“Urban Writer” Jim Miara thinks I may be trying too hard to put a bad spin on the news that fewer people are moving out of Massachusetts:
Sometimes the glass is half full. Yes, Mass. population gains could be attributable to a sinking economy, including a poor housing market and rising gas prices, but there could be another reason: It’s a good, progressive, tolerant place to live. It’s just a thought.
MassINC for years has been the pure voice of gloom and sometimes doom. You are going to make yourself ill. Cheer up.
Miara is being somewhat tongue-in-cheek (he assures us that he has “the greatest respect” for MassINC research), but he’s right that reflexive pessimism can be an occupational hazard among journalists and think-tank people. Few of us aspire to write a report headlined “Don’t worry, everything’s OK” — in part because things never stay OK for very long. (Everyone agrees with that, right?)
By the way, Miara has noted our Eeyore-like tendencies before. In a 2006 column for Banker & Tradesman, he wrote, “By far the most prolific identifier of impending calamities is the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, better known as MassINC.”
I just may put that on my resume, in anticipation of the Bay State being wiped out by rising sea levels and my applying for a job at the Kentucky Institute for a New Commonwealth.
In his B&T column, Miara lauds the long-range perspective of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, and I should point out that CommonWealth magazine ran an essay of his in 2003 called “Mother of Reinvention“:
Time and again, Boston has faced economic crises that seemed to doom the city and its surrounding area to second-tier status, if not worse. Time and again, Boston has found new sources of productive growth.
So we do sound an optimistic note from time to time at MassINC and CommonWealth (about Boston, if not the rest of the state). Look for another one in about five years.