It's A Different World

I've been thinking about economic development lately, since Carolyn Lewis, our Economic Development department head, gave her notice last month. There's general agreement that, as we look for a replacement for Carolyn, that we need to take a much more aggressive and collaborative – and expensive – approach to economic development in Otsego County. Carolyn agrees, and has made some suggestions for the Board to consider, going forward.

I'll have more to say on this soon, probably in posts about Sandy Mathes's presentation on Wednesday, and the Governor's 'Tax-Free NY' proposal, which eliminates many taxes for new jobs created on or 'adjacent to' SUNY facilities. 

But all this (as well as graduation season) got me thinking about my older son, who has almost finished a bachelor's degree at a good private school in NY. One semester before graduation (he was scheduled to graduate this December) with a degree in Computer Science, he left school and took a job in San Francisco, as the first employee of a well-funded internet startup. He's making about what I made when I was first promoted to district-wide adminstrator. 

He's got a list of idols – role models – in his field, as most of us have had at one time or another. What's interesting about this list is most of the names on it – starting with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – never finished college. The guy he's working for – the guy who founded the company and secured the funding – is 20 years old and did not finish college. The same is true about the many successful, busy, happy geeks he has run into in the month since he's been there.

So we have a huge, successful, vibrant, creative, entrepreneurial subculture creating great wealth and changing the culture of the world with tecnology, and many (most?) of them did not do what, for generations, we have assumed you had to do to create world-changing technology.

How does that inform us when we start to ask about economic development in Otsego County? The Governor has connected job growth in New York to the SUNY system, and he may be right (more on that soon). But are we making any purposeful forays into the (admittedly unfamiliar) world of 21^st century technology, where the rules we've used for centuries have been left behind? The world has changed, friends. We need to change with it or be left behind. Dylan was right: “He who isn't busy being born is busy dyin'.”