Kian Hudson is a native Hoosier and appellate litigator at Barnes & Thornburg LLP. He previously served as deputy solicitor general for the State of Indiana and is a former law clerk for Seventh Circuit Judge Diane Sykes and an alumnus of Northwestern University and Yale Law School.

Why do some places prosper more than others? The question preoccupied scholars and policymakers even before Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, and the question remains an urgent one today—including for Hoosiers.

While the decade ending in 2020 saw some of our sister states—particularly those west of the Rocky Mountains—experience economic growth at a compounded annual rate of well more than 2 percent a year, Indiana lagged behind at 1 percent a year (0.6 percentage points behind the country as a whole). Now to be fair, part of this is simply that Indiana’s population grew more slowly over this period, experiencing a 4.7% increase rather than the double-digit growth found in several of these other states. And taking per capita personal income as our metric tells a more nuanced story: Over the 2010s Hoosiers’ real per capita annual personal income grew from just under $40,000 a year to slightly more than $50,000 a year (i.e., by about 27 percent). That growth rate matches America’s aggregate growth rate and is slightly better than Kentucky and Wisconsin and essentially matches Ohio (though it is slightly worse than Illinois and Michigan).

Still, it seems clear that there is room for Indiana to improve on this score. Much less clear, however, is how to do so. The several experts who presented to this year’s class of Mitch Daniels Leadership Foundation Fellows on June 24th brought serious expertise and experience to bear on this question, and even they had no easy answers. More than two centuries on from Adam Smith, the recipe for economic prosperity remains a bit of a mystery.

Some things, of course, are obvious. A competent and incorruptible government is better than a corrupt and incompetent one. But the answers to the concrete policy questions confronting us today are anything but obvious. Should Indiana use its record-high cash reserves to expand broadband access in rural areas or instead expand the Indy-to-Chicago passenger-rail line, increase funding for the state’s public research universities or instead offer more generous scholarships for vocational education? Or should the state simply reduce tax rates or otherwise return the money to Hoosiers? These questions are incredibly difficult—not least because the last decade has brought economic prosperity to states with remarkably divergent policy programs.

Hoosiers, however, cannot shrink from answering these questions. One way or another, choices must be made. And amidst all this uncertainty, perhaps the most important insight is this observation, offered to MDLF fellows by Allison Melangton, Senior Vice President for Penske Entertainment: Time and again, she said, the thing that differentiates Hoosiers, the thing that allows us to accomplish things others would not, is that we do teamwork—we can set aside our egos for sake of common projects (such as the many world-renowned sporting events to which Indianapolis has been host) that we know we couldn’t achieve on our own. If Hoosiers can remember that, even amidst our many genuine conflicts and divisions, we’ll be well-positioned to pursue prosperity—together.