Raw and Uncensored – Economy, Jobs, Education, Government and Rumors
July 8, 2013 Leave a comment
Check out LaunchPad INW – the original, local social networking (and in person networking) group has transitioned to a weekly newsletter sharing information on local innovation and entrepreneurship activities.
To learn more, read “Welcome to LaunchPad“.
January 19, 2013 3 Comments
(Update: By request I have turned comments back on for some recent posts. They were turned off, mostly, a year ago, since I spend little time on the blog now, and comments require monitoring. Hope that helps and thank you for your suggestions, ideas and corrections.)
The State’s “adjusted” employment data for Spokane County (thru November 2012) shows an upward spike:
The US government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics “raw” data for Spokane County (through November) shows a subdued seasonal rise in jobs. (Data is from the US BLS “One Screen” database). In a traditional post recession recovery, we should be seeing a job growth rate similar to how it was before the recession took hold (pre-2008).
November 2, 2012 Leave a comment
6 Things That Can Kill Your Citys Startup Community.
The co-founder of TechStars explains why communities fail to have an entrepreneurship community. He lists six broad categories that hinder startup and economic growth – and incredibly, Spokane ranks high on all six categories (most of which have been previously written about on this blog – See the History of Spokane Economic Plans and Recommendations, in links to right of this page).
This seems a reasonable summary that matches up with Spokane and may give hints as to how to overcome the problems …
November 20, 2011
Independent online resources where you can monitor the long term trends yourself. They have the data used in the charts on this web site, and often have the same charts too. This blog has brought up nothing new – everyone else knows what is going on!
Due to a recent Court ruling in Oregon, I may take this entire web site offline in the future. If the government provides more First Amendment protections to “journalists” than to citizens and the government decides who is a journalist, then what happens to the First Amendment freedom of the press concept? Basically, the First Amendment is thrown away as the government selectively choose who is a journalist and who is not.
November 20, 2011 Leave a comment
We wish it were true!
But back in the reality-based world and this last post on this blog … by the numbers, Spokane is not getting better, it continues its long downward slide.
For decades, wages in Spokane have grown at half the rate of the rest of the state, falling further behind every year. Spokane wages average about 20% behind the rest of the state. Government and health care workers make close to King County wages – but everyone else here earns much less than the -20% wage differential implies.
Every year, Spokane residents fall further and further behind their counterparts in the rest of Washington and in the nation. This chart shows that Spokane per capita income was at 90% of the State’s level in the 1970s, but has declined to less than 80% of the State’s level by 2008 (the orange line). In 2010, average wages rose 2.7% nationwide, but rose only 2.3% in Spokane County. Stated another way, average wages rose 17% faster everywhere else while and Spokane residents’ income fell relative to everyone else.
The next chart highlights the wage differential for those working in higher skilled jobs in Spokane. Education and health care, which are shown, are similar to King County. (Government wage data was not available for this specific comparison). As we move to the right into higher skilled jobs like manufacturing, finance and engineering, the wage differentials are enormous. Spokane will never attract a national or world class high skilled workforce when wages in Spokane are up to 50% less than across the state. Which is why the State and local power brokers have identified Spokane as the low wage, low skilled industry cluster for the state.
Tons more data after the break …
August 16, 2011 Leave a comment
A sample of job categories was selected from the Workforce Explorer web site for Industry Trends. A few were dropped out because the job category did not exist in both counties.
| Occupation | Spokane | King County | Spokane Pay |
| Public Schools/Education | |||
| Teacher | 33207 | 36051 | -8% |
| Elementary Teacher | 58227 | 55921 | 4% |
| Education administrator | 100703 | 102037 | -1% |
| Government workers | |||
| Firefighter | 61987 | 72591 | -15% |
| Police and Sheriff | 64560 | 72205 | -11% |
| Zoologists and wildlife biologists | 57261 | 62254 | -8% |
| Health Care | |||
| Pharmacist | 107792 | 95782 | 13% |
| Registered Nurse | 65735 | 77800 | -16% |
| Physician assistant | 88684 | 100508 | -12% |
| Dentist | 147660 | 159630 | -7% |
| Nursing aides | 24342 | 30917 | -21% |
| Private Sector Jobs | |||
| Science and Technology | |||
| Industrial engineer | 69391 | 83122 | -17% |
| Mechanical engineer | 62946 | 82890 | -24% |
| Software engineer, apps | 70504 | 94071 | -25% |
| Software engineer, systems | 74135 | 99318 | -25% |
| Computer programmer | 54288 | 95782 | -43% |
| Chemist | 50917 | 73321 | -31% |
| Chemical technician | 38653 | 35160 | 10% |
| Law & Business | |||
| Lawyer | 90215 | 118674 | -24% |
| Paralegal | 35344 | 53588 | -34% |
| Marketing manager | 108781 | 125807 | -14% |
| Sales manager | 82235 | 119374 | -31% |
| Advertising/promotions manager | 48198 | 101550 | -53% |
| Architect | 83145 | 72237 | 15% |
| Editors | 58218 | 61492 | -5% |
| Reporters and correspondents | 40346 | 54105 | -25% |
| Labor | |||
| Roofer | 35953 | 46263 | -22% |
| Truck Driver | 39584 | 43626 | -9% |
| Sheet metal worker | 35946 | 57792 | -38% |
| Cooks, all other | 23731 | 29322 | -19% |
| Retail sales | 21486 | 24151 | -11% |
| Bus and truck mechanic | 42489 | 51252 | -17% |
| Hairdresser, stylist, cosmetologist | 33459 | 32702 | 2% |
| Mobile heavy equip. mechanic | 41968 | 59303 | -29% |
Wage data from the State’s Workforce Explorer Industry Trends section.
Related articles
July 3, 2011 Leave a comment
Image via Wikipedia
Spokane’s future industry clusters:
Categories 1, 2 and 3 will account for 60+% of the local economy. Here’s the number of workers, per category, flipped from horizontal to vertical to present the relative size differences. Retirees and transfer payments are not shown in the chart but would be in the top 3.
Here is the impact of transfer payments. As you can see, transfer payments are a large component of the local economy. For more information on transfer payments please see “Trend of Transfer Payments into Spokane County“.
Data Data from washington.reaproject.org
Retirees
Previously, many people retired from Southern California and took their large real estate capital gains to low cost Spokane. That source of retirees is diminished due to the housing collapse and its return in the future is not predictable. This is an important driver for health care, housing and service sectors. Inbound migration may be at reduced levels for a long time.
Clusters
The State adopted an industrial clustering policy where the state selects the industry clusters to be supported in each region. The primary clusters for Spokane are health care, education, and trucking and warehouse operations. Manufacturing has been in a slow national decline for 30 years.
Health care is on a growth streak due to retirees, a doubling in individual use of medical services over the past 30 years, and more recently by expectations of “ObamaCare” leading to an expectation of increased demand for services primarily paid for by someone else.
Risks
The loss of retirees from Southern California produces risks to the area’s current strategy and may be why the 2011’s local economy continues to remain stuck well below 2007 levels. On the plus side, the nation’s overall large “baby boom” approaches retirement years. However, where they choose to settle in their retirement years will have a big impact – and some think relocating as part of retirement may be thing of the past, not of the future.
There is a risk that the health care act might not play out as expected. It is possible that court challenges may limit the growth in the health business sector.
There is a risk that shifting more money into health care services without addressing the exorbitant prices charged and excess consumer demand for health services paid for by other people means less money for the production side of the economy. This is not a sustainable path.
Spokane’s future is based on retirees and health care – but that future has risks. And a big risk is there is no plan B.
Low Wages Are By Design
Greater Spokane says our region’s primary competitive advantage is low wages and low land and housing costs (or stated another way, poverty). Per Greater Spokane, our region’s competitive advantage is low prices. And no one in power wants that to change.
Spokane will be the state’s low wage, low cost housing and low cost land destination. This appears to be by design.
Outside of the key clusters, wages and opportunities will be limited.
The substantial quantity of data collected on this web site, and reviews of all the economic plans going back to the 1980s show that the chronic low wages and limited opportunities are endemic to Spokane. Every one of the plans mentions these problems. These problems remain because not many people want to embrace change – low wages are a feature and are by design. The area is settling into a future as a comfortable government-funded enclave of government and health care workers, and retirees collecting benefits.
Everything on this website has been mentioned before, often many times, in prior economic studies about Spokane. What I present on this website is not my opinion but is backed by data and numerous studies. This view is shared by business leaders of the past, by various politicians, current and former academic administrators and many more. The data tell this story, not me.
Why?
See the recommendations links at the right of this page. Lots of bad decisions were made in the past.
Hiatus
It’s been an interesting experience to go from wondering why so many businesses disappeared to finding out what really happened. The answer was not at all what was expected.
Unfortunately, no one cares. It’s always been this way in Spokane. As a friend said to us in the 90s, “It’s just a big small town, only bigger.” So true. (Well, at least one other person gets it…)
And nothing will change.
This web site will now be updated primarily for major events or changes.
June 16, 2011 Leave a comment
This State House bill 2ESB 5764 – 2011-12 was passed and signed by the Governor. This bill abolishes the original Spokane Intercollegiate Research Technology Institute (SIRTI).
Under the bill, SIRTI will be replaced with a new state agency called “Innovate Washington”, which by law, will be required to work with public and private universities, industry and government to grow “the innovation-based economic sectors of the state and responding to the technology transfer needs of existing businesses in the state”.
Innovate Washington seems to have some leeway with regards to state’s top-down, centralized planning “industry cluster” model, although its goals are aligned with a “sector-focused economy”. With regards to education, “Priority shall be given to applicants that have an established education and training program serving the targeted industry and that have in their home district or region an industry cluster with the same targeted industry at its core.” What this means is that educational programs are primarily intended to be aligned with the local region’s, state-selected industry clusters.
The list of clusters selected by the state for Spokane varies from month to month, year to year, and so on. See Washington State’s Innovation Ecosystem, What Does This Mean for Spokane, Why Washington’s Top Down Industrial Clustering Policy Will Fail, Washington State Reinforces the Health Services Cluster, and Yet Another Set of Centrally Planned Clusters for Spokane. For practical purposes, your business needs to align with the State supported clusters.
The eastern office will be the current SIRTI office on the WSU-Spokane campus, and the western office will be at UW-Seattle. Each campus will have a designated representative on the Board, which will have 15 members, 8 of which should come from industry and the rest are WSU/UW or political appointees. This seems to address my previous comments that the Board structure of SIRTI was disconnected from their contemporary mission.
Regarding Spokane, specifically, we still need to create an innovation culture which is lacking here.
That’s all I have time to write now.
Past items on SIRTI
May 13, 2011 Leave a comment
via The World’s 26 Best Cities for Business, Life, and Innovation – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic. Nice article with discussion.
May 10, 2011 Leave a comment
Regionally, Boulder is #1, San Francisco #6, Seattle #7 and Salt Lake City #14 on the list of best start up accelerators.
April 21, 2011 Leave a comment
Arrrrrh! Go Pirates! Rogers cyberteam fourth at nationals – Spokesman.com – April 21, 2011.
April 1, 2011 Leave a comment
Further updates are going to be like these – Twitter-sized and infrequent.
March 23, 2011 Leave a comment
Some local agencies and organizations provide some data, and some times, information, on their web sites – but sometimes they practice “hide the decline”. We do not know if this is due to lack of resources, is inadvertent, is an “honest mistake”, is due to sloppiness or carelessness, incompetence or deliberate decision to hide something, or that my common sense interpretation of what I see is just weird. We don’t know.
But if you want to hide the decline, some of the examples may give you some ideas 🙂
These examples involve good to outstanding organizations who are usually doing good to outstanding work. These comments are intended as suggestions for improvement and should be taken that way. They may be embarrassing to a few people – I am sorry if that is the case. The goal is to show how improvements can be made to make these items better!
Spokane International Airport – Lots of Numbers
SIA is a fine airport and has done a lot very good things. But sharing data? Not where they need to be. I’ve covered this item already and am repeating this here in part to show what it took to get to the actual data and turn it into useful information.
The airport’s long term passenger load has been approximately flat since 1996. But you would not discover this unless you tortuously went through the tables of numbers they provide, but spread across many pages and many links. And you would definitely not know this because the historic data back to 1995 was well hidden on the web site. When you click on a link for the data for a single month, you see a URL like this: http://spokaneairports.net/Pass_stats/12-10ep.pdf
If you delete the filename at the end to leave http://spokaneairports.net/Pass_stats/
you obtain the full file directory of older data going back many years. While painstaking, each monthly report can be transcribed, by hand, into spreadsheet, and turned into a useful chart.
Hidden deep within this file directory is a document named historic.pdf that provides historic data. There is no clickable link on the airports web site to access this data. But the file becomes visible if you use the trick to truncate the URL as shown.
Regardless of the effort to get to the data, it should not be hidden. SIA should have charts up on their web site. Making it visible would help local leadership make informed decisions.
When this data was combined with a forecast chart in the airport’s master plan (issued in 2000), we saw that the forecast was wrong the year it was issued and deviated further and further away from reality every year since. The forecast part of the chart had to be interpolated from a chart printed in the master plan; the data was not available.
The airport management announced in the fall of 2010 that they would – ten years later – be updating their master plan with a revision expected in 2011.
By comparison, check out SeaTac Airport Statistics. The PDF reports at the top create some nice charts (would be better if they were visible on the web page) and data can be downloaded in .xls spreadsheet files. Here’s an example of how SeaTac makes their data accessible – I just opened their PDF report:
I tried to identify the money spent on infrastructure improvements at SIA over the past decade. That information is not obviously available on the SIA web site. I eventually found it in an EWU study on economic effects of the airport (about $190 million of improvements over the past 8 years). Historic and trend data on revenues and spending should be easily available to the public so we know how our fee and tax money is being spent. This applies to all local governments.
I think SIA is a fine airport – the new airport director and management will likely do a better job of sharing important information with stakeholders in the future.
Washington State University – Funny Press Releases
I am big supporter of WSU; we need more support for higher education in this state, not less. And I will discuss that further in Part 3 and Part 4.
With that in mind, I found the following example to be funny. The following text appeared in the 2010 press release on spring semester enrollment. Similar wording was used in 2009 and 2011. Can you spot the odd one out?
The university’s fastest-growing campus continues to be WSU Tri-Cities, which enrolled 1,508 students, an increase of 160 or 11.9 percent over last spring. Enrollment at WSU Vancouver is 2,892, up 105 students or 3.8 percent over spring 2009.
The Pullman and Spokane campuses, which are considered one campus for state enrollment reporting purposes, showed an overall increase of 1.3 percent or 265 students over spring 2009. The Pullman campus enrollment is 18,629 students and WSU Spokane has 1,311 enrolled for spring.
When the enrollment rose at branch campuses, the enrollment increase was highlighted. For WSU-Spokane, only an enrollment number is provided. That’s a data point – not information.
The omission of whether there was an increase or decrease made me laugh – this is a press release issue. The local media never noticed the decline in enrollment at WSU-Spokane.
WSU has an Institutional Research office that provides a lot – a TON of data – on enrollments including in downloadable .xls spreadsheet format. Charts would be nice but with easily accessible data, we can create our own charts. WSU (overall) and the IR group are doing a great job.
The chart above and below are produced by me from the enrollment data provided by WSU’s Office of Institutional Research.
It is hard to see but the blue line, which is Spokane’s enrollment, goes down. I created this chart and an accident of how I made the chart presents an interesting way to hide a decline – just cover it up with other lines on the chart! This is a common technique but blame me for this chart, not WSU!
To see the decline a bit better, here is a chart showing only the branch campus enrollments. The blue line and section represents WSU-Spokane.
WSU provides a lot of great data through their Institutional Research web site. It could be improved with more charts – but they are to be commended for providing the raw data. But the press release wording-that’s just funny!
The WSU-Spokane campus will be revisited in Part 4.
The News Media – Lacking Context
It would be helpful if local news would present trend charts showing how things have changed over time. Typically, they present the raw number someone put in the press release (like the above). Without seeing the historical trend in news reports, the story is just noise and not useful information that the reader can use for understanding.
For example, compare seeing today’s stock report with no knowledge of where the market has been yesterday, last month or during the past years. Which is more useful? A single stock price quote or a chart? Numbers in most news stories are just numbers and devoid of important context.
When I tracked down the companies that left the area or downsized, it was hard to find out how many employees the companies once had. When a company folded or moved out, and if the closure was even covered (we cover new business openings but sometimes miss closures) some news reported the loss of employees as of the last day. But most of these companies had been downsizing for a period of time. I saw one report that said when Agilent closed, it was the loss of 99 jobs. Really? The company had been downsizing from a high of at least 1,500 staff. Some old reports said that when contract workers, consultants, on-site vendors and others were included, the site in Liberty Lake might have had nearly 2,000 people total (SR news article quoting former Agilent Human Resource manager). Seeing the total loss in context – from between 1,500-2,000 workers is quite a bit different than reading about a loss of 99 workers (update: the SR, by the way, reported this with the full context). When Itronix closed, 380 workers were affected. But just before that, the company had 450 workers and may be even 520 said some old news reports.
Seeing the full context helps us understand the overall impact of a business that is growing, shrinking or closing.
With all the cutbacks at the local media, I assume they lack the time and resources to do the job that they really want to do (I think this is the main issue). The problem affects many stories. For example, reports about local and state budgets never show us past budget plans, actual spending or tax revenues or trends in those values. This is critical information needed for the reader to put the present situation into historical context and see what trends there might be in spending or taxes.
And then there’s the happy talk news – read the comments to this news story – especially the one by “Zelda” … see how leaving out the context creates a “fake but accurate” style of report.
Local Government – More Info Please!
Most local government agencies need to greatly improve their data reporting to the public. How has their spending changed over time? Their staff? Their revenue collection? What metrics do they collect to monitor their effectiveness? Do the metrics show improvements over time?
GreaterSpokane, Inc – Pick Cherries!
A time honored technique to minimize a decline is to just move the start or end points of your graph – delete the data you would rather others did not see.
In 2010, I looked at patent production per 100,000 population, which is a measure sometimes used to indicate a region’s innovation capability. GreaterSpokane, Inc (GSI), used the following table to show only a minor drop in local patent production:
The “trick” here was to set the start to 2004. In reality, the local patent production rate fell by -75% since the late 1990s. The chart above may have been due to insufficient research, an “honest mistake”, carelessness or that someone else handed them the chart and they just republished it. They may not have been picking cherries.
GSI’s job is to promote the region. Understandably their focus is promotion and to highlight the positive. However, as a means for understanding our local economy and planning purposes, GSI’s reports can be misleading as they focus on the positive and miss the negative.
GSI’s web site also has a lot of out of date information. They need to audit every page – and verify that every claim is still true or meaningful. For example, about 25% of their list of top local tech employers are either out of business, not actually tech companies or not local.
Various local web sites also have lists of “awards” or proclamations by magazines about life in Spokane – but most are undated. Tracking some of them down, some are old and no longer mean anything useful about today’s Spokane.
There are other examples but you get the idea.
As we will see in the next two examples, when we see sloppiness, it makes Spokane look dated, quaint and out of date. We can do a lot better than this!
Terabyte Triangle – Spokane is a High Tech Hot Spot!
This phrase “Spokane is a High Tech Hot Spot – Network World Magazine” appears on many local promotional web sites. Unfortunately, it is not what Network World actually said. What Network World actually said all the way back in 1998 was that “Spokane is not a high tech hot spot, but is warming up“.
Inaccurate claims such as that are sloppy or untruthful. Take your pick. Who knows where this phrasing first appeared – its on several local web sites and I suspect the claim developed a life of its own.
DowntownSpokane.org
This is a very useful web site with great information about downtown happenings. But like the above, some pages are hopelessly out of date.
We begin with, oh dear:
Then,
The “more miles of fiber per capita than any other city in the nation” is really, really old. No source has ever been provided for this old claim.
This is quote also has a life of its own across many local web sites. GSI quotes IEEE Today’s Engineer for the source of this, giving the claim a bit of authority. But some sleuthing around suggests that IEEE Today’s Engineer lifted the claim directly from a local promotional web site … nearly identical wording appears on other local web sites up to two years prior to the published story. That does not look good … And today, Spokane ranks #17 out of 19 cities in Washington for overall Internet access speed. In other words the above claim, if it was true once upon a time, is doubtfully true today. But what ever …
Going down the page, this claim is embarrassing:
Only 20? Hello? It’s 2011 and this may be a surprise but in many parts of the country, personal homes even have fiber optic connections today!
Except that General Dynamics (Itronix) is closed and gone, Vivato is closed and gone and Cyan and Telect have both shrunk their local presence considerably from their hey day. But other than that …
Always a nice supportive quote:
Except the quoted CEO was with a start up that is no longer in business. Nice quote, too bad its not quite relevant anymore.
Other pages (and here too) are dated and should be brought up to date. The above is just a small sampling of questionable data and claims seen on local “official” web sites.
Have you spotted a pattern in promotional web sites? They are often old and out of date and say things that are no longer true. Collectively it reflects badly on Spokane. Attention to detail? Not here. Inaccuracies and incorrect claims do not help promote the area at all.
I am sorry these observations appear embarrassing to some local groups. Whether I write about them here or not they are out there for the world to see and they are embarrassing. Let’s pay attention to details and fix them and make these web sites even better!
Recommendation 2: Part 2
For what ever reason – honest mistakes, laziness, sloppiness, lack of attention to detail or perhaps “hiding the decline”, the sort of things described above – and those are only a partial list – suggest “good enough” is common here. Parts 3 and 4 will address why good enough is not good enough – we need to aim high and seek excellence.
On a brighter note – Good ideas come from other good ideas!
Good ideas come from analyzing, synthesizing and understanding what we see around us. Getting an accurate picture of the situation in Spokane and at local institutions will help all of us know where we are and help us to make better decisions to get to where we want to go!
Local agencies need to be producing useful information, not just data points (see Part 1).
Local agencies and organizations need to making their useful information readily accessible to everyone (Part 2).
Local agencies and organizations need to provide accurate information.
The more accurate data and useful information that all of us see, the better the quality of our decision making!
The Part 2 recommendation is then:
Part 3 reviews the low wage problem and hypothesizes that we’ve been investing in pouring concrete for far too long. For the 21st century we need to invest in people and ideas, not more concrete.
Part 4 follows up with more on our concrete obsession, but adds that we seem to aim low instead of aiming high.
March 17, 2011 Leave a comment
The State’s revenue forecast (taxes and fees collected) for 2011-2013 has fallen by $698 M + $80 M. The Seattle Times suggests the two-year budget short fall could exceed $5 Billion. (Corrected: I previously omitted the +$80M).
You can read the report – its available here.
A reason for the revenue downturn is perhaps captured in these two charts from the report:
Washington’s Software technology sector has slowed considerably with annual employment growth rates forecast to reach 5% in 2012, down from 10% in recent years and 20% at the peak of the dot com boom and bust:
There are a great many interesting charts in the linked document highlighting many growth areas such as exports.
March 14, 2011 6 Comments
I previously documented what happened to a large number of high tech and manufacturing firms that left Spokane during the past decade, as well as during just the past two to three years in “Major manufacturing and high tech employers close, leave Spokane” which provides a long list of firms that closed or downsized.
The Spokesman-Review today looks at what happened to some of the workers who used to be with Itronix (closed) and Agilent (closed) with anecdotal stories. See Two years later, Spokane’s laid-off tech workers regroup – Spokesman.com – March 13, 2011.
Be sure to read the comments that readers have added to that story. Readers are saying the same things reflected in the data collected on this web site.
Some engineers have retired. Some have moved outside the area. Some found telecommuting work elsewhere. Some switched to other fields, with lower incomes. Some are involved in start ups here. Some have returned to school. Many suggest they would have moved elsewhere but were stuck due to family obligations or because of difficulties selling their home.
From a local economy standpoint, the start ups that may have been spun out of these losses are the best opportunity to translate the tech down slide into a longer term upside. I thought this was a positive story but then I read their “related” story … ugh.
Related
The SR has a companion article “Area companies gained tech skills” that can only be described as Orwellian BS. This revisionist article, based on anecdotes, implies we’ve only lost around 500 tech jobs. Which is misleading by setting the start of the downsizing to just a year or two ago – and goes against other SR reports that peg total losses at about 20,000 during the decade. But from that false premise they can then lead to a positive outcome.
They quote a local economist saying he’s “seen data” (secret data?) that shows tech companies “adding plenty of jobs in the past 12 months”. Doesn’t show up in the WorkForceExplorerc.com data which has been updated through January 2011 by the Washington State Employment Security Department. Tech jobs are likely to show up in the big category of Information (software is a tiny subset) and Professional and Business Services (again, a subset) or in Manufacturing. Let’s take a look at the charts through January 2011:
The news story is one of the most misleading pieces of reporting I have seen in the Spokesman-Review in quite a while. Which is why I try to always link to the original data. I do not make up the data. Anecdotal stories can be helpful to understand the narrative but they usually need to agree with the data.
A commenter claims that the Washington State data is simply all wrong. But in addition to the above industry sector charts, total jobs remain way down since 2007. I am sorry that the data is ugly.
A future post will discuss the common practice of “hide the decline” with examples and naming the organizations that do it. But part 1 will highlight some organizations that are honest and go out of the way to make their data accessible and presentable for the public. They are to be commended.
March 6, 2011 1 Comment
Consider Amazon’s online jobs board: It lists about 1,900 openings in Seattle, at least twice as many as a year ago. More than 900 call for techies.
via Business & Technology | Amazon.com on a hiring spree | Seattle Times Newspaper.
February 20, 2011 3 Comments
Jason, an attorney with a degree in electrical engineering, lost his job with a Spokane patent law firm last May. Their income tumbled from a salary of $145,000 a year to $585 a week in unemployment.
via Homeowners burdened by bureaucracy when trying to get out – Spokesman.com – Feb. 20, 2011.
Previous coverage of this topic: Patent production in Spokane has dropped by a staggering 75% since 1998.
Patents are a proxy for the level of science and technology innovation that a region is capable of producing.
This anecdote also illustrates the low demand for highly skilled, highly educated workers in Spokane.
Political Comment
The collapse of the Spokane economy ought to be at the top of the list of what local politicians and cheerleaders discuss publicly. It’s not. Except for frequent calls for new taxes and tax hikes – the consequence of a failed economy – politicians refuse to discuss the problems facing Spokane. Local politicians either fail to understand this situation, fail to lead or have chosen not to lead on this critical issue. Read more of this post
February 17, 2011 Leave a comment
Taxes on cellular phone service in the state of Washington run 23%, or almost 3x higher than the sales tax. This places Washington cellular phone service taxes as the 2nd highest in the nation.
February 12, 2011 Leave a comment
If Richard Florida’s thesis is correct (it might not be correct, unfortunately but Florida insists it is correct, of course), then we need to be doing quite a few things differently in the Spokane region:
Five key trends illustrate how this new phase of capitalism, which is based fundamentally on ideas, is shifting the nature of economic competitiveness:
- First, economic competitiveness now turns less on access to natural resources or giant factories and much more on harnessing human creativity—from the R&D lab and design center to the factory floor.
- Second, place is supplanting the industrial corporation as the key economic and social organizing unit of capitalism. Density, the clustering of creative people—in cities, regions, and neighborhoods—provides a key spur to innovation and competitiveness.
- Third, the rise of a new geographic unit – the mega-region – is supplanting both the nation-state and the metropolitan areas of cities and suburbs as the natural economic unit. The world’s 40 largest mega-regions places like Europe’s Amsterdam-Brussels-Antwerp, America’s New York-Washington-Boston Corridor, Asia’s Shanghai and Beijing axis, and India’s Mumbai-Poona and Bangalore-Madras corridor—produce two-thirds of the world’s economic output and nine in ten of its innovations, while housing less than 18 percent of its population.
- Fourth, innovation, competitiveness and rising living standards now require an increased and accelerated velocity for moving goods, people and ideas.
- Fifth, we are now seeing the rise of new environments for living and working which leverage these trends – harnessing and tapping the creativity of the largest number of workers, bringing people together in dense and flexible and arrangements, and accelerating the velocity of people and their exchanges. These experiments are in their infancy, but point the way to a more prosperous future.
Update 2017: Richard Florida mostly admits he’s theories have been all wrong.
Spokane has been becoming more isolated – the telecommuting meme of a few years ago seems to have faded in favor of face-to-face. Fewer non-stop cities served by the airport. Fewer daily flights. More investment in rail infrastructure – on the other side of the state. Ick.
What can or should we do to address this?
February 3, 2011 Leave a comment
RICHLAND, Wash. – While much of the nation has undergone a severe recession, the Tri-Cities has continued to prosper, driven largely by a climate friendly to innovation, federal and private funding sources seeking science and technology solutions, and by a growing number of locally-based technology firms and entrepreneurs.
According to a study released today at the Tri-Cities Regional Economic Outlook forum in Kennewick, the Tri-Cities has been successful in founding and sustaining technology based companies, attracting and retaining educated and skilled technical workers, and stacks up well compared to many other metropolitan areas in the Northwest. However, the study also notes there is a shortage of local equity capital to invest in starting and expanding high tech businesses in the area.
via Technology, innovation driving Tri-Cities metro area growth | R&D Mag.
They note that the “high tech” software and Internet industry of Western Washington is largely not present in the Tri-Cities – instead, its focused more on physics, chemical engineering, materials science and so on.
Spokane Economic And Demographic Data 
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