To create the new jobs needed in our nation, and make sure our world-leading creativity and innovation ends up creating new businesses, we need deeper pools of venture and early stage capital.

Nowhere are jobs needed more than in the Midwest manufacturing belt. A recent Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program report authored by Cleveland’s Frank Samuel suggests how we might better link new technology discovery going on in the ‘Rust Belt” to new firm creation. It turns out the industrial heartland reaching from Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and St. Louis in the west to Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Buffalo in the east produces on metrics associated with innovation: 33 percent of all national R&D, 35 percent of all nationally competitive National Institute of Health (NIH) grants; 30 percent of all U.S. patents awarded; and educating 36 percent of all U.S. scientists and engineers.

However only 12 percent of the nation’s venture capital gets invested in the region to convert technology discovery to new firms and jobs Even more disturbingly, the Rust Belt’s deep pockets in terms of sizable state and local pension funds that do put money into VC, are essentially sending it to the coasts. Fully 47 percent of the nation’s public pension fund venture money comes from the Rust Belt--but only 13 percent of that money is reinvested in Great Lakes region commercialization.

This dearth of early stage capital is not just a regional problem--but one of national significance--and a threat to the U.S. position as the world’s innovation engine.

For much of the United States, Detroit has become shorthand for failure--not just because of the dilapidation of the town’s iconic industry, but because the entire metropolis seems like a dystopian disaster. It is the second-most-segregated metropolitan area in the country; the city’s population is 82 percent African American. No other American city has shed more people since 1950--Detroit is only half its former size. Its city government fails at the most basic tasks. A call to 911 will bring a response, on average, in about 20 minutes.

Via Tyler Cowen, a new economic study, inspired by new Nobel-winner Elinor Ostrom, shows that local ownership of tropical forests is the best way to preserve them: