The FREOPP Brain Trust: Erica Grieder
People often ask us: “Why are you headquartered in Austin instead of Washington, D.C.?” The authority on that is Erica Grieder.
In 2013 Erica published her first book, Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas. Drawn from her work as the Southwest correspondent for The Economist from 2007 to 2012, and as a senior editor at Texas Monthly from 2012 to 2016, Erica describes how Texas emerged as an ethnically diverse economic powerhouse where prosperity has grown incomes for lower and higher earners alike.
“One of the fundamental truths about Texas,” Erica writes, “is that, although the state is genuinely sui generis, and self-consciously different from other states, it is, in many ways, the most American of all.” Demographically, Texas represents the future of America; it’s a state where 57 percent of the population is comprised of minorities.
As Bryan Burrough of The New York Times observes in his review of Erica’s book, the combination of free markets and immigration have driven Texas’ economic success. “The state has benefited from waves of immigration, beginning after the Civil War and persisting to this day,” notes Burrough. “As outsiders, successful immigrants tend to be hard-working and self-sufficient, and the state’s pro-business culture has made their jobs easier at every turn.”
Pessimists on the right believe that as America becomes more diverse, the public will lose its interest in free-market policies. Texas is a living rebuttal to that hypothesis. Pessimists on the left believe that free markets benefit only the wealthy. But millions of ordinary Americans have immigrated to Texas, too — enough to fill a state like Wisconsin once over. As Erica’s work shows, they haven’t done so for the ocean views or the summer weather. They’ve done so for the economic opportunity.
Erica grew up an Air Force brat in San Antonio. She left Texas to attend Columbia, where she majored in philosophy, but returned to obtain a master’s degree from the University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs. These days, she splits time between Austin and Houston, where she recently joined the Houston Chronicle as a columnist.
Erica wants to make her intra-Texas loyalties clear: “I’ll support the Houston Rockets over the Dallas Mavericks, but I’m a San Antonio Spurs fan and always will be.”
As a member of FREOPP’s Board of Advisors, Erica helps us consider ways to apply our work to state and local policy in Texas, and to identify opportunities to apply Texas’ lessons to the country as a whole.
“I couldn’t be happier to join the team at FREOPP,” Erica says, “a group that was founded on the premise that equality of opportunity is the purpose of America.”
Follow Erica on Twitter: @EricaGrieder
