Economic Development is now a serious business

Truth be known, for years states and towns have treated economic development as a diversion to put glossy ads with politicians pictures in business magazines, lavish benefits on a few large companies and perfect a counting system that gave elected leaders credit for every job that would be created anyway. 

 

Today, with prospects of a long, jobless recovery and the chance that credit, public debt, energy and demographic issues could upset the entire western post-industrial economy, economic development needs to be approached as seriously as public health and building codes. Growth will no longer happen automatically and mistakes and superficial answers could lead to serious and perhaps irreversible negative consequences.

 

In the last month the Governor of Connecticut, though a report issued by her department of Economic and Community Development, and the state legislature, through a task force organized by the majority leaders of both the House and Senate began looking at the strategic direction needed to create jobs and grow the state’s economy.

 

Each effort will end up with worthy goals, some great ideas and a few bad ones. Plus, there will be plenty of eloquent statements about the challenges we face.  Yet we need to do more. Just doing as well as North Carolina or Massachusetts won’t be good enough. We have to do better than them.

 

We can start to achieve this by examining the way we are approaching the development problems we face. 

 

We must to put aside politics as usual and the vanities of who happens to “be in charge” and collectively work to amass enough data and real time information from investors, companies and experts to challenge and then go beyond the easy assumptions and “me too” approaches. Failure to do this will mean Connecticut lacks the unique set of insights and methods to deliver jobs and growth.

 

Ironically, as the richest state our burden to “get it right” is higher than just about any other location in the country. Every job we do not create, or that is just at the national average means we get poorer. The lack of critical mass in many cluster areas means job seekers may take worse jobs in places where there is more opportunity.  Newer economies have fewer old bridges to fix and most other places have more professional government structures and even stronger business trade associations.

 

So, is our accumulated wealth and current clusters of jobs an accident or the result of great planning and skill?

 

The answer is – it doesn’t matter.  New jobs and new investments going forward are going to be won in a very competitive and greedy world that will concede nothing to our grand economic history or legacy. Our good fortune is of little use against the rest of the country – or world -- that now has every item of competitive advantage we can call on in terms of skilled workers, great schools and excellent roads and governmental systems.

 

We can keep most of our unique ways of doing business and politics but only if we work together to have the best solutions to the questions of how to create wealth and jobs than other locations.  Let’s start working towards this now.

 

Think how much the climate has changed for a place like Connecticut in 100 years.  When our citizens were starting and developing Winchester, Pratt & Whitney and the Hartford, the southern states were still rebuilding from the civil war or trying to convince New York bankers to invest in a few new railroads. Those very bankers who were already travelling on the vast New Haven railroad system to their homes away from Wall Street in Greenwich. 

 

Fifty years ago the technology that spilled out of a Connecticut landscaped chocked with arms firms, industrial giants and thousands of experienced machine shops  supercharged with research work at Yale, MIT and the labs of AT&T, GE and IBM built the modern world of electronics, aerospace and military contractors.  While the southern states still had state schools focusing on agriculture and workers fully employed by the lower wage factories that had escaped Connecticut.

 

 

But what we can do is think of economic development as an apolitical social good that must be mastered to maintain our way of life and the benefits that we take for granted.

 

To do this requires that we approach the field scientifically. We need to bring all branches of government, private groups such as CI and the Connecticut Technology Council and the providers of investment capital together with academics to analyze economic data at the company level and then create plans that take into account the hyper competitive nature of the world.

 

The states and regions that are the most scientific and the exhaustive in perfecting ways to attract and retain money, talent and ideas will inevitably win.  It sounds simple, but it means, like watching better coached teams win on Sunday afternoons, that teamwork must be combined with staying up late and watching game films for hours and then writing out a better game plan.

 

We spend too much time taking credit for good things that would have happened regardless, ignoring the bad things that are happening that are actually not our fault and rarely summoning up the resources that must be borrowed from today’s needs to be better invested to built prosperity in the future.

 

Of course, we usually do just the opposite.  An election year is not a great time to suggest this, but why can’t we bring the Administration, the Legislature and organized business community together in a facilitated and collaborative way to build a true strategic plan for the state.  Sometimes the enemy of the good is the great. But in the global race for jobs and growth excellence is the only place to be.

 

 

 

Comments

[Soft Cialis]

How is economic development measured?