You take the high road and we’ll take the low road

Sullivan County is scarcely alone in its dogged attempts to find some means to provide more and better-paying jobs for its residents. An increasingly competitive global environment has exerted nationwide influence over even small rural economies. Both the manufacturing jobs that have been rupturing for decades and the knowledge-intensive hi-tech jobs that kept the U.S. afloat during the nineties are bleeding away to overseas locales at an accelerating rate.

This is not the first time that this country has faced such a crisis. The United States has a history of breaking new economic ground in sectors such as heavy manufacturing or electronics, seeing that economic sector migrate abroad to less developed countries with lower wages, and then recovering by breaking more new ground on yet another economic frontier.

We are once again in such a crisis period, and it has brought us to a crossroads. How do we provide jobs for our workers?

On the one hand, we can go down the road that depends on bricks-and-mortar locations. They can’t be outsourced and so have a higher level of security in the global marketplace. Unfortunately, they tend to be jobs in lower-paying areas like retail, requiring comparatively little skill and providing poor benefits.

Bill Scranton III delineated another road in his keynote address last week at the Northeast Pennsylvania Alliance’s regional economic forum in Wilkes-Barre, PA. “This is a knowledge-driven economy,” he said, “which means good jobs depend on intellectual capital.” He went on to mention areas such as nano- and bio-technology, which remain globally in the forefront of development, and already have a foothold in northeastern Pennsylvania.

The first road is the road to economic stagnation; a capitulation to the idea that as developing countries take over our high-tech jobs, we must be relegated to an economic backwater, satisfied with dead-end, low-level employment. The second is the only hope of long-term strength. It is distressing, in this context, to note that by choosing casinos as a solution to our job-market problems, we are choosing the low, not the high road.

A 1998 National Gambling Impact Commission Study found “no change in overall per capita income” after the introduction of casinos. It found that casinos siphoned income from local businesses; writing of Atlantic City, “in 1978 there were 311 taverns and restaurants in Atlantic City. Nineteen years later, only 66 remained, despite the promise that gaming would be good for the city’s own.” The average salary reported for tribal casinos in 1998 was about 56 percent of the average per-job earnings for that year as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. And for those who are hoping that an increase in property values will make up for any shortcomings in job quality: the study found that although commercial property values rose in the wake of casino development, residential values either stayed the same or actually fell.

What we have here, in short, is yet another low-level, low-paying, retail-type industry that may take care of short-term needs but leaves us with no future.

It’s true that simply to say “no” to casino development would not be a solution. The job problem is real, and it must be actively addressed. Scranton in his speech mentioned a variety of educational resources that Northeastern Pennsylvania has and we do not: Sullivan County Community College, though doing a stalwart job collaborating on such efforts as the ATTAIN lab as mentioned in a previous TRR editorial, cannot by itself provide the kind of training opportunities that would make this a natural destination for businesses looking for a highly-educated workforce.

But one more concept Scranton referred to is “regionalism,” the importance of adjacent localities cooperating to produce areas of economic opportunity. “One county’s gain is everyone’s gain,” he said. “ If we do not think this way, we will fail.”

If Sullivan County doesn’t have the resources to fully develop our intellectual capital ourselves, perhaps we need to start looking at how we can collaborate with our neighbors. The one thing that’s clear is that, unless we shift our sights higher than bare survival and find a way to participate in the “knowledge-driven” economy, we will drift into an economic backwater from which we are unlikely ever to emerge.

Dr. Punnybone

Too Close to Call