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The economy of the 1980s presents significant problems and no easy promises for business. In a slow‐growth, high‐inflation environment business will have a difficult time making profits grow faster than inflation. Developing strategies to do so, however, is the art of strategic planning.

It has been obvious for some time that the U.S. manufacturing industry has been on a downward slide. However, the recent recession has accelerated the speed of the decline to the point of public outcry. Production, and thus employment in some industries is down by a third. This, in turn, is creating profound economic hardships for many communities and a crisis of regional economic disparity not seen since the Great Depression.

Political economy is a term in wide use and has been for centuries. Yet standard economic theory reduces politics to ethics or economics. This reduction is enabled by the presumption of closed choice data or given utility and cost functions. In this conceptual framework, the political vanishes into an activity of preference satisfaction according to a welfare function (ethics) or into trade (economics). To bring the political back to life within a theory of political economy requires that closed schemes of thought be replaced by open schemes. The ways in which individuals react to the indeterminacy of their subjective choice data, in innocuous small-scale settings as well as in situations of dramatic exception to constitutional rules, separates them into leaders and followers. Followership creates an opportunity for political enterprise at the social level (enterprise in rules) and at the subjective level (enterprise in visions of options, and hence preferences). At both levels the political comes to the fore of political economy as an answer to the “challenge of exception.” Much of our inspiration for this argument traces to the work of Friedrich Wieser, Carl Schmitt, and Vincent Ostrom.

Homelessness has many causes and also is stigmatized in the United States, leading to much misunderstanding of its causes and what policy solutions may ameliorate the problem. The problem is of course getting worse and impacting many communities far removed from the West Coast cities the authors examine in this study. This analysis examines the socioeconomic variables influencing homelessness on the West Coast in recent years. The authors utilize a panel fixed effects model that explicitly includes measures of healthcare access and availability to account for the additional health risks faced by individuals who lack shelter. The authors estimate a spatial error model (SEM) in order to better understand the impacts that systemic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have on a variety of factors that directly influence productivity and other measures of welfare such as income inequality, housing supply, healthcare investment, and homelessness.