Posts Tagged ‘economy’
The “Real Time Economics” blog in the Wall Street Journal has an interesting post matching state voting preferences (determined by current polls) to changes in home prices, changes in personal income, and the unemployment rate.
You can do a quick sort online, and a few points jump out right away…
- The six states with the lowest unemployment rate are all strongly Republican. Four of the six with the highest rate are voting Democratic.
- 10 of the 12 with the greatest gain in income are going Republican, while 10 of the 12 with the lowest income gain are voting Democratic.
- The home appreciation category is really interesting. 18 of the 20 states with the greatest losses in home prices are going Democratic. 16 of the 20 states that best maintained their home’s values are leaning Republican.
It’s tempting to look at that last category and translate the pain felt by homeowners into a desire for a new political ideology. Not so fast. The vast majority of the states (in those batches of 20) are voting the same as they did in 2004, so really it was a case of the blue states getting hit the worst by the recent housing downturn.
Using their data, I converted the polling data to a linear scale, and did some simple correlation analysis. The coefficient of correlation was roughly 25 percent for both the categories of unemployment rate and change in personal income. It rose to 45 percent for the home price change category.
I thought it might be interesting to look at the difference between states’ voting from 2004 to 2008 and created a category for the ‘delta.’ I was hoping for some big insight, but the results were disappointing. The correlation coefficients were actually less, so the big takeaway might be that there is a lot of inertia. Changes in economic conditions may take longer to make a large impact.
My spreadsheet is here for your own analysis.
Of course, the United States’ political landscape is narrowly divided into Red and Blue states, so even a small shift in voter sentiment is translated into a sea change.
Best, Bert
These challenging economic times present both opportunities and potential pitfalls for corporate workplace management. The opportunities come from reduced client or customer demands. When a business is growing rapidly or a customer base is expanding quickly, there is little time to focus on whether the workplace is appropriate for the tasks being done or as efficient as it could be.
While slower times mean reduced revenue, they also can offer a time to consolidate gains and think about the future. Writing in Workplace Magazine, Naseem Javed argues that this is the perfect time for companies to focus more on innovation (generally, not necessarily in the workplace).
Normally, in busy, booming days, Canadian businesses along with senior executives become so convinced of success that they begin to forget about real innovation. The best ideas of innovation come through depressive, recessionary cycles. What better times to re-engineer, redesign and rethink the entire business processes, overall strategies and most importantly the prime business model itself?
Although Javed is not referring to workplaces specifically, his observations apply. This is a time when shifting some employees from their regular tasks to designing a better workplace is not as likely to affect the short-term bottom line.
A workplace aligned with employee and corporate needs will pay dividends long term. As workplace specialists Kevin O’Donnell and Wolgang Wagener of Cisco write in the introduction of their book:
A company’s work environment is one of the largest determinants of culture and worker productivity. By better aligning the work environment with the needs of the worker, space is reduced while productivity is improved.
Although the economic slowdown may temporarily ease the talent shortage for some companies or in certain cities, only the short-sighted ones will believe this is a sustainable new reality. Demographics shift irrespective of economics. And the knowledge economy - that thrives with a creative, collaborative, and innovative workplace - will not disappear.
As the world emerges from this economic slowdown - whether in six, 12, or 24 months - those companies with the environments best suited to make their employees as productive as possible will benefit disproportionately. Not only will their people be more productive than competitors, but they will also be well placed to attract talent from the competition who have not aligned the workplace to their employees’ needs.
While Obama and McCain debate the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown, the role of arts and culture funding has taken center stage in the current Canadian contest spurred by recent federal cuts in arts and culture spending. Others have covered what’s at stake in this debate, but let me simply weigh in with what our ongoing research at the Prosperity Institute tells about the role of arts and culture in the economy.
Our most recent research on both Canada and the United States breaks down the economy into its core occupational sectors - finance, management, technology, arts and culture, health. and education - and attempts to guage the effects of each on regional income. In both the U.S. and Canada, finance, management, and technology have a considerable direct effect on income. And both education and health - which are essential for a high-functioning society - have little if any effect on regional income. They’re necessities or public goods, but they don’t drive regional economic well-being. Arts and culture, however, are very important. In the U.S., arts and culture occupations have a significant effect on regional income, about as strong as finance and management and stronger than science technology. In Canada, arts and culture have a less direct impact on income, but a potent impact on high-technology firms, stronger in fact than the impact of science and technology occupations on those firms.