economic development
Herman Daly, 84, Who Challenged the Economic Gospel of Growth, Dies One of the economists I most admire. Perhaps the best-known ecological economist, he faulted his mainstream peers for failing to account for the environmental harm growth can bring.
Coalition to Back Black Businesses, Small Business Readiness for Resiliency Program among small-business grants open right now – The Business Journals While the SBA’s popular Covid-19 relief programs for small-businesses are over, there are still a number of grants available for businesses.
On Politics: How St. Louis became a laboratory for social work The Delmar Divine the Loop Trolley and a lot of St. Louis’ modern history.
NYTimes: This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession With Growth Must End “It’s a false assumption,” argues Herman Daly, “to say that growth is increasing the standard of living in the present world.”
Is St. Louis a Top Engineering City?
Historically, St. Louis has seen itself as a engineering-oriented sort of place. As the starting off point for people heading to the West, St. Louis’s blacksmiths made all sorts of products. Later in the 19th century, St. Louis on the river and at the hub or railroads, became a major manufacturing city. By the middle of the 20th Century, St. Louis was the nation’s second largest manufacturer of cars, and one of the five biggest for planes. Behind all that was an army of engineers – designing, building, and troubleshooting. We prided ourselves on our engineering achievements – ranging from the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft to the Gateway Arch.
With that tradition in all of our minds, we assume we remain one of the great engineering cities of the USA. Earlier this week Forbes published a piece by Joel Kotkin titled “America’s Engineering Hubs: The Cities With The Greatest Capacity For Innovation.” In it Joel reports on a study from the Houston Partnership that looked at the 85 largest metro areas in the country, ranked in terms of the number of engineers per capita. The Forbes piece mentions the Top 10, with San Jose tops at 45 engineers per 1000 employees. Number 10, Denver, was at 17. I personally reached out to Joel Kotkin and asked for our city’s ranking. He was kind enough to send me the complete list. St. Louis was 46th, with 10.6 engineers per 1000 employees. Kansas City was 53rd at 10.1.
This suggests that our historical recollection and modern situation might not be fitting together well. Why might that be? We have several fine engineering schools in the region – MUST, SLU and WashU immediately come to mind. Education News lists 24 in the state. One question though is do we need to grow these schools, or programs? If so, the state can take an aggressive role in promoting and supporting that type of growth, as can Missouri companies who are the eventual employer of so many of these graduates.
Another question is are we doing enough to keep graduates here. Today an increasing number of engineering students come from overseas, and the American visa system requires them to leave as soon as they finish, unless they can find a job and pay to get their work visa. This is basically forcing American-trained engineers to leave the country as soon as we finished adding value to their education. This problem can only be dealt with by the Congress.
The other issue is long-term. A lot of what is powering the high concentration of engineers in those Top 10 cities is a focus on the types of industries that make high levels of use of engineers. Those industries tend to be high-tech, and high-value-added sorts of industries. Today that includes St. Louis staples like aerospace and biotech, but also advanced manufacturing (think robotics), exotic materials (think nanotech), and of course IT and the Internet. St. Louis and Missouri is making strides in all of these areas. SLU attracted a top nanotech researcher (Eugene Pinkhassik) from the University of Memphis last year to anchor that campus’ efforts, and SLU’s not alone in that effort or area. But these areas need more support from state and local government, foundations and corporations to build these industries as eventual homes for the engineers we turn out.
Trained engineers are invariably a bright bunch. They know enough to go where the money is, and the money usually comes from the jobs. We need to make more engineering jobs to make Missouri the right place for our in-state-trained engineers to stay.
How Missouri Fares as an Entrepreneurial Powerhouse
The US Chamber of Commerce posted a report last month on how the states were doing in promoting enterprise. Entitled Enterprising States: Policies That Produce (get the report here), the report rated states on 33 attributes the Chamber felt were essential to economic (and entrepreneurial) growth in areas such as Economic Performance, Exports & International Trade, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Taxes & Regulation, Talent Pipeline and Infrastructure.
Missourians are probably curious how we did. Of 33 measures, Missouri scores in the top 10% (i.e. the top 5 states) on none. We had 2 measures (Entrepreneurial Activity and Higher Education Degree Output) that were in the top 20% (a.k.a the top 10 states) and 10 more measures in the top half of states. The chamber gave top 10 state lists in the six areas mentioned above, and Missouri did not have one mention on any of the lists. On the list of “The Next Boom States,” Missouri did not get mentioned.
As a state that prides itself on low taxes and being a haven for business, state leaders and a host of politicians would probably expect the Show-me State to fare well, but in comparison to other states on those Taxes & Regulation measures, Missouri’s performance is anemic. There are six measures (Business Closure, Tax Environment for Mature Firms, Tax Environment for New Firms, State business tax climate index, Small Business Survival Index, and State Cost of Living Index). Missouri is in the bottom half of states on the first three, and ranked between 11 and 25 for the last three. And this is one of the categories where our state’s performance is strongest, along with the Talent Pipeline.
In the report’s narrative on our state, the Chamber applauds Missouri’s efforts to improve the economic climate and mentions advances in training and promoting manufacturing and exporting. It is gratifying to see the state getting recognition for making strides, but reports like this, which are really compendia of already existing surveys, bring into sharp relief the need for the state legislature to do more to help promote efforts to grow our economy. Some of these, like an angel tax credit, higher education supports, funding for economic development, or supports for improved Internet access, are relatively inexpensive, and provide relatively fast paybacks in improved business and job results. Improving the tax climate in ways that groups like the Tax Foundation recommend would help, but also require more legislative energy and pose bigger challenges in making sure the state has enough revenue to meet its own obligations.
Missouri’s entrepreneurs did their part, starting businesses at the 6th highest rate in the nation in 2011, despite the less-than-ideal conditions in the overall economy and (as the Chamber’s report indicated) the state. It would be a great time for our legislators to step up their own game.
Jerome Katz's Entrepreneurship Blog 