Calling the soccer mom squad…

An alert reader asked if my column yesterday on unemployment implied that the Commonwealth can’t produce good home grown managers. Of course it can; we’ve got a solid list of local captains of industry who have founded flourishing businesses here.

But closing the door to outside management, either purposefully or inadvertently, also closes a door to a benefit of U.S. affiliation. Americans are a geographically fluid bunch, and will go where the best opportunities are. The Commonwealth held the promise of being on the geographic menu for some of Uncle Sam’s managers and professionals, but most would agree that the CNMI isn’t a hospitable venue for their efforts.

The CNMI is an interesting place for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is our position astride the widening gulf between the rising economies and sinking ones. The Pacific island economies aren’t exactly considered healthy, and many are plunging head long into abject poverty.

And world economies as a whole look mighty polarized. The high-tech haves, the ones with the intellectual and industrial know-how, are enjoying solid prosperity. Most everyone else is sort of squatting in the economic mud, watching the world go by. Hey, there are over six billion people out there, and the brute labor most have to offer the world isn’t worth much of anything, and in some cases is so valueless it won’t even support the caloric energy needed to produce the labor.

That’s not a venue I’d care to compete in. It’s not a venue I even care to witness. I’ve been in places of the world where people live and breed like flies, and they always–always–seem to blame the world’s rich economies for their plight. How does that contorted logic work? Did a squad of soccer moms from Rochester and a company of stock brokers from Chicago all go on secret raiding parties to the world’s dank ghettos and force the inhabitants to breed at gunpoint? Was this some kind of CIA plot?

Any economist can tell you that if you add labor to an unproductive economy by population growth, the value of that labor, on average, will go down. So, in some places, you’ve got more and more people getting poorer and poorer. That ain’t my fault, and it’s not yours, either.

But I guess the chief symptom of folly is the fact that those who commit it always blame someone else for the results.

The fundamental understanding of what makes economies productive doesn’t require a lot of high falutin’ book work; some people understand it innately. A few of the strongest voices about such matters came from people with no formal schooling in the field; W. Clement Stone, Harry Browne, and Robert Ringer, just to name a few authors who come to mind.

But gut level instinct, by and large, won’t steer an economy into richer waters. An economy, if it is going to be rich, either needs to be sitting on a pile of oil (we’re not, illegal dumping notwithstanding) or have the ability to out manage, out think, and out compete its rivals. Other economies are competing for our tourists. Other nations are competing to produce garments. Some political forces in the U.S. aren’t exactly enthralled with us. The suitcase squad continues to flee, and isn’t exactly painting a rosy picture of the CNMI. And yet…and yet…we don’t seem to get the picture here.

Maybe we’ll have to call that elite squad of soccer moms after all, and have them kick some sense into us.