Re: Millennium Place III | Hayward Place
This is true to a certain extent -- it takes some time for stimulus to work its way into other parts of the economy. But more importantly, Boston is not in a "Great Recession" the way much of the rest of the country is. Our unemployment rate is low, our foreclosure rate is low, and we have pent up demand because a lot of people upped their savings or retired debt for fear of things that ended up not happening. Boston is one of the few places in the country that has a true 21st century economy, and I would not at all be surprised to see that this sudden development surge is only the beginning of a larger trend.
Henry -- BINGIII!!ooooooh!!!
So why do we have a "Gathering of Cranes"
Some places are recessing and others are progressing:
Boston is a winner this time arround -- perhaps to a large extent because the Global, National, Regioal, State and Greater Boston economy is transitioning to a Knowledge Based Economy. This transition is thus favoring the KE enterprises -- and just as the case of the transition to the Industrial Economy in the 19th Century where it happened here first -- so too are we leading the transition to the KE
While I was MIT in the 70's Economics satisfied the Humanities Distribution Requiremnt so I took 3 economics courses -- 2 of which were conducted in a large scale by Nobel Prize Winner Paul Samuelson -- author of then standard text on Economics -- based on applying math to what had then just been descriptive. A key feature of this mathemaical approach to economics which got Samuelson the Nobel Prize -- was that economics was like any other science -- it had laws and you could apply equations and models.
This however has been shown to be a falacious assumption -- as it is impossible to test economic theories by any means except the ensemble method commonly used by astronomers -- i.e. you can't run an experiment all you can do is observe and then try to partition the data by some explicit parameters such as class of star based on temperature
Well a key element of Samuelson's economic models was the Phillips Curve which traded inflation for unemployment (hyperbolic relationship). We learned all about this trade-off in his lectures. I have a fundamental distrust of theories, so I started to plot the data on the curve - Shazam ! it didn't fit as this was the beginning of the decade of stagflation. I showed my plots to Prof. Samuelson and he said -- probably some abberation associated with adjustments.
Each time afterwards when the new inflation and unemployment data came out I replotted the data and it kept deviating Prof Samuelson had a different explanation -- reality was he was missing some other parameter -- there in fact seemed to be a family of Phillips Curves -- with the optimum moving away from the origin -- something was different in the 1970's.
Fast-track to 2012 - and the "Recovery from the Great Recession"
There are in effect a "family of GR's" and associated recoveries depending on:
a) where you are
b) upon what sector your economic backbone is based -- thus North Dakota is near full employment as drilling in the Baaken formation is exploding
If you abstracted Greater Boston from Massachusetts -- there would certainly be a near normal ecoonomy comapared to Mass as a whole. Mass in turn is well ahead of New England and New England is ahead of the US as a whole.
Drill down further -- Take Kendall Square and iits immediate surroundings in Cambridge and you have to describe it as a BOOM comparable in intensity, if not the geographic extent of the DotCom / Telecom Bubble period of the mid 90's to early 2001.
Hence the Gathering of Cranes
The only questions - How persistent and how sensitive to the externals is the current boomlette?
Those questions will influence the evolution of the SPID as it is in its early stage of growth and hence more sensitive to interuption.
