
The military produces people every year with experience in electrical systems, communications, electronics, mechanics, networking, logistics, construction and complex technical environments. Too often we hand them a list of civilian job titles and expect them to figure out on their own where they fit.
That is a wasted opportunity.
Kirk Offel and OVERWATCH are already working on that problem by helping connect transitioning veterans with careers in mission-critical infrastructure. That is exactly the kind of workforce pipeline the next economy is going to require.
Employers have a responsibility too. They cannot arrive in a community, complain that qualified workers do not exist and treat workforce development as somebody else's problem.
The pipeline has to be built together.
The question should not simply be, “How many jobs does this project create?”
The better question is: How do we position our people for the jobs this economy is creating?
Nostalgia Is Not an Economic Development Strategy
There is a natural human tendency when an industry changes to ask how we save the jobs we have.
Sometimes that is exactly the right question.
But eventually communities have to ask a harder one: what are the jobs that come next?
That changes the conversation. Instead of trying to preserve the economy exactly as it exists today, communities begin thinking about what skills their workers will need, what infrastructure future employers will require, what industries are likely to grow and what assets they already possess that could give them an advantage.
They also have to ask the uncomfortable question that is too often missing from public debates.
What happens if we do nothing?
The lesson of the Rust Belt is not that communities should blindly embrace every new technology or development placed in front of them. It is that nostalgia is not an economic development strategy.
Detroit's industrial greatness did not protect it when automobile manufacturing changed. Youngstown's generations of steelmaking did not guarantee another generation of steel jobs. Kodak's dominance of photography did not protect it from a technology invented inside its own building.
Pittsburgh could not bring back the steel economy it had lost, so it started building something else.
The old LTV steel mill in Hennepin did not come back either. Today, that same ground is being positioned for industries nobody in that mill would have pictured when my dad was walking through the gate.
I had to make the same decision on a much smaller scale. Around 2002 or 2003, I could see the industrial world around me changing and knew I could either wait for someone else to solve the problem or start preparing myself for what came next.
I changed with the technology.
Communities have to be willing to do the same.
Who Gets the Creative Part?
The next economic transformation is already underway.
Artificial intelligence is part of it. Automation is part of it. Advanced manufacturing is part of it. So is the enormous expansion of computing, electrical generation, transmission and digital infrastructure required to support all of it.
Nobody knows exactly where this transformation ends. Nobody knew exactly where electricity, automobiles, computers or the internet would end either.
But communities still have choices.
They can understand what is changing before the change arrives at their doorstep. They can establish clear rules before developers come calling. They can understand their physical infrastructure and begin building the human infrastructure needed to match it.
They can decide what kinds of development make sense for them, demand transparency, protect residents from legitimate impacts and negotiate from facts rather than fear.
Most importantly, they can prepare people for the jobs that are coming instead of waiting until the jobs that are leaving are already gone.
Creative destruction does not give communities the choice between destruction and no destruction. History has been painfully clear about that.
What it gives them is something much closer to a race: a race to recognize what is changing, adapt quickly enough and build the physical and human infrastructure necessary for whatever comes next.
Some communities will move early enough to capture a meaningful share of the creation.
Others will spend years trying to preserve an economy that has already moved on.
The Rust Belt has lived both stories.
So have a lot of families, including mine.
We should be willing to learn from them.
You can reject the infrastructure of the future. You cannot reject the future.
The destruction is coming either way. The question is: Who gets the creative part?
