After multiple years of being the outlier of business competitiveness rankings when it came to Massachusetts, CNBC finally came in line with other rankings. It finally showed, what most business people understand, Massachusetts is not that friendly of a place to do business. If you are Greg Bialecki, the Secretary of the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development and Governor Deval Patrick that poses a problem, a big problem. Not just for the Commonwealth, but for Barack Obama's reelection chances.
You may remember that this spring the wheels came off the stronger-faster mantra of the Patrick administration, when it comes to the Commonwealth's economy. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that Massachsuetts ranked near the bottom of states, not the top in job creation. When that happened Bialecki and Patrick blamed the BLS.
But when faced with this new CNBC data, Bialecki called CNBC to complain about their methodology. The Boston Herald has the story.
Greg Bialecki's office called the cable news outlet yesterday aghast at the 2012 ranking of "America's Top States for Business," wherein Massachusetts plunged - inexplicably - from sixth to 28th.
"We're pretty much doing the same things we were doing compared to last year," Bialecki said. "There's not any new laws or regulations that have changed the business climate here in Massachusetts."
Brad Jones finds the situation frustrating to say the least.
d that's precisely the problem, House Minority Leader Brad Jones postulated yesterday. "I think part of it is the fact that other states have been aggressively doing things to make themselves more attractive," the North Reading Republican said. "I think in Massachusetts the approach is, 'if we stand still we're good.' "
The Herald Article goes on to point out that Massachusetts ranks high in the number of people with advanced degrees, that somehow this is going to mean we are more competitive. But as we have discussed here before, Andrew Sum of Northeastern University has conclusively proven that there is no correlation between educational attainment and job growth.
We also ranked all 50 states in terms of their payroll employment and household employment growth rates from 2000-2010. None of the 10 states with the largest share of workers with an associate's or higher degree made the top 10 list when ranked on payroll employment growth (Table 3-8). Only two of these states with the largest share of college-educated workers made the top 20 in payroll job growth rates. Two of them actually fell into the bottom 10 states ranked by payroll employment growth. The best-educated states were more likely to fall in the bottom 10 on payroll employment growth than in the top 10, implying a very weak or no statistical relationship between educational attainment and payroll job growth. (page 68-69)
This is not a metric taht the Patrick administration should have been basing anything on, yet it forms the core of their argument. Perhaps CNBC read Sum's work and took that into account.
When the phone doesn't ring on the top floor of Ashburton it's CNBC calling.
