Our views: A transition to new jobs

• Advocate Opinion page staff
• Published: Apr 7, 2008 - Page: 4B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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In the political world, all eyes for the moment are on Pennsylvania, where Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are in an April primary duel. But one of Louisiana’s leading politicians, Gov. Bobby Jindal, might want to look at Pennsylvania for more than the returns.

Jindal is governor of a state that is seeking to move from its traditional base of oil and petrochemical manufacturing to another type of economy that will be more competitive in a knowledge-driven marketplace.

Pennsylvania has faced many of the challenges that Louisiana will face in the coming years. And in some ways, although not all, Pennsylvania is a success story.

The industries in Rust Belt states were poached by low-wage states of the South with anti-union politics. The job losses led to population growth stalling or declining. Pennsylvania had to change, and the state’s officials say it has.

“Most people have an older impression of Pennsylvania — that it’s an industrial state, a coal and steel state like Ohio. That’s a way-too-dated view of the state,” Dennis Yablonsky, Pennsylvania’s secretary of economic and community development, told The Boston Globe. “Our economy has been in transition from an industrial state to a knowledge-driven one for 20 years.”

What helped to save the state? In large part, a concentration of great universities — state and private — invested in academic leadership in computer technology.

Louisiana can learn from a state that put serious money into higher education as a path to long-term economic growth.
Pennsylvania is now growing again, with the Department of Labor and Industry forecasting annual job growth of almost 7 percent by 2014.

But those jobs are not distributed evenly: Manufacturing jobs will decline by 19.5 percent in that period.
New jobs will be in professional and technical services, computer systems, wireless telephone providers and data processing.
That is a huge transition.

Pennsylvania’s lessons for Louisiana?

The states are different in part because the “old economy” of petrochemical manufacturing here is hardly on its deathbed the way mining and steel processing are. Many good jobs will remain in the refineries and chemical plants for the foreseeable future in Louisiana.

At the same time, a different economy is not only coming, it’s already arrived in high-growth states across the nation.
Louisiana has been late to the party in terms of building assets that will make it more competitive.

A community college system is new, although growing, and LSU has a shot at national status with the university’s Flagship Agenda that should be funded by the state during the next few years. LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center can be expanded, even beyond the $50 million proposed by Jindal this year.

The latter sum is much less than many states are putting into biomedical research centers, but it’s part of what the state must do.
Richard Florida, a longtime resident of Pittsburgh, is the economic development guru now at the Rotman business school in Toronto. His studies of how metropolitan areas advance, with an openness to new ideas and a tolerance of diversity, also are lessons for the path forward for Louisiana.