Goal for Alberta government has been diversifying their economy to better weather economic storms better.
I moved here in the early 80s. It feels like diversifying the economy from agriculture and oil/gas has been a constant challenge. With the last bust, smaller centres took a big hit because it's so hard to diversify during the good times. I talked to a lot of people who had been in higher paying oil jobs who were now doing service work - steady but lower paying. Seems all regions in Canada acknowledge and struggle with economic diversity.
But this article implies that's not common knowledge. ...capitalist societies have taken as faith that the key to prosperity is specializing in what they’re naturally good at... is diametrically opposed to challenging the status quo and encouraging innovation. Educated elites need to "discover" ...the complexity and diversity of products made in a region tend to be a proxy for the knowledge and know-how of its workforce. This makes workers more valuable and gives them a broader range of career options, upping their bargaining power. By contrast, countries—or regions like Central Appalachia—that make relatively few things tend to constrain people’s opportunities to learn new skills, whether on the job or at school.
I think the actual challenge is transitioning from a raw materials sector - certainly that seems to be the case for the Appalachians.
https://qz.com/1167671/the-100-year-capitalist-experiment-that-keeps-appalachia-poor-sick-and-stuck-on-coal/
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I think of wealth redistribution as taking wealth from resources from an area to benefit people in other areas - in other words not valuing labour.
ReplyDeleteYou can see the difference in attitudes even between Alberta and Saskatchewan. Alberta's royalty system ensures our roads are paved and helps the province make it through tough economic times. Saskatchewan was more concerned with drawing business from Alberta so didn't build in those protections. Perhaps they felt they had enough other money streams to compensate.
bio-diversity, psycho-diversity, jobs-diversity. Bio-diversity can be assessed with a genetic survey. Jobs-diversity by some other sort of possible survey. Psycho-diversity... could use a distribution of languages as a proxy. This looks like a jobs-diversity-poor land, a gold rushes thing.
ReplyDeleteI'm not talking about removing specialist industries; diversity gives time for an economy to recover. It wasn't diversity that killed those towns but the shitty austerity programs the government promoted.
ReplyDeleteThey should have been bailing out people or done like Iceland and just let them finance their own fixes. But then, boo fucking hoo, the financial sector would have to pay for their poor risk assessments and the rock stars who caused the mess would leave the industry.
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