Robert Whitcomb’s Digital Diary: Hyberbolic Job Claims and Traffic Tribunal Traumas
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Old Industry New Again; Hyberbolic Job Claims; Traffic Tribunal Traumas; Facts Eventually Bite
"There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogs."
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-- Hal Borland
From the late 19th to the middle of the 20th Century, Massachusetts was often called “The Shoe Capital of the World’’ because of its many shoe factories, most notably in Brockton but also in towns north of Boston, particularly Lynn. Most of the factories were closed as the companies either went out of business or moved their operations south in search of cheap labor, aided by new industrial air-conditioning. Same thing with the textile companies.
But the Bay State and New England in general have been pretty good at reinventing themselves. Even in shoes. Nowadays footwear companies are drawn to (or stay in) Greater Boston because of the increasingly rich design, marketing, manufacturing technology (such as robotics) and other expertise available there. Consider the following companies with headquarters operations in the area: New Balance, Puma, Alden of New England, Wolverine, Clarks, Earth Brands, Reebok, Vibram, Rockport and Converse.
A particularly evocative development is the recent move by British-owned Clarks Americas into the former Polaroid factory in Waltham. In its glory days in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Polaroid, the instant camera and film company, was considered a leader among the Massachusetts technology companies that were spouting up along the recently built Route 128. The company was called a “juggernaut of innovation.’’ (There’s been a minor revival lately of using Polaroid cameras. Like vinyl records?)
A big change since the ‘60s is that many tech companies now prefer to be in Boston and Cambridge because the executives, and their younger workers, find them more stimulating than the suburbs. The most dramatic recent example, of course, is General Electric deciding to leave its boring Fairfield, Conn., corporate campus and move to Boston’s trendy waterfront.
Gary Champion, president of Clarks Americas, succinctly explained to The Boston Globe the lure of Greater Boston:
“The skill is what brings us here, even still.’’
Having spent summers in high school working for a trucking company in Boston (on the then grubby and arson-rich waterfront) much of whose business was servicing the shoe and related business, I find this comforting.
Massachusetts’s jobless rate in December was 2.9 percent and the state’s average wages are among the highest in the nation. Massachusetts employers need more skilled workers to staff the many well-paying and sophisticated jobs available in the Bay State. That its public schools are probably the best in America, and that the state hosts world famous colleges and universities, helps to churn out great workers. But so successful are so many Massachusetts companies that they’re desperate for more highly skilled workers. In a sense, a nice problem to have!
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For a variety of social, political and historical reasons, Rhode Island never moved nearly as deeply into the “Innovation Economy’’ as did its neighbor. But it has made some progress recently in attracting some very successful companies.
But such progress should not be exaggerated. Exaggerations undermine credibility, which is not good for the trust needed to help build a strong long-term economic growth.
Here’s an example: Regarding the Wexford Science & Technology project in the Route 195 relocation project: Gov. Gina Raimondo has asserted that the $32 plus million in public subsidies for the Wexford project will create 1,000 new permanent jobs in Rhode Island. GoLocal fact-checked those claims.
It found that the actual jobs created, at least at first, will be closer to 80 to 90. Of course, over time, the project may draw many more enterprises and jobs, especially if attention-grabbing companies (and maybe some of their vendors) move in too. A version of the multiplier effect. But that is unknowable at this point.
My friend Leonard Lardaro, a URI economist, observed to GoLocal on the Wexford job outlook: “As always, we will find ourselves largely flying blind. I think this project will prove to be worthwhile ultimately, but when I see such ad hoc estimates as these I simply take the 'wish' numbers and divide by two. It's amazing how accurate that procedure has been over the years here," said Mr. Lardaro, who writes the monthly Rhode Island Current Conditions Index (CCI) that details the state of the Rhode Island economy.
No one can project with certainty the total jobs effect of the Raimondo administration incentive. I’d say that the recent announcements have probably raised interest in the state enough to bring in more big enterprises. God knows, the administration is working hard on this and, of course, the governor is a former venture capitalist. She knows business.
So we shall see. Of course the most rational policy is to improve a state’s education and physical infrastructures and streamline the tax and regulatory systems so as to attract a very wide range of businesses without having to use special tax and other economic incentives to lure famous firms – incentives that everyone else has to pay for. An even playing field.
Unfortunately, such a fair and efficient approach seems politically impossible. The voting public wants to hear that the state has drawn in famous companies and the loyal companies and individual citizens who were already here will have to help pay for their moves. That’s what happens in varying degrees in every state.
But the Raimondo administration would do well to keep job forecasts modest and hope that the reality exceeds its forecasts, which would raise the administration’s credibility and give it room to do more deals with taxpayer money.
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The Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal is sociologically fascinating. One is struck by the number of people who cannot pay even very small fines (say $60) in spite of the fact (or because?) they have big cars; the number of people driving with marijuana in their vehicles; the number of people whose car windows have such dark tinting that the judge orders them to remove it so that law enforcement people can identify the people within – and what they’re doing -- and how many confused people are fined after being videotaped passing parked school buses with their stop flags extended and lights flashing but, some fined drivers allege, no driver or children in sight.
It’s a good business: the videotape company (now an outfit called Student Guardian) gets 75 percent of the fine, the state 12.5 percent, and the city or town where the violation occurred 12.5 percent. The economic impetus is to keep the flag extended and the lights flashing as much as possible. In any case, stay as far away as you can from school buses, for the kids’ sake and your wallet’s.
Some wags have suggested that the inside of the buses also be videotaped to prove that they are occupied but that would violate the privacy of the children.
You also, as you’d expect, see lots of speeding tickets in relatively wide-open parts of the state, such as Burrillville, but far more school-bus-passing offenses, driving without insurance, license and/or registration, marijuana possession, excessively tinted windows and so on in urban areas – for example, East Providence.
xxx
The amount of ignorance in large parts of the American electorate seems to be swelling. For example, many Trump voters believe that the number of people with health insurance had fallen under the Affordable Care Act; it has surged; that Mr. Trump won the popular vote; he lost it by about 3 million votes; that Hillary Clinton and her campaign were involved in a child-sex ring run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor; not!
But as Trump promoter Scottie Nell Hughes said on CNN after the election marked by Mr. Trump’s relentless lying. (Mrs. Clinton trimmed the truth and said a few outright lies but NOTHING approaching Mr. Trump’s industrial-strength continuous lying.)
Ms. Hughes: “And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts—they're not really facts. Everybody has a way—it's kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.’’
The Trump campaign certainly showed little self-consciousness about lying. But trying running your personal or occupation life as if facts meant nothing.
As John Adams, our second president, wrote:
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
Facts may not matter much in “reality’’ TV or in the marketing of casinos, glitzy hotels, casinos and now, presidential campaigns, but in the long run facts have a way of painfully trumping (so to speak) fantasies and lies in a dangerous world.
Meanwhile, for an exciting tour of our new leader’s Russian and some other foreign commercial entanglements read:
Moscow has more than enough to blackmail him for his personal and business activities.
I wonder now that we’ve seen the effects of the Democrats’ and most famously Hillary Clinton’s debonair/slobbish/naive attitude toward their own cybersecurity whether both parties will be as sealed up in the future as the GOP and Mr. Trump’s were in the campaign? Will someone be able to get into our new leader’s Twitter account and change the course of history?
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Good news: The Massachusetts legislature is studying whether to have the state join Canada’s Maritime Provinces by ditching Eastern Time and joining Atlantic Time. Since New England is so far east, this would make a lot of sense. It would give us more afternoon sunlight in the late fall and winter and end the sleep deprivation caused by our move into Eastern Daylight Time in March. If New England’s dominant state makes the move, then the rest of the region, perhaps excepting Connecticut, or just its Fairfield County, which operates almost as part of New York, would have to follow suit.
Atlantic Time matches the time that New Englanders already use in the summer; adopting it would simply mean that in the fall, we wouldn’t have to fall back but rather we’d keep the clock an hour forward all year.
The change would, based on current school hours, result in kids going to school when it’s still dark some of the year. So open school an hour later than now. You’d probably get more alert students: Studies have suggested that the sleeping cycles of young people, especially teens, clash with the typical 7:20-8 a.m. openings of public schools.
We’re in the wrong time zone. Consider that Boston lies so far east in the Eastern Time Zone that during standard time, Boston’s earliest nightfall of the year – Dec. 7 -- is a mere 27 minutes later than in Anchorage, Alaska.
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If there were an orderly and fair way to do it, I’d much prefer cutting real-estate and business taxes instead of doing away with the Rhode Island car tax. Taxing polluting, sprawl-producing cars and using the money, for, among other things, creating European- and Japanese-quality mass transit on the face of it would seem to make a lot of sense.
BUT given that cars and trucks are mobile (thus usually easily registered out of state); that determining their value is more problematic that determining the value of a house, and that car taxes are too high in poorer communities to partly offset the lack of taxes available from real estate there, the only thing to do is to get rid of them. They just can’t be made fair.
To make up for the lost revenue I’d suggest that hated word – tolls. Such user fees are the fairest way to get revenue. Of course this is when people say: “We don’t need to offset the loss of the car taxes; we should just slash state government programs.’’
When I ask which ones: Most people fall silent. The fact is that most government programs are there to meet a need and/or public demand. Is there waste here and there? Of course, as in any large organization, in the public or private sector. Is there corruption in some places in government. Yes, of course, wherever there are people. But there’s far, far less than what I have witnessed in business as a financial editor.
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The novelist Russell Banks, pretty famous for writing about “working-class’’ people, has come out with a new book called Voyager: Travel Writings. It’s an engaging piece of work that takes us on his climbs in the Himalayas, the Andes and the Adirondacks, his island hopping in the Caribbean and Seychelles, his bizarre drive down the Alaska Peninsula, his meditations in the Everglades, a sort of depressing Big Chill reunion in North Carolina of his college friends, his far-too-long and smoky interview with Fidel Castro and much more.
Along the way Mr. Banks, who is 76, ruminates on his often very disorderly life, especially on his four marriages, each to unusual women. (Actually, I guess everyone is unusual in his or her own way.)
“I keep going back, and with increasing clarity I see more of the place and more of my past selves. And more of the past of the planet as well.’’
He writes with seemingly brutal honesty about his own foibles while accepting them. They are what they are. In this he’s like a lot of people who reach the far side of 60 and decide that it’s a lot less anxiety-provoking and a lot easier just to tell the truth as honestly as they can remember it. Old people are more likely to tell the truth than young people. Perhaps they take a kind of sad comfort in the English poet’s Thomas Gray’s line: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’’ Self-glorification/justification lose their satisfactions.
But then, Mr. Banks is well known for the resilience of his novels’ characters in the face of personal disasters, some self-inflicted .
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Some restaurants are trying to get patrons to order their sit-down meals via a computer terminal at their tables in an attempt to cut staff. Such jobs are among the last fairly available jobs and many of them are entry-level. Americans should help their fellow citizens and demand that a fellow human and not a computer take their orders.
One wonders where future consumer purchasing power will come from with so many sectors automating. Henry Ford famously paid his workers well to help create a market for his cars.
Related Slideshow: 17 to Watch in 2017 in Rhode Island
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