Archives: Reg Murphy Pubs

Income inequality, social mobility, and new politicians

Written by Skip Mounts on . Posted in Reg Murphy, Skip Mounts.

January 2019 not only brought the start of spring semester at the college with renewed expressions of hope by our student-scholars, it also marked the seating of a new Congress. This latter event brought a vocal minority of newly elected representatives to the House of Representatives who have a unique view of economics and economic success. First, they are calling for a new top marginal tax rate of 70 percent. Next, they cite the existence billionaires as an indicator of the immorality of the economic system.

I will not waste your time explaining that a 70 percent marginal tax rate destroys the incentive to do anything productive. If this is not, as a professor of mine would say, ‘intuitively obvious to the casual observer,’ then any explanation I could offer would do no good. I would, however, like to talk about bit about economics and morality.

As framed by the new politicians, my discussion will center around income inequality and social mobility. In recent years, the top income quartile (top 20 percent) earned 24 percent of personal income. This is up from 22 percent of personal income not that many years ago. Thus, income inequality is growing in the United States.

Social mobility refers to the probability that our children, when adults, will be in a higher income quartile than us parents. This is to say: will our children will be better off than we are today? Recent studies suggest that there is a one in three chance that our children will end up in a higher income quartile. This percentage has not changed in the past 30 years.

So, in the end, income inequality has increased but social mobility is the same. What are we to glean from this?

The first thing one needs to recognize is that the distribution of income is an outcome. It is what it is. It is the result of economic activity and many other variables. It is simply like a report of facts by an auditor. Social mobility, however, is probably a policy variable. There are things that can be changed that will enhance social mobility. In fact, this is probably desirable as we all want our children to be better off than we are.

Let’s start with billionaires and immorality. First, I know of no evidence that points to billionaires being billionaires because they did something to the rest of us. This would be the case in a zero-sum world. However, we know that the world is not zero-sum. Billionaires became billionaires because they did something special for the rest of us. Their income status is the outcome of doing things for others. Is this immoral? Or is taking something away from them because they simply exist immoral? (You can’t answer me using your iPhone, Facebook, Instagram, etc. or if you are holding a Starbucks Coffee from one of the 30,000 stores.)

Studies also show that increases in social mobility result from increases in human capital. The source of human capital improvement for most of us comes from education and training. So, should we limit the success of others or should we create an educational system that benefits everyone and allows the success of others to provide an incentive for the rest of us?

Where is the immorality? Access to education by everyone is probably one of the hallmarks of the United States. Why don’t we invest in it and promote access for all, encourage institutional efficiency and use this as a sign of our morality? I’m just saying.

Dr. Skip Mounts is the Dean of the School of Business and Public Management at the College of Coastal Georgia. He is also a professor of economics and an associate of the Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies.

  • Reg Murphy Center
  • Skip Mounts

Are the ‘Barbarians’ really at the gate?

Written by Don Mathews on . Posted in Don Mathews, Reg Murphy.

Claims that “Barbarians are at the gate!” are prolific these days. One such claim has it that some barbarians are already within the gate. The barbarians in mind are Chinese imports.

The claim is that cheap Chinese imports have gutted U.S. manufacturing, destroying millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

There are many problems with the claim.

For one, U.S. manufacturing hardly appears to be in decline, never mind gutted. Federal Reserve data show that U.S. industrial capacity is greater than it has ever been. It is 18 percent greater than it was in 2000, when trade with China was liberalized.

U.S. manufacturing production, too, has reached an historic high. Despite falling by 19 percent during the Great Recession, U.S. manufacturing output is now 9 percent greater than it was in 2000.

The idea that U.S. manufacturing is in decline is based on the decrease in manufacturing employment. Manufacturing employment reached a peak of 19.4 million in 1979. It was down to 17.2 million in 2000, and down to 13.5 million just before the Great Recession.

The recession pushed it down to 11.5 million. But it has increased each year since 2010, and now stands at 12.8 million.

Are Chinese imports to blame for the decrease in U.S. manufacturing employment?

Doubtful.

By far the most significant reason for the decrease in U.S. manufacturing employment since 2000 is technological advance. To be producing 9 percent more output with 25 percent fewer workers is an extraordinary increase in productivity.

A prominent 2013 study estimated that Chinese imports accounted for as much as one million of the four million decrease in U.S. manufacturing employment between 1990 and 2007.

More recent research suggests that estimate is incorrect.

The more recent research takes into account the fact that the bulk of U.S. trade in goods is in industrial supplies and capital goods, products that you and I, as consumers of retail goods, never see.

In 2017, 54 percent of goods imported by the U.S. were industrial supplies and capital goods; 23 percent were consumer goods. In the same year, 65 percent of goods exported by the U.S. were industrial supplies and capital goods; 12.5 percent were consumer goods.

Which U.S. firms import industrial supplies and capital goods? To a large degree, U.S. exporters. Purchasing lower-priced, quality inputs makes U.S. exporters more competitive and able to export more.

Which foreign firms import U.S. produced industrial supplies and capital goods? To a large degree, foreign exporters. Purchasing lower-priced, quality inputs makes foreign exporters more competitive and able to export more.

A consequence? U.S. imports and exports of goods stimulate each other.

The data show it. Since 2002, inflation-adjusted U.S. goods imports have increased by 88 percent, while inflation-adjusted U.S. goods exports have increased by 101 percent.

The same is true of U.S. trade with China. Since 2000, U.S. imports of goods from China have increased by 405 percent, while U.S. exports of goods to China have increased by 697 percent.

That also means that goods we import often have a significant amount of U.S. content, while goods we export often have a significant amount of foreign content.

That is especially true of Chinese imports. A Federal Reserve study published just two weeks ago found that 56 cents of every dollar in U.S. imports from China actually goes to U.S. firms and workers.

Taking all that into account, recent research suggests that Chinese imports have had little effect on U.S. manufacturing employment.

At times, there truly are barbarians at the gate. Far more common are cries of “Barbarians are at the gate!” when, in fact, there aren’t.

  • Don Mathews
  • Reg Murphy Center

Meetings can be useful when done right

Written by Melissa Trussell on . Posted in Melissa Trussell, Reg Murphy.

The week before classes start is a busy one for professors. There are syllabi to write, course websites to update, lessons to plan, and last-minute advisees to direct. But, last week, when I needed to be doing those things, it felt nearly impossible to get anything done at all.

I spent most of my working hours last week in meetings. The few days before students return to campus are always meeting-packed. All-campus meeting, all-faculty meeting, department/school faculty meeting and multiple optional meeting opportunities for training and professional development.

And just prior to starting these on-campus meetings, I attended the annual meetings of the American Economics Association in Atlanta. This is the largest economics conference in the country and consists of three days of non-stop meetings for research presentations and panel discussions.

I am exhausted of meetings. And, according to an article published in the Harvard Business Review last summer, I am not alone. In fact, even in the meeting-packed week before classes start, my job is a relatively meeting-light job according to the report.

The article cites research finding that CEOs work an average of 62.5 hours per week and spend over 60 percent of that time in face-to-face meetings.

It would be easy to take the rest of this space to write about how much productivity is lost while we sit in meetings. Indeed, a complementary study described in the Harvard Business Review a year earlier showed 71 percent of senior managers think meetings are unproductive and inefficient, and most say meetings keep them from doing their own work.

But, I have been in some really good meetings in the last week and a half, and I want to spend the next couple hundred words focusing on what is good about meetings.

There is not a lot that economists agree on, but almost all economists agree that long-term growth of an economy depends on technological advancement, which always starts with a good idea.

Research shows that good ideas are made even better when a diverse group of individuals collaborate. And, in a business world overrun with emails and instant messages, America’s top businesspeople still recognize the value of face-to-face meetings to encourage collaboration.

In his YouTube video “Where Good Ideas Come From,” author Steven Johnson says, “Good ideas normally come from the collision between smaller hunches, so that they form something bigger than themselves.”

One of my favorite examples of such a collision — or, more accurately, a series of collisions — is in the case of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amons Tversky. The very first meeting between the two, who were reportedly polar opposites in personality, was at a seminar in which Tversky presented his work on how people learn. Kahneman challenged Tversky’s experimental design, and the two began meeting to discuss Tversky’s work and Kahneman’s objections. The two continued meeting and sharing hunches, and the result was a Nobel prize winning body of work establishing the field of behavioral economics.

This is what meetings are good for. When done right, face-to-face meetings provide spaces where hunches can collide to become good ideas.

  • Melissa Trussell
  • Reg Murphy Center

Some questions for Sen. David Perdue

Written by Don Mathews on . Posted in Don Mathews, Reg Murphy.

A couple weeks ago, Sen. David Perdue had lunch with the Golden Isles Republican Women. It must have been a tough lunch for the Senator. He said some things that I can’t imagine our local Republican women would leave unchallenged.

Since I am not a Republican woman, I did not attend the lunch. But The Brunswick News covered it well.

According to The News, one matter Sen. Perdue discussed was the closing of U.S. automobile factories over the years. The senator lamented the closings and said, “I don’t know how to bring those back, frankly, when you’re dealing with $3 an hour labor in China.”

As my colleague Dr. Skip Mounts points out, running a business and understanding economics are two very different things, and knowledge of one does not translate into knowledge of the other.

With his “$3 an hour labor in China” remark, Sen. Perdue provided local Republican women with a case in point. I’m sure they pounced on it.

The notion that firms in a country with high wages can’t compete with firms in a country with low wages is a zombie: it’s dead wrong but refuses to die.

In the 1800s, Britain was the world’s leading manufacturer. Its firms paid the highest manufacturing wages in the world. The same was true of the U.S. in the 1900s, and it’s still largely true today.

Contrary to what some say, the reason manufacturing prowess and high wages go hand in hand is not tariffs. It’s productivity.

Worker productivity depends on capital, technology and the way production is organized. The better the capital, technology and production organization, the more productive workers are.

And the more productive workers are, the more firms pony up for them.

In the U.S., wages are high because worker productivity is high. In China, wages are low because worker productivity is low.

Plus, on a global scale, a manufacturing wage of $3 an hour isn’t bad. In plenty of countries, manufacturing firms pay workers less than $3 a day. So why aren’t manufacturing firms in those countries driving Chinese firms out of business?

Sen. Perdue also told local Republican women that though it’s common for countries to protect certain industries within their borders, he would prefer not to play favorites.

Indeed, the government should not prop up some industries at the expense of others. But the senator contradicts himself, and no doubt our Republican women called him on it.

If the government should not “play favorites,” why is Sen. Perdue all in for the president’s nationalist trade policies?

Imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum amounts to giving domestic steel and aluminum producers fat welfare checks, paid for by domestic manufacturing firms that make products out of steel and aluminum and domestic residents who buy those products.

Nationalist trade policy is the government deliberately overriding domestic businesses and individuals because “it knows best.” I’m sure our Republican women are against that. They used to be, anyway.

Sen. Perdue also expressed dismay about the amount of U.S. government debt owned by China.

Whoa. Our Republican women couldn’t have let that go by. (China owns $1.1 trillion of the $21.9 trillion U.S. national debt, by the way.)

If the senator is so concerned about China owning $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, why are he and his party so unconcerned that the national debt has grown by $2 trillion in the two years his party has had control of the presidency, senate and house?

We are fortunate to have party members willing to hold the feet of one of their own to the fire.

  • Don Mathews
  • Reg Murphy Center

Quality of life is the true measure of development

Written by Melissa Trussell on . Posted in Melissa Trussell, Reg Murphy.

This month, as I have continued thinking about how our values shape economic policy, I am reminded of a statement shared with me by Brunswick’s Economic and Community Development Director, Travis Stegall.

He said, and I paraphrase, there are two types of development economists: those who focus on money, and those who focus on people.

I remember how shocked and disappointed I was when I stepped out of graduate school and into “the real world” and discovered how many fall into the former category.

I had recently come home from my third trip to West Africa, and I had just completed a dissertation wholly focused on improving lives of individuals and communities who had experienced conflict. I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to change the world with what I had learned.

But then I started talking with others about local development in the U.S. and Canada, and I started noticing a disturbing theme. To many here in the developed world, economic development is all about attracting and keeping businesses and raising Gross Regional Product (GRP).

Business development and GRP are certainly a large part of economic development, but they should never be the sole focus of a development plan. When development becomes synonymous with improving GRP, we miss the point entirely.

In Chapter 6 of their book Essentials of Development Economics, Edward Taylor and Travis Lybbert assert that income is but a means to an end. A region’s true level of development is measured not in production or income but in its residents’ quality of life. Income certainly contributes to quality of life but does not define it.

In the 1990s, the U.N. Development Program established the Human Development Index (HDI), a numerical measure of how well-developed a nation or region is.

The HDI is calculated using four proxies for quality of life: life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling for children, average years of schooling for adults, and gross national/regional income per capita.

Truly developed economies are economies in which people have access to quality health care and education and are therefore free to make choices that both productive and fulfilling.

Free. There’s the key word. Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen described economic development as just that — freedom.

When we value individual freedom over money, it changes how we do economic development. We start to see plans to develop humans rather than industries. Education and health care are no longer simply footnotes in the workforce development chapter of our strategy to attract firms.

We educate and train individuals because quality education expands one’s career options and extends his or her freedom to choose.

We ensure top notch health care so men and women are free to provide for themselves and their families without the physical, emotional, and financial burdens of sickness.

And when we develop these communities where individuals are free to pursue happiness and emotional and financial stability for themselves and their families, I suspect we will find these are exactly the communities in which businesses thrive and GRP soars.

  • Melissa Trussell
  • Reg Murphy Center

What is the margin of something you buy?

Written by Skip Mounts on . Posted in Reg Murphy, Skip Mounts.

One of the things you learn about in the economics of consumer behavior and the theory of the firm is product differentiation. In a competitive market all goods and services are essentially the same. Competitive pressures assure this.

However, consumers must still choose among the alternatives. Choice is made on things/attributes that seem inconsequential yet determine uniqueness and lead to selection. This is product differentiation. Pizza is pizza – flour, cheese, meat, tomatoes, etc. – but my favorite is tossed as the one tossing sings.

Certainly small things, but they differentiate my favorite from others.

Remember pizza is pizza. While small things are small, they are also the ultimate factors that drive consumer choice. It is the difference that matters.

Theory tells us that choices are made at – let’s call it ‘the margin’. What is the differentiation — ‘the margin’ — of some of the things you buy?

We were in Thomasville, Georgia a few weeks ago. Like many cities Thomasville has shopping centers around the community with TJ Maxx, Publix, Lowes, food chains and on and on. (No Starbucks for some reason?) What is unusual, however, is that they surround a viable, exciting, amazing downtown.

While many cities with the same layout have dying central cores, Thomasville’s is thriving. You find a wide variety of retail, restaurants, bars, and most important, many shoppers and downtown residents. Heritage is also on display. This past weekend was their annual Victorian Christmas that brought 30,000 people to downtown. Yes, 30,000!

What is their margin? What differentiates Thomasville and its downtown from so many other cities and their failing and dying cities cores?

Being the economic sleuth I am, I decided to talk to someone in every store we went in — and I mean every store. I also talked to city, community, and business leaders.

Here is their ‘margin’ I think? Thomasville has a unique economic development model. Their premise starts out simply — the quality of life is dependent on economic development. However, what follows is not that simple.

While many cities take economic development wherever and whenever it occurs, Thomasville assumes that it begins in downtown and works its way out in the community.

Development begins at the center and moves out. Most cities develop randomly — we take our victories wherever they occur. In Thomasville, downtown drives everything else.

If public investment is called for, the first places to set priorities is downtown and surrounding communities. From what I can tell, everyone is committed to this model.

Another point that was stressed was total inclusion of all interested parties.

They talk to one another all the time. Government also tries very hard to be service oriented toward the small business owner. Big businesses looking at Thomasville as a potential location see that small businesses matter to government.

Therefore, the big business knows that it will matter too.

I could go on and on. Better yet — go to Thomasville. Eat at Jonah’s Fish and Grits — the wait is worth it and the hushpuppies are a gift of love.

What does this tell us about our home? First, I love Brunswick and the Golden Isles. Our entrepreneurship program and downtown go hand in hand.

Several years ago, a community vision statement was created by a some folks.

It reads: “Working together to make Brunswick and the Golden Isles an exceptional place in Georgia to live, work and visit by strengthening our communities and enhancing the quality of life.” It is being adopted by many organizations in the community.

Maybe, just maybe, we need to focus less on adopting it and more on talking to one another about the issues it raises. Another thing that I learned from the folks of Thomasville: this all takes time. A young lady said to me, “We love our children and grandchildren more than we fuss with each other.”

So let’s talk. Let me worry about how to encourage this conversation.

I may have an idea or two in my next column.

  • Reg Murphy Center
  • Skip Mounts

College’s role in transforming the community

Written by Skip Mounts on . Posted in Reg Murphy, Skip Mounts.

A few weeks ago in this space I talked about my personal perceptions of the interaction of the college with the community and the community with the college. I referred to this interaction as the “strategic commitments.”

The first strategic commitment was the transformation of the college from a junior college to one offering bachelor degrees. From the perspective of the School of Business and Public Management I talked about our six bachelor degree programs that have been created since 2008. Two items have driven our work. What are the needs of the community and how can we differentiate ourselves from others? From this working framework you can understand our commitment to criminal justice and to hospitality and tourism.

The subject for today is ‘“strategic commitment 2” — the role of the college in transforming the community. I’ll give you a heads-up, this is going to take more than one column.

The first way of community transformation is the dual enrollment program. As many of you know, after meeting admissions criteria, high school students may enroll in college classes and earn credits toward high school requirements and have credits toward a college degree. This is free with books included — not a bad deal.

Free college credits and the lowering of overall costs of a college degree is the obvious benefit of the program. The more important benefit, in my opinion, is that high school students must come to campus and take classes with the wide variety of others at the college. This acclimation only occurs while on campus. Given that 75 percent of our students are first generation, this acclimation is essential and prepares students for the very different learning environment they will face as they pursue their degree. This increases the likelihood of their future success that will contribute to a higher standard of living.

The next way of transformation is seen in our use of internships. All of our bachelor’s degrees (as well as culinary arts) require students to complete an internship during their senior year. This is the best time to synthesize real world experience with the theory of the classroom.

We invest considerable resources in our internship requirement as we see them as much a part of our program as a class. Also, intern hosts are treated like faculty. At SBPM internships are not just something nice to put on a resume. They are requirement of graduation. Few schools in USG do this.

There are two general types of internships. The first lets a student survey all the operations of a business. Here they get to see things from an overall perspective. In a second type of internship, students focus on a unique problem or challenge faced by a local business.

Here our students under the watchful eyes of the host apply theory to solve real problems. This type is the most numerous of all the internships across the disciplines we touch — business, criminal justice, public management, health informatics, hospitality and tourism, and graduates of technical schools seeking to learn management. All must complete an internship — all.

Another measure of community transformation is seen in graduation. In May 2011, eight students walked across the stage to get a Bachelor of Business Administration. This past May (including a small commencement in December) saw 100 degrees award in SBPM programs — 100! These students had just been problem-solvers in internships. Now they become employees ready to join the labor force. While the base is small, this represents a compound annual rate of growth of 32.4 percent.

Even more amazing are the details. Median starting salary of our 2017 graduates is $35,620. Also, 91 percent of these graduates found employment in Georgia while 83 percent found employment in coastal Georgia. Finally 71 percent of the 2017 graduates found employment in their area of study.

Again, our goal is to have programs that support the needs of our economy. The economist in me loves the final observation — what I call the market test. Employers come back for more!

The next area of impact is in our commitment to developing a local entrepreneurial eco-system. Here there is a lot to say — all for another day.

For now, I you think we are making great strides in significantly answering the promise found in the second strategic commitment. While we at One College Drive are very different from what we were not that long ago, those of you looking to us to make our community a better place are different as well.

  • Reg Murphy Center
  • Skip Mounts

Does anyone care about federal budget deficits anymore?

Written by Don Mathews on . Posted in Don Mathews, Reg Murphy.

Honest talk from political partisans about the federal budget situation has always been rare. With the ascendance of progressives in the Democrat party and right-populists in the Republican party, it’s nonexistent.

Consider first the progressives. Progressives champion an extravagant expansion of the welfare state.

Free health care, free college, guaranteed jobs paying $15 an hour, and lots more. The cost of the most popular progressive programs is estimated to be around $42.5 trillion over the next decade.

To put that in perspective, federal spending currently amounts to 22 percent of GDP. Add the progressive programs and the percentage doubles.

How to pay for it all? Progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proposed imposing a 28 percent tax rate on corporations, a 15 percent surcharge on millionaires and a carbon emissions tax.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, those taxes would raise about $2 trillion over the next ten years. How to pay for the remaining $40.5 trillion? That’s a detail to be worked out later.

Republican mendacity about the federal budget is more interesting.

In the first two-thirds of the last century, Republicans preached “sound finance” — the view that budget deficits, except in a state of emergency, are fiscally irresponsible. Republicans denigrated the notion, associated with British economist John Maynard Keynes, that tax cuts and spending increases can stimulate an economy in recession.

Then came Ronald Reagan, who threw sound finance out the window.

The Reagan administration won major tax cuts and major spending increases. The tax cuts, the administration claimed, would pay for themselves by stimulating the supply side of the economy.

They didn’t.

Republicans to this day condemn Franklin Roosevelt for the budget deficits run during the Great Depression. Yet the budget deficits under Reagan in a growing economy were slightly larger than the deficits under Roosevelt during the depression.

In the four years between 1933 and 1936, the federal budget deficit under Roosevelt averaged 4.9 percent of GDP. By 1938, the deficit was 0.1 percent of GDP.

In the four years between 1983 and 1986, the federal budget deficit under Reagan averaged 5.1 percent of GDP. It was still 3 percent of GDP in Reagan’s last year of office.

Republicans are now selective in preaching sound finance. Republicans are all for balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility when a Democrat is president. When one of their own is president, deficits are “supply-side economics.”

Consider the two most recent presidents.

Obama inherited a wicked recession. So Obama, like Regan, pushed for and won an economic “stimulus package.”

There were important differences between the Reagan stimulus and the Obama stimulus, but the essence of the two was the same: big tax cuts and big spending increases. And big deficits.

One difference was that Reagan was a bigger spender than Obama.

Under Regan, federal spending increased at an inflation-adjusted average annual rate of 2.5 percent, compared to 1.9 percent under Obama.

Yet in Republican circles, Reagan is hailed as a fiscal policy marvel while Obama is excoriated as a profligate spender.

And now?

In the first 11 months of fiscal year 2018, the federal budget deficit was $895 billion. In fiscal year 2016, the last under Obama, the federal budget deficit was $585 billion.

It has taken Republicans in control of the White House and Congress less than two years to increase the federal budget deficit by 53 percent.

And not a peep of concern from Republicans. Or Democrats.

So, each of the two major political parties has demonstrated that it could not care less about the fiscal state of the federal government.

  • Don Mathews
  • Reg Murphy Center

Communicating to others what an economist does

Written by Melissa Trussell on . Posted in Melissa Trussell, Reg Murphy.

A couple weeks ago, Travis Stegall, Brunswick’s Economic and Community Development Director, stopped by the college to give a talk to the students in my economic development course. He did a great job. He was interesting and engaging, and he conveyed a real passion for seeing Brunswick develop into a thriving city.

But, for me, one of the most memorable moments of his presentation happened at the end, when a student asked, “What is the hardest part of your job?” Of all the challenges associated with developing community and bringing business to downtown Brunswick, Mr. Stegall pinpointed “Communicating to others what I do” as the most difficult part of his job.

I know how he feels. I would not say communicating what I do is the most difficult part of my job, but it is one of the more difficult parts of meeting new people professionally or, even worse, socially.

When folks find out I am an economist, they have one of two reactions: 1) they stagger back, turn pale, and tell me how much they hated economics in school, or 2) their eyes light up and they begin to ask for my opinions on current economic policy, usually as they segue into telling me their own opinions.

Often, neither reaction stems from a solid understanding of what economists — particularly microeconomists — do. To someone with the first reaction, I’d say a class or two in principles of economics only scratches the surface of all the cool stuff economists study.

And to someone with the second reaction, I’d say the federal reserve is fascinating, but studying it is not my cup of tea. My mentor in grad school described economics to me as a toolbox, rather than as a subject area. And I tell my students that although our syllabus lists a set of topics we will cover, economics is in the way we think about these topics, not in the topics themselves.

Truly, economists study topics across the board — markets and prices, effects of taxes or tariffs on trade, labor markets and employment trends, immigration, health care, sports, and on and on.

The value economists bring to a given field of study is a rational approach to problem solving. Economists assume (reasonably, I believe) that individuals weigh options and behave in their own self-interest.

Given this assumption and the right data, economists can answer almost any question one could ask about human behavior or effects of policy changes on human behavior.

Thus, economists often struggle to communicate what we do because we may study a wide range of topics, many of which are not front page economics news. The common denominator for economists is data. Economics is a toolbox allowing for the application of data and statistical best practices to real-world questions, or, as I like to call it, math with a purpose.

  • Melissa Trussell
  • Reg Murphy Center

Our work is not done at Coastal

Written by Skip Mounts on . Posted in Reg Murphy, Skip Mounts.

College classes have begun for fall semester 2018. Since fall 2011, Coastal Georgia’s School of Business and Public Management has grown from about 400 students to nearly 900 this fall. That is a compound annual rate of growth of 12.28 percent. Growth stocks should be so consistent. In this light, I would like to give you a report card on the School of Business and Public Management (SBPM).

When I came in March 2011 to interview for the dean’s position in the school, two things — which I call today the Strategic Commitments — were obvious. The first was that the community was committed to the transformation of the college to a bachelor degree granting institution. I call this Strategic Commitment 1 and was not surprised by it. What was surprising was Strategic Commitment 2. The community expected the college to be committed to transforming the community.

These commitments are not independent of each other. Clearly there are overlapping areas. My focus for today is Strategic Commitment 1.

Two things drive the development of the degrees we offer in SBPM: they must serve the needs of the community and State, and they must be differentiated from degrees that students could get at other schools. Our degrees must be useful and special.

Our first two degrees were a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) and a Bachelor of Science in Health Informatics (BSHI). An unusual feature of the BBA was that all of the classes were required. Students had no opportunity to study a unique area of business. This format did not easily address the needs of the market. With curriculum reform taken at the time, students can now choose a concentration for detailed study in accounting, economics, finance, leadership, marketing, management, and health care administration. As a result of the opportunity for enhanced study of an area of business, at present 68 students are choosing to study accounting and finance, two very difficult disciplines. Also, one of our young economists got a full-ride graduate scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis (one of 5 Wash-U awarded that year). This is amazing for an access institution starting its 10th year and are just two examples of student achievement. Students studying health informatics are now finding employment in major local, regional and national health systems. The BSHI, with its emphasis on computer science and data analytics is unmatched in the state.

Government agencies and nonprofits face increasing demands for their services while experiencing declining financial resources. These two opposing forces call for managers trained in business principles within the public sector world. This was the rational leading the development of the next degree — Bachelor of Science in Public Management. There is no other similar degree in the entire University System, especially with its concentration in nonprofit management and leadership. Again, our goal is to be appropriate, useful and unique.

The next degree developed over the past 10 years is the Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice. This is the fastest growing degree at the college and is only in its fourth year. Criminal justice students choose to study public policy, homeland security, cyber security or data analytics. Needless to say, this is a cutting edge undergraduate degree and, with our wonderful relationship with FLETC, unmatched in the Southeast if not the nation. Here our goal is simply to be the best undergraduate program in the United States.

We also teach leadership and management skills to technically trained individuals. This is only open to graduates of technical schools. One might be a heck of a welder, yet we train them to be able to lead a team of welders. Here we complement the workforce needs of the state and, again, find ourselves in a unique market position in the state.

The newest addition to our degree offerings is a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality and Tourism Management (BSHTM). We have been teaching culinary arts for years (and remain accredited by the American Culinary Federation) and do really good work. Now, with the BSHTM, we have expanded our portfolio of offerings based on our area’s truly unique leadership in the hospitality industry. There is no other similar degree in the University System. Again we are appropriate, useful and unique.

There you have it. I work with a wonderful faculty and staff that are committed to our students and community.

What grade might you give us filling Strategic Commitment 1? I give us an “I” — an incomplete. We have done a lot but we are not yet done. There is much more to come. It’s been a heck of a ride but the finish line is not yet in sight. Thank you Golden Isles for all you have done for us.

  • Reg Murphy Center
  • Skip Mounts