- We're joined now by Ambassador John Rakolta He's the chairman of Walbridge company, but also co-chair of the Growing Michigan Together Council, which is what this session today has been mostly about.

Now John, you've taken unusual position for a guy who chaired a council whose goal was to figure out ways to grow Michigan's population.

Now you say we can't grow Michigan's population, at least not anytime soon, why is that?

- I looked at the studies that were done by the demographers, and one after another showed us that the four drivers of population growth were all trending in the negative direction for Michigan.

And it would take more than one population council report to reverse those trends.

Those trends are low birth rate amongst a low young cohort, high death rates amongst 65 and over population, no migration from other states, and very little international immigration.

These are the four drivers of growing the population.

And every one of those in Michigan is basically in the tank.

And there's no way of changing those in the short term.

- So John, if we can't grow population, what can we do?

- We can increase productivity because people aren't interested in just growing population for population's sake.

What this is all about is growing prosperity, making our state a richer state, having our citizens make more.

And what that requires is a better understanding of how innovation and education play a role in the gains of productivity of virtually anything that's done on the face of this earth.

- Before we get into how to grow prosperity, let's talk about what's happened to Michigan's prosperity.

This one time was the land of opportunity and it's not so much anymore.

- That's true.

Starting in 1952, we were approximately 117% of the national average.

That means we were 17% higher than the average.

Over the ensuing 72 years, we've gone from that high state to today, our per capita income is stuck at 86%.

So now we aren't even at the national average.

And the difference, just to get back to national average, is $6,000 a year per worker.

So we've got a lot of catching up to do.

- So John, to grow prosperity, what do we need to be doing here?

- We have to increase the educational quotient of the entire state.

The high paying jobs in America today are all wrapped up in new innovation, old manufacturing processes that have been improved through automation and the like, artificial intelligence, we have to adopt those things and implement them widely across the state.

And we have to have labor and management join together.

So as this innovation comes forward, that there aren't any obstacles to implement it.

And the only way you can do that is to show the workforce that this is in their best interest.

That in the long run, the outcome will be positive for everybody.

It's not trickle down.

It's from bottom up.

- So you grow prosperity bringing in the kind of jobs younger people are looking for, ultimately you grow population?

- Yes, ultimately people will come here, but it takes a long time for you to change the K through 12 outcomes that are currently, I mean it took us 25 years to go from 10th place to 40th place in terms of outcome.

We're not gonna change that overnight, but we have to identify that as a major problem and start putting our thinking and our resources and our cohesion toward that.

- Now you said that education's the number one issue.

You've been involved in trying to make that happen here for a long time.

What are the obstacles for improving education outcomes here?

- We've never valued education very highly because we had all these great blue collar jobs.

You could make a good middle class living with a high school education.

That's not true anymore.

We need to recognize that that's come upon us a lot faster than we ever had anticipated.

- What will this take in terms of the politics of the state, the political will to make all this happen?

- The political will is always just on one side.

We have this unfortunate moniker called the Michigan 180.

That is that successive administrations seem to reverse most of the policy implementations of the prior ones.

We need to stop that.

We need to coalesce and to put forth policies that survive the current administration.

That's number one.

Number two, we have a history of being uncohesive.

It's not only in politics, it's in labor management, it's in race relations, it's in county city.

All of those groups have to look more closely at the better meant of Michigan as a whole because we're all gonna succeed together or fail together.

And this past 70 years, we've seen this slow decline that you never see in any one day, month, or year.

Now that you look back, you see how massive it is, and you ask yourself the question, where have we been and why haven't more politicians emerged identifying these issues?

And I don't know the answer to that.

- We have to find them though, if we're gonna get through this, right?

- That's true.