Retired Washington State University economist Norm Whittlesey is sitting at his kitchen table with two other retired economists, Walt Butcher and Ken Casavant. They are reminiscing about the collective 150 years they have worked on and around the Columbia River.
“We used to catch steelhead on the Snake River before the dam,” says Whittlesey. “I’ve got a picture of Walt with, what, a 25 pounder?”
Walt Butcher chuckles and says, “That fish might be up to 25 pounds by now.”
Casavant adds, “It’s been growing, even after being eaten.”
With a sweep of his hand across a map of the Columbia River watershed on the … » More …
Two years ago, Lou Pepper watched the bank he once managed become the largest bank failure in U.S. history.
Pepper, a former Washington State University regent, had retired from Washington Mutual in the early 1990s when the bank was sound. But then a pattern of rapid growth and risky lending led to the collapse.
The former CEO felt helpless as each day brought more negative news. “People had been building this bank for 115 years, damn good people,” says Pepper, leaning forward in his chair in the small first-floor office of his home on Skagit Bay. And many of them were losing their savings, their … » More …
Washington State Magazine talks with Tom Reese, the economic development officer in the Spokane mayor’s office, about the knowledge economy, the role of higher education in economic development, and the planned university district surrounding Washington State University’s Spokane campus. Reese is an adjunct faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Design Institute at WSU Spokane.
Tom Reese: Spokane is redefining itself. I think it’s really interesting that the world’s fair focused on Spokane and the environment. Spokane at that time [1974] was in the throes of being a resource-based economy, timber, and manufacturing and processing of those resources, and how to do it [correctly] was really … » More …
We were having a long midweek dinner at Le Pichet in Seattle, a sort of anticipatory wake for the Seattle P-I, where my friend Tom had worked as a reporter for 20-some years. Tom’s pretty crusty and tends to brush even the most irksome things off with a joke.
But being a fifty-something journalist facing a post-newspaper era in a town awash in laid-off reporters, reality had started to sink in. Even so, referring to the demise of his employer and the economic times in general, at one point Tom gestured outside to First Avenue and said, “But this is no crisis. Somalia has a … » More …
Many of you are familiar with Thomas Friedman’s argument, in The World is Flat, that technology has eliminated many barriers to competition and thus created today’s globally competitive economic environment. His dramatic examples of outsourcing show that key services, including high-level engineering and scientific tasks, can be effectively accomplished without regard to the workers’ physical location. This allows imaginative businesses to tap talent from around the globe, often at considerable savings.
Friedman, a foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, uses this evidence to reach some alarming conclusions about how America will fare in the future. After establishing the central thesis that location is … » More …
