If you peruse the BBC web site as I do on a regular basis, you'll often find stories about the U.S. that the media here don't seem to find headline worthy. Sometimes you have to wonder why; you'd think a story about New York City political leaders giving Wall Street the fish eye like a junkie rethinking his/her relationship with a dealer would get a little attention at least....
Before the financial crash, says Mr Pinsky [president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation], 34% of the city's private payroll depended on Wall Street - and, needing to diversify, the city went in search of a "game changer".
"We spoke to every person we could think of - academics, entrepreneurs, community groups, business leaders, and we asked the same basic question: 'If there was one thing you could change about the city's economy, what would it be?'
"There was one consistent message. If you look around the world at the centres of innovation, what you see at their core is a critical mass of engineering and applied sciences, research and development and talent creation."
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
Looking Beyond Wall Street for the Future
Roosevelt Island in the East River is the site of a new campus, on a piece of land with a checkered history. Just a short distance from the United Nations on the east side of Manhattan and the site of prisons, hospitals, and asylums over the years, the island is going to be the center of a high tech array of buildings, including a massive solar power installation. (The BBC link has a short video which shows off the island and the plans for the campus.)
The origins of this project go back to the financial crash of 2008, when the city authorities looked nervously at an economy over-reliant on finance and banking.
The new digital giants, such as Google and Facebook, were coming out of technology clusters around Stanford University in Silicon Valley and Harvard and MIT in the Boston area.
New York, reluctant to miss out on the party, decided it had to compete - and the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, invited universities across the world to take part in a competition to build a new science campus.
The winner was Cornell, in partnership with the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. And the first classes are set to begin this autumn.
It is already proving to be something of a tech brand-fest. While the Roosevelt Island campus is being constructed, the university is going to be housed by Google in Manhattan, free of charge until 2017.
Assets on the Ground, Real Job Creation
Cornell University's partnership in this project ties in with its ongoing presence in New York City. Scientific American took a look at the project back in January.
This is a rather interesting public-prvate partnership. It's an ambitious effort and having it go ahead in the current economic climate is audacious to say the least. It's a rare example of long term thinking in the public policy arena. It doesn't hurt that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been promoting it heavily. (Not that Bloomberg isn't guilty of some really egregious municipal folly.)
The BBC article compares it to the historic investment by the city in the Erie Canal, which made it the dominant port on the East Coast and also had much to do with the eventual rise of Wall Street ironically enough. The current investment is expected to have some direct impacts on the city.
Since the mid-1960s three quarters of the city's jobs in manufacturing industries, including many middle-income jobs, have disappeared.
There is an expectation that the Roosevelt Island campus will create 8,000 permanent jobs - and a further 600 new companies and 30,000 jobs in associated spin-offs and support services.
Mr Pinsky says the campuses will be "job engines" - delivering employment paying above-average wages.
Tech Valley - The Empire State Strikes Back!
Continue north up the Hudson, and you'll find the same thinking is at work all the way to the Canadian border. New York State is attempting to leverage its institutions of higher education in partnership with technology firms to stimulate innovation, job creation, and the reinvention of its industrial base, while also using its natural heritage of the Hudson - Mohawk rivers, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks to help lure talent to the area. There's an all-purpose tag that's been developed to market the region: Tech Valley.
One of the centerpieces of the effort, drawing national attention, is the College of Nanoscale Science & Engineering, of SUNY Albany. The city of Albany is doing what it can to capitalize on the developments taking place around the campus. Add in the long standing efforts of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute over in Troy, the numerous other schools in the area, and contributions from state government agencies like the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health, and the collective mass of public, private, and academic resources is notable. It's already attracting international players.
Caveats, Cautions, and Comparisons
As always, there are questions to consider. To what extent is the use of public funds in this effort a subsidy/bribe for the benefit of private interests? Are the taxpayers going to get an adequate return for this investment? How affordable are those programs going to be for the students they're intended to serve, and how viable will their career prospects be in the current economy and the longer term? Are they going to be educated in the classical sense, or just highly-skilled techno-serfs? How committed are the business and industrial partners to these efforts? How easily can they be lured away by other regions competing to attract them? With so many parties coming together to bring this off, who ultimately has 'ownership' of the resulting liabilities and gains?
Technology parks are not a panacea for all economic problems; there are plenty of other things that need attention. (Socio-economic mobility, wealth inequality, sustainability, etc.) They're also 'trendy' in that a lot of regions around the world are trying to put together their own which leads to over-competition. But - they're a step beyond the knee-jerk reaction of building industrial parks, casinos and convention centers for 'economic engines'.
What's happening in New York is in sharp contrast to other regions of the country. California's vaunted university system is being strangled by the state's ongoing fiscal insanity, thanks to Prop 13 and the choke hold conservatives have on budgeting/taxation in the state legislature. Conservatives are attacking universities as hotbeds of liberalism, and attempting to destroy public schooling with vouchers, charter schools, profitization, and ideology-based curriculums. Universities are increasingly being corporatized by business interests with no interest in academic integrity; just the view that "everything should be run like a business." It's in sharp contrast to an era when it was once possible to find Rockefeller Republicans who had a vision of building for the future and regard for the public interest.
There is this about Silicon Island and Tech Valley. They represent long term thinking that includes the benefit of the overall public as a consideration, an increasingly rare item in today's political-economic climate. It's in sharp contrast to the kind of thinking found among the conservative extremists dominating the Republican party these days. They don't give a damn about the future as long as they can cement their grip on power and set their ideology in stone on the back of the rest of the country forever.
That difference is why New York and the other blue states are largely net contributors to the economy of America, while so many Red States are economic parasites that would descend into blatant third world levels of inequality without massive transfers of wealth from the rest of the country. It's about the future, and having one, for more than just the privileged and lucky few. They call that socialism now - once it was the American Way. We need to get back there.