ISSUE 001
Missouri Initiatives
Everything in this one comes from the state's own files — no aggregators, no roundups. Missouri publishes a remarkable amount about itself and almost nobody reads it, so this is a county-level GDP file you can download, the no-cost advising network most owners don't know they've already paid for, and one number that explains what we're actually working on.
An idea worth thinking about
The cheapest county in Missouri sits twenty points below the most expensive
MU Extension's Missouri Economy Indicators series looked at 2025 cost-of-living data and found the state sixth-lowest in the nation. The interesting part is inside the state rather than the ranking. Twenty index points separate Missouri's most and least expensive counties — St. Louis at the top, Texas County at the bottom — and only St. Louis City and County come in above the national average. Metro counties average 92.3 against a national 100; nonmetro counties, 89.7.
The standard reading is that low cost of living compensates for lower wages, which it does. The reading I find more interesting for anyone building something: your fixed costs in most of Missouri are set roughly ten percent below national, while what you can charge for software or services is increasingly set by a national market that doesn't know or care where you are. That gap is the whole argument for building here, and it's a structural feature rather than a consolation prize.
Read the indicators brief
A tool I disappeared into
Every Missouri counties GDP, five years, downloadable
MERIC — the research arm of the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development — runs an interactive county GDP dashboard. Pick a year, click any county on the map, and you get its GDP trend over the past several years, in real dollars adjusted for inflation or current dollars unadjusted. There's an Excel file of five years of county GDP sitting right there for download, which is where I ended up.
MERIC also recently added a Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages dashboard, which covers over 95 percent of US jobs and can be filtered by county, metro area, or workforce development region and by industry sector. Between the two you can answer most "is this industry actually growing here" questions without paying anybody. State GDP for scale: $358.0 billion in 2025 in real dollars, up 1.3 percent.
Open the county GDP dashboard
Learn something
You've already paid for a business advisor. Most owners never claim one.
The Missouri SBDC network provides no-cost, confidential one-on-one business advising — business planning, market research, financial statements, funding, succession — funded through a cooperative agreement with the SBA and University of Missouri Extension. Centers are hosted at universities and colleges across the state, each covering an assigned set of counties. Missouri S&T handles Crawford, Dent, Franklin, Gasconade, Maries, Phelps and Pulaski. Missouri Southern covers Jasper, Newton, Barton, Vernon, McDonald, Cedar, Dade and Lawrence. Missouri State serves fifteen southwest counties from Springfield, Forsyth and West Plains.
Two details that trip people up. It isn't walk-in — you have to formally register for services, which takes about five minutes and is what makes the counseling confidential. And the free one-on-one consulting is scoped to for-profit businesses, while training and workforce development sessions are open to nonprofits too.
Find your SBDC
What we’re seeing
Two regions hold 58 percent of Missouri's jobs. The rest of the state splits what's left.
Missouri is 114 counties plus the City of St. Louis. According to MERIC's own regional profile, the St. Louis and Kansas City regions together account for roughly 58 percent of the state's employment. Everything else — every small city, every rural county, the entire southeast — divides the remaining 42 percent.
I want to be careful about what that number does and doesn't mean. It is not evidence that rural Missouri is failing. Employment concentrates in metros everywhere; that's what metros are. Missouri's real GDP reached $358.0 billion in 2025, up 1.3 percent, and $468.5 billion in current dollars, up 4.4 percent, and that growth is not confined to two corners of the map.
What the number does establish is where the default sits. When a program is designed, a fund is raised, or a support organization opens an office, 58 percent of the employment is in two places — so that's where the gravity pulls, without anyone deciding it should. Closing an innovation gap isn't primarily about persuasion. It's about deliberately building the thing in the 42 percent, because nothing about the underlying math will do it for you.
MERIC, Regional Profiles
One question
Which county are you building in?
Reply with just the county name. I'm mapping where the people reading this actually are, and it changes what's worth writing next.
More in this pillar as it's written.
— Shana
Sources link to the original publisher, never to a summary.