Lean In: Lessons on Indiana's Economic Future from Evansville

Sam Snideman is Vice President of Government and Sector Relations at United Way of Central Indiana and currently serves as Chair of the Indiana Early Learning Advisory Committee. 

When Class IX gathered for its economy lecture in Evansville on June 5, 2026, one of the first things we heard from Tom Guevara, former Director of the Indiana University Public Policy Institute, was that when you are presented with a problem, you should lean into it. For all the many great things about Indiana, it is a state that faces several problems. 

Our conversation about Indiana’s economy and the ways in which regions like southwest Indiana and Evansville are responding shows how important local solutions are to these complex challenges. If we are to make the most of this potentially transformative moment, as a state, we need to lean in: to strengthening investments in our people; to supporting an environment in which innovations lead to gains in both economic and human development; and to renewing our civic institutions through more active citizen engagement.

Regions (and states) succeed when economic development is tied to human development. Our college-going rates are in a multi-year decline, and children seem to have lower well-being than before the pandemic. If we want a prosperous economic future for our children and our grandchildren, we must face the reality that we are too often failing to address the opportunity gaps that exist in neighborhoods, cities, and counties across our state. We must think critically, together, about how we incentivize economic growth so that those incentives do not come at the cost of investment in our people. As the late HUD Secretary Jack Kemp once remarked, “economic growth doesn’t mean anything if it leaves people out.”

How, as a practical matter, do we work through these economic challenges toward finding solutions? What we learned from our friends in Evansville is that it takes a shared vision and a commitment to long-term thinking. Whether we are considering building a bridge over the Ohio River or creating a promise neighborhood to improve the lives and educational opportunities for vulnerable children, all our challenges require us to work closely together. To engage in the hard work of negotiation and collaboration. To live into what the late Yale political theorist Robert Dahl called pluralism: the give-and-take of local interests that produce the political decisions that allow us to live together in community.

The Nobel Prize winning economist F. A. Hayek wrote that the economic problem of society is not merely an issue of how to allocate resources or goods within society, but rather how to best use resources given the fact that the knowledge one needs to make these decisions is distributed throughout society at large. In our current moment, the answers to how we improve real wages, strengthen household economies, and improve firm performance lie in our ability to make decisions locally. Whether you call it localism, subsidiarity, or sphere sovereignty, we improve our ability to understand and problem-solve when we empower locals to make decisions and to determine the future of their communities.

Local decision-making provides the context for humane economic choices, but we also need to be sensitive to the moral questions raised by economic activity. Over the last 135 years, two popes named Leo wrote about transformative economic moments and the importance of finding good and just economic outcomes for the most vulnerable in society. As Leo XIII wrote in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, “Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner.” Similarly, Leo XIV, in considering the potential challenges AI will bring, wrote, “Solidarity arises precisely when we decide not to remain indifferent to what happens to our neighbor but instead to transform unavoidable bonds — economic, cultural and technological — into paths of sharing, cooperation and mutual care, embracing the idea of ‘thinking and acting in terms of community.’”

Markets have been spectacularly successful in lifting untold numbers of people out of poverty. And they often work without too much top-down meddling from the state. When they work well, though, they depend on people who have well-developed moral and ethical perspectives. Theorists like Adam Smith and the German Ordoliberals knew that markets are vital, but they cannot long endure without moral foundations. Policymakers like Governor Daniels and those who worked with him likewise understood the moral obligations of the state to ensure the creation of an environment in which Hoosiers could prosper economically. 

With respect to John Adams, both our constitution AND our economy require a moral people and are unfit for any other. As MDLF fellows and fellow citizens, we should feel a special moral duty to ensure that we remain committed to the hard work of defending the institutions, virtues, and localism that makes market economies (and constitutional republics) work. Coming away from Evansville, I feel a deeper sense of what is possible when people of goodwill use long-term vision as the foundation for economic opportunity.