Ruminations – 15dec2007

George Rebane

• Promoting Nevada County Jobs
• Role of Religion in Campaigns

Jeff Pelline wrote a good editorial in today’s Union that covered a lot of the waterfront in promoting job growth in the county.  Here are some added thoughts.  RR readers know my school of economics teaches that technologists have been the prime wealth creators for many decades and from here on out will have even more of that burden put on their shoulders.  But all wealth is not created equally even in technology.  For example, ‘green companies’ that depend on the government’s distortion of the markets (read subsidies) to survive will be a weak and marginally sustainable area of growth.  Such green technology firms in Nevada County are basically betting that the folks in Ohio and elsewhere will want to pay for people to work and live in Nevada County.  And this only lasts for a while until the plug is pulled.  As an entrepreneur, I would be leery of sticking my government subsidized company up here instead of in a more accessible (metropolitan area) closer to bigger labor, transportation, and other markets.  And teaching local people job skills is absolutely wonderful as long as they then have the ability to work in the county.  For example, teaching welding and other machine shop skills makes a lot of sense if we allow the establishment of new business that do welding and generate all the other collateral effects like traffic, pollution, noise, … ; otherwise we train people locally to then move, or worse, commute elsewhere to work.

Peggy Noonan (‘The Pulpit and the Potemkin Village’) in today’s WSJ laments that religion again plays a big part in the upcoming presidential campaign.  In this she and other columnists concentrate on the (pejorative) discriminatory aspects of supporting a candidate based on religion. What these commentators seem to miss is the most fundamental role that a declared religion plays in favor of a candidate.  And that is that a credible religious label efficiently encodes (that’s tech talk) a whole list of values and behaviors of the candidate without having to take time/money to repeatedly spell them out for every new audience. In short, if the, say, man believably asserts he’s a practicing Baptist, then a large fraction of the people immediately attribute a whole bunch of good attributes to him that they would like to see in a principled politician and/or office holder.  Of course, the candidate has to trade off the effect on certain people who may not think that having a bible thumper in office is such a hot idea.  In any event, claimed religions, club affiliations, military experience, etc serve to efficiently summarize a lot information about the character of the candidate and make us feel we can successfully predict how he really would act in office.  Until there is drafted and publicized a widely accepted and vanilla ‘Universal Code of Political Ethics’ that is free of ties to known belief systems and affiliations, we should understand that hearing a politician play the religion, ethnic, or race card is also a fast way of saying ‘I am this and not that’ relying on the appropriate stereotypes embedded in our culture.  (BTW, accurate stereotyping is not the politically incorrect thing that certain folks would like to have us think; but we’ll cover that another time.)  For us voters such self-ascribed labels are good information and should be looked at in their entirety, and not simply serve as a slogan-based stimulus to either summarily accept or reject the candidate.

Comments

[Russ]

You are right about companies that depend on grants, when the grants stop coming the company goes bust. Show me a company that was started on grant dollars and went on to be a self sustaining company in Nevada County. If Jeff is talking about green manufacturing, we have lost some green companies already due to the transportation costs in hauling in raw materials and the finished products out. They moved closer to I-80 and rail access in Roseville. Green companies that do not make products, but only do design work, do not produce much tax revenue. Especially if the product are produced off shore. I will be writing about some of the other issue in Jeff's article at NC Media Watch.

[George Rebane]

Russ, I meant that 'green companies', in addition to those getting grants, would be put at risk by the feds' playing with the market. Such companies may be second tier firms who just supply or co-serve the market with companies receiving grants. They too would be affected when the plug is pulled or re-arranged. gjr

[Jeff Pelline]

Let's not let ideology color our analysis. We can create sustainable green jobs with the grant money, demand from consumers for the products, and education to train the people in "green collar" jobs. The grant money will be around for a long time, too — oil prices aren't going lower. As far as demand, marketing studies also show that people here are "keen on green." The transportation problem is an issue for all companies here — not just green ones. We have to ask the same question about transportation policy that we are asking about economic development. Are we providing effective public and private leadership? Are we implementing the right policy? Are we showing the proper sense of urgency?