Complaining about Illinois? It’s one of the most powerful U.S. states in world
Photo: Adam Jones via Wikimedia Commons. Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
If you spend enough time at a neighborhood bar in Chicago or a diner downstate in Carbondale, you’re going to hear it. It’s the unofficial state pastime: complaining about Illinois.
We talk about the taxes (yes, it’s high), the politics (yes, it’s machine-powered), and that persistent feeling that we’re just a layover at O’Hare (yes, we’re the U.S. transit entrepôt).
But there is a massive disconnect between the way we talk about our home and the reality of how the rest of the world sees us. While we’re busy rolling our eyes at a city sticker or a 9.5% corporate income tax rate, the global economy is looking at Illinois as one of the most formidable powers on the planet.
We aren’t just a state. We are a global titan.
If Illinois were to break off and become its own country tomorrow, we would walk onto the world stage as a top 20 global economy.
We are talking about a Gross State Product that has surged to approximately $1.15 trillion. That puts us in the same league as Saudi Arabia, which sits at $1.3 trillion, and ahead of major European players like Poland at $1.1 trillion and Switzerland at $1 trillion.
Think about that for a second. We have more economic weight than sovereign nations that have their own armies and seats at the United Nations.
The reason we are so powerful is that we aren’t a one-trick pony. We are the food and confections capital of the world. Our manufacturing sector alone is a $135 billion powerhouse, accounting for over 12% of our total GDP. When people eat, anywhere on earth, there is a high probability that an Illinois company like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Mondelēz International, Kraft Heinz, Conagra Brands, or Lactalis American Group had a hand in it. We are the global snack and supply chain masters.
We are also the heavy equipment capital, with the machines building the world’s infrastructure stamped with the names of companies like Caterpillar and John Deere, which are part of our concentration of nearly 60 Fortune 1000 headquarters. We are home to Illinois Tool Works (ITW), Dover, and W.W. Grainger, companies that provide the nuts, bolts, and industrial supplies that keep global manufacturing from grinding to a halt.
And we aren't just resting on 20th-century laurels. We are currently building what people are calling the Quantum Coast.
While Silicon Valley is busy with apps, we are cornering the market on the next generation of computing with a $1 billion investment in the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park. We graduate more engineers annually than MIT, Stanford, and Caltech combined. We are the top nuclear energy producer in the country, led by Exelon, exporting nearly one-fifth of our electricity to our neighbors.
We are essentially the engine room of the American Midwest, producing nearly double the economic output of Michigan or Indiana.
Beyond the raw numbers, there is a moral weight to the power Illinois wields. We’ve seen it in the way the state has led on social issues (we protect LGBTQ people and women’s reproductive rights), maintaining our status as a sanctuary for those who need protection. We’ve seen it in the way our communities show up for one another, from mutual aid networks in Edgewater to service projects in downstate Peru. Did you know Rotary International headquarters is in Evanston?
We are a state with a GDP per capita of approximately $90,000—a level of individual economic productivity that dwarfs the national averages of Germany or the United Kingdom.
Even in the sectors we take for granted, we are dominant. We have the insurance and financial giants like State Farm, Allstate, Discover Financial, Northern Trust, and Arthur J. Gallagher. We have the retail and healthcare titans like Walgreens Boots Alliance, McDonald’s, Ulta Beauty, and Abbott Laboratories. We have the biopharmaceutical leaders like AbbVie and Baxter International saving lives globally from North Chicago and Deerfield.
The irony is that we often feel like the underdog. We complain because we care, and we want things to be better, but we often miss the forest for the trees. We focus on the bureaucratic headache of the DMV while ignoring the fact that the very ground we stand on is a central node in the global supply chain.
Every major railroad meets here. The most connected airport on earth—the home base for United Airlines—is here. The future of the electric vehicle battery is being built here with plants like the $2 billion Gotion facility in Manteno and the Rivian factory in Normal.
It is time we stop buying into the narrative that Illinois is a state in decline. You don’t become a trillion-dollar economy by accident. You don’t become a leader in quantum physics and clean energy by being "stuck." We are living in one of the most powerful places on earth. Maybe it's time we started acting like it.
