THE PIONEER BLOG

Jim Stergios

Krugman, Comfy Pillows and Rick Perry

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Paul Krugman, economist polemicist extraordinaire, took out a very lightweight hammer and cushy tongs on Rick Perry’s job creation claims: Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular. And just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a low cost of living. In particular, there’s a good case to be made that zoning policies in many states unnecessarily restrict the supply of housing, and […]

Jim Stergios

Science for Consumers

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The Massachusetts department of education (DESE) is under way with a revision to the state’s science standards. Context here is that we have had strong science standards in place since 2006, which served as the basis for students preparing for 2010—the year in which the new MCAS Science test became a graduation requirement. There’s nothing wrong with a review—the state is supposed to update its standards every few years, and to improve them. I wish as it did, the state would also inch up the passing grade for the MCAS—deliberately but so that over a five-year window, the passing grade was more like 230 than 220. It would be more meaningful. And the kids can do it. But it’s time […]

Joshua Archambault

Massachusetts is 1st in the Nation on Health Care Cost!

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However, this gold medal is one we wish we could return. Kaiser Family Foundation released a report this week that documents the wide ranging differences in health insurance premiums across the country. Massachusetts led the pack with an average individual insurance premium topping $437 per person per month. This is almost double the national average. It should be noted that this report does acknowledge the many factors that lead to high insurance costs, such as  cost of living, patient cost-sharing, generosity of benefits, the base cost of care, age-based demographics, and cost control efforts. As a result, most of the Northeast is considered expensive. From a long term health policy perspective, the report will provide a baseline to measure changes […]

Steve Poftak

Thinking Snow? SnowCOP Technology

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What? You aren’t thinking about snow right now? Well, while you swelter, city workers are busy fine-tuning their snow removal technology. Yes, you read that right– Technology. If you think ‘snow removal technology’ just means plows and salt trucks, then meet SnowCOP, Boston’s snow removal data system. Each plow driver, public and private, carries a GPS-enabled phone which feeds data in Boston’s SnowCOP. The data is plotted onto a map of the city, which is broken down into 200 snow zones. The map shows the current location of the vehicles, as well as color coding each street to show whether it has been plowed in the last hour, two hours or longer. This lets Public Works Department (“PWD”) managers know […]

Jim Stergios

False Alarm on Science

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In a nicely timed alarm, the state’s department of education is noting that kids aren’t learning science as well as they are learning reading and math. You can never rest on your laurels, but this strikes me as alarmism of the worst kind. An article in the MetroWest Daily News notes, On the 2010 MCAS, for example, 36 percent of 10th graders in the state scored below proficient on the science and technology exam, compared to only 24 percent on the math and 22 percent on English. The problem is that in the next breath, MWD’s Scott O’Connell suggests that those results on the first science MCAS that counts as a graduation requirement constitutes a crisis: Globally, American students are […]

Jim Stergios

Do exam schools add value?

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Historically, many of Massachusetts’ political and economic leaders have built their success on the education received at the city’s historic exam schools—Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and the John D. O’Bryant High School of Mathematics and Science, which in total enroll about 5,300 grade 7-12 students. They have received accolades from the usual sources of school rankings, and led other states to follow our example, with New York City building on its own historic grade 9-12 exam schools (Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School) by establishing in 2002, the High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College, the High School of American Studies at Lehman College, and Queens High School […]

Steve Poftak

Start-Ups Needed. Desperately.

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Massachusetts has had some good short term news, creating jobs at a faster clip than the rest of the country. (Although, given the weak manufacturing data and general market weakness, I’d be concerned about popping the corks prematurely.) But our state has a long-term problem. Massachusetts takes a long time to recover from recessions — It also took us almost two and a half times as long as the rest of the country to regain the jobs we lost in the ’90-’91 recession. We never fully recovered from the 2001 recession, while the rest of the country created millions of jobs before the 2007 recession hit. In the diagram below, you can see that the national number of jobs (the […]

Steve Poftak

Red/Blue Connector? Gone.

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Last week, MassDOT did the right thing – effectively ending the Red/Blue Connector project. The project had some logic to it – the Blue Line ends abruptly at the Bowdoin Street station right near City Hall Plaza and the Connector would have extended it to the Charles/MGH Red Line station, connecting the two lines directly while giving Blue Line riders access to MGH and Red Line riders a single transfer trip to the Airport. The state committed to the project in a different time and place. The Big Dig was only supposed to cost a few billion dollars, most of that Federal money, so committing ourselves to some big transit projects must have seemed logical. The current reality is much […]

Steve Poftak

Pay No Mind to the Thieves from NH

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How do we create jobs? If you read media accounts, you’d think it was luring companies to relocate from other states. And politicians feed that beast, issuing press releases every time a company relocates (scroll through the press releases from the Mass Life Sciences Center to see multiple examples). A few weeks back, the Globe had an entertaining piece on the “thief” sent by the New Hampshire to talk Massachusetts employers into moving over the border. (And New Hampshire seemed pleased with the attention, particularly to their low cost business climate.) Guess what? It’s all relatively meaningless. Of course the loss or gain of any jobs is important, but in the big picture, firms relocating in and out of Massachusetts […]

Steve Poftak

The MBTA Gets One Right

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It has almost become blood sport in these parts to pick on the MBTA. I’m not sure if its the ability to gripe in real time through social media, the hyperavailability of the MBTA’s new General Manager Rich Davey, or the crushing maintenance backlog hobbling their operations. Probably a combination of all three. But they are doing some thing right, really right. If you are a regular rider and not using any of their tracking apps, you should give it a try. These apps turn the unknown of taking the T (how long do I have to wait for the next bus? When is the next train arriving?) and turns it into a known. You can now track 3 of […]

Joshua Archambault

Do you feel safer in a hospital or on an airplane?

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The World Health Organization released a report recently that led with the headline that you are more likely to die from a medical error than from flying in an airplane. Reuters take on the report: While being treated at a hospital, there is a one in 10 chance a patient will experience a medical error and a one in 300 chance that a patient will die because of the error. Meanwhile, the risk of dying in an airplane crash is about one in 10 million… Each year in the United States, 1.7 million infections are acquired in hospital, leading to 100,000 deaths, a far higher rate than in Europe where 4.5 million infections cause 37,000 deaths, according to WHO. More […]

Steve Poftak

The New Normal: Job Creation In Massachusetts

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Trying to figure out the jobs picture in Massachusetts is a challenging task these days. There’s a steady drip-drip-drip of bad news – exemplified by State Street’s announcement this week that 850 jobs are leaving Massachusetts. At the same time, the most recent monthly jobs announcement for the state shows an increase of 10,300 private sector jobs over last month, (but the unemployment rate remains unchanged at 7.6%, reflecting a change in the denominator countering the effect of the increase). The job market in Massachusetts has been surprisingly dynamic for years, with roughly 17% of total jobs being created or destroyed in a given year (regardless of economic conditions). Massachusetts has had success creating lots of firms, but there are […]

Steve Poftak

The Relentless Quest for Expansion

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Some familiar faces are once again calling for new revenues for our state transportation system(on SHNS, sub req’d.). Its been well-documented that the system is woefully underfunded and we’ll need new revenues sooner or later. But I can’t join in with the chorus right now. First, I don’t think the state is doing a good enough job telling us what they are doing with their money and if its making a difference (see previous post). Second, I’m highly skeptical that new revenues would be spent to remedy the massive maintenance backlog on our infrastructure before another dollar gets spent on expansion. Many of these same voices calling for new revenues and decrying the lack of maintenance were also the ones […]

Steve Poftak

Meet the Pillars of the Clean Economy

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Yep, your friendly MBTA bus driver and local garbage collector represent the two largest sectors of the “clean economy” according to a new report. The report, by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the prestigious Brookings Institution, totals up the employment of the “clean economy” sector. And, to be fair, is pretty upfront about its methodology and reasoning. What concerns me is that the incredibly broad contours of the ‘clean economy’ (which even includes the HVAC tech who allows me to keep my office at a cool, energy-sucking 62 degrees in summertime) are quickly conflated with ‘clean energy’, ‘cleantech’, ‘green economy’ and other buzzwords. Then the data about the size of the sector enters the policy discussion without an understanding of […]

Steve Poftak

Learning the Wrong Lesson

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Cutting through the bureaucratese of the assembled emails and memos from MASSDoT in this weekend’s Globe was a chilling phrase: according to the District 6 (i.e. metro Boston) highway director, We don’t write things down because they trigger a formal event. The article proceeds to detail a confusing he-said, he-said, he-said over what the Transportation Secretary, Acting Highway Administrator, and District 6 Engineer knew about the falling light in the Big Dig tunnel and what they did about it. I won’t unravel that tale here. But the macro-point is that the culture deep within MassDoT remains one of opacity and concealment. The irony is that no one (well, almost no one) blames the current administration for issues related to the […]