Author Michael Walden Shares His Book, North Carolina in the Connected Age
On North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, July 26, at 5 PM

Michael Walden, one of North Carolina’s leading economists, believes that we are currently living in a technologically-connected age that has completely transformed the state’s economy. Once driven by tobacco, textiles, and furniture, the North Carolina economy now thrives on technology, pharmaceuticals, finance, food processing, and the manufacture of vehicle parts. While the state as a whole has benefited from these dramatic transformations, some population groups and regions have not experienced consistent economic growth.

In an all-new episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch with D.G. Martin, premiering Sunday, July 26, at 5 PM, Walden shares his book, North Carolina in the Connected Age, an essential read for anyone wanting to understand how the state arrived where it is today and what its future might hold.

“The ‘Connected Age’ is my term for what I think people already know—we live now in a different kind of time run by modern technology,” says Walden. “The world is more connected, world trade has exploded, we are connected increasingly always to our jobs…so it’s just my way of putting my name on what a lot of people say is a technological revolution and indeed it has dramatically changed the North Carolina economy.”

Walden identifies education as the key factor; a skilled, college-educated work force, he argues, is now a region's most prized commodity. Walden traces how the forces of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have remade the North Carolina economy, impacted people and regions, and led to the most substantive public policy debates in decades.

“I start my story in the book around 1970. That’s when, for example, Research Triangle Park was really getting off the ground, nationally, at least, we had settled some of our racial differences…and the great migration from the North and Midwest had begun and was really taking hold in the South,” says Walden. “And so, you could say that the 1970s was the watershed decade.”

At a time when North Carolina's population is exploding and its economy is shifting profoundly, Walden applies the tools of his trade to chronicle these changes and to inform North Carolinians in easy-to-understand terms what to expect in the future.

“What I’m looking at in this book is how our state economy was transformed, really remade, from what it was in the 2oth century, primary based on what people now call the “Big Three” (tobacco, textiles and furniture) and how North Carolina survived…to become one of the fastest growing states in the nation,” says Walden.

Michael L. Walden is William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor and extension economist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University. He is author of seven books, including Smart Economics: Commonsense Answers to Fifty Questions about Government, Business, and Households. He also produces a daily radio program and writes a weekly syndicated newspaper column.

Don’t miss DG Martin’s all-new interview with Michael Walden on North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, July 26, at 5 PM, only on UNC-TV!

During the 26-week season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests will also include:  John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed (Holy Smoke), Justin Catanoso (My Cousin the Saint), Todd Johnson(The Sweet By and By), Barbara Fredrickson (Positivity), Michael Davis (Street Gang), Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), Howard Lee (The Courage to Lead), Marianne Gingher (Adventures in Pen Land), and Dan Barefoot (Hark the Sound of Tar Heel Voices).

For additional information about series guests and airdates, plus links to the Bookwatch blog and online book club, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh’s independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV’s other original productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.