Times Union Op-Ed: State’s Unfair City Aid Formula Needs Revising

I’ve been looking at how well the State’s local revenue sharing works. It doesn’t work well. I wrote an Op-Ed that appears in the Albany Times-Union this weekend: It may be found here: https://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/State-s-unfair-city-aid-formula-needs-revising-13709884.php I’ll have a longer piece that takes a closer look at this on my blog next week.

Data, Key Punches, Blogging and the Upstate Economy

Fifty years ago, as a research assistant in graduate school at Syracuse University, I did some quantitative research for a professor on the effect of various factors on state policy outputs. Doing the work required me find data in books in the university library and to go to a room in the university computer center, like […]

Response to Lost Manufacturing Jobs – The Effects of Imports and Increased Productivity

I’d like to thank Kay Wilkie, who serves on the United States Trade Representative’s Intergovernmental Policy Advisory Committee for offering useful comments concerning my post, “Lost Manufacturing Jobs – The Effects of Imports and Increased Productivity” Kay points out that “It would be worthwhile to carefully examine and review the aspects of international trade and investment […]

As Private Sector Employee Incomes Stagnate, Local Government Workers Prosper

The slow growth of worker incomes since 2000 has been the subject of intense policy and political debates. One of the clear messages of the 2012 Presidential campaign was the call to remedy perceived distortions in world trade that have disadvantaged American workers, particularly those had in the past held jobs in manufacturing industries. The […]

Economic Stagnation and Electoral Discontent in the Rust Belt

Readers of this blog know that I have been describing changes in employment in New York State and the rust belt associated with the loss of manufacturing employment in the nation. The loss of 5,500,000 manufacturing jobs since 1970 has slowed employment growth in the region as a whole. As a result, upstate cities, along […]

Require Full Transparency from “Private” SUNY Non-Profits

An Op-Ed that I wrote in the Albany Times-Union today: The charges against Alain Kaloyeros, the head of SUNY’s Polytechnic Institute, and others by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, if true, reveal a disturbing disregard for the processes put in place to ensure that procurements decisions are made in […]

Poverty in Upstate Metropolitan Areas – Characteristics and Change: 1999-2013

This is a paper based partly on data previously presented on this blog site. This paper examines the incidence of poverty in upstate New York cities compared to the surrounding suburbs. The data shows that while residents of upstate suburbs enjoy incomes that are substantially higher than the national average and poverty rates that are […]