According to occasionally reliable sources, I was in contention to be honored this year by Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM) for the best darn business writing anybody ever read, anywhere, but especially in Massachusetts.
I didn’t make the cut. AIM decided, instead, to honor foreign-owned companies that do business in the state. AIM was probably not aware that I am owned by a shadowy Cayman Islands holding company and qualify as a foreign company doing business here.
I forgive AIM. Including a foreign-owned company in its Global Trade Awards program is a good idea.
Local boosterism tends to focus on "local boy makes good" and the sinister challenges that come from overseas. In these times, as human and financial capital wander the globe looking for love, AIM is very grown up in its decision to acknowledge that foreign ownership should not determine whether a business enterprise is invited to the cocktail party.
According to AIM numbers, foreign firms provide about 170,000 jobs in Massachusetts – and if you include quite a bit of indirect, middle-man kind of transactions, the number is much higher than that.
With the political focus at the state and federal level on "jobs," there is much to be said for the premise that jobs created by foreign firms making independent investment decisions to come to Massachusetts and elsewhere in the United States is far preferable to the economic development fantasy money often thrown around by government bureaucrats.
William Shughart II, distinguished professor of economics at the University of Mississippi and well-known in be-suspicious-of-government circles, wrote an amusing piece earlier this year in the San Jose Mercury News, teasing President Obama for his "competitiveness agenda" speech to a high-end Silicon Valley audience.
"Obama apparently did not see the irony in extolling the virtues of more federal money for science and technology before a group of people who, by and large, had founded and grown their businesses into stunning success stories without government handouts," he wrote.
Bank On It
The complexities of the international marketplace, and the sophistication of the corporations, large and small, that dance through that economy, don’t tend to fit well into local-yokel economic development rhetoric, as well-meaning as much of it is.
Despite Bank of America dumping about 2,000 jobs in Massachusetts over the past few years, its CEO Brian Moynihan reassured us all that the corporation remained "committed" to the region. OK, applause, applause. To be sure, as long as the Boston-Cambridge colossus is full of interesting companies, and personal family income remains higher than in Somalia, BofA will probably stick around – but we wouldn’t mind a bit if TD Bank came on down from Canada with 500 more branches and a brokerage operation.
The subtle, modest message from AIM’s International Business Council is always worth remembering, as we fret about whether local kids stick around after college, or whether local folks are going to cure cancer with an invention from their Brookline garages. Whether the folks come from down the street or around the world, Massachusetts must remain attractive – in competition with men and women and businesses that can choose New York City or San Francisco or Austin, Texas, or Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, or Paris – with little angst about whether they are "local."
If foreigners or sinister folks from New Jersey (wherever that is) plop themselves down in the mean streets of Cambridge, looking for local high-tech firms to gobble up, the response must not be concern about not being "local."
Although I’m putting words in the mouth of Associated Industries of Massachusetts that it may well never have intended, the underlying wisdom of its relatively simple decision to acknowledge foreign companies is to communicate this reality: If your checks don’t bounce and you hire some local folks, then whether you are local, national, international or from Pluto is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
As the late Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, explained in his own unfashionable way, corporations aren’t people; and they don’t have to donate to the United Way; and they don’t have an obligation to pretty up the neighborhood. If they make money, and reward the investors, they’ve done their duty.
