I’m terrified Amazon will chose my city
As we near the final decision by Amazon where they will put their second headquarters, I’m really hoping they don’t pick my hometown of Boston.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a huge compliment that Amazon has Boston on it’s list of finalists for a new super facility.
Lured by 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in new investments, Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh earlier said he would be “laser focused” on bidding. Here, bidding means deciding how much of our money to offer in the form of tax incentives.
Is it a coincidence that that news came out at the same exact time GE has announced they are cutting jobs and $2 billion in costs? Because there is a sense of cosmic timing here. GE announced downsizing and delays for the relocation of it staff to Boston, though the tax incentives will still kick in right on schedule.
When that deal was finished I wrote to question why GE should get special treatment — and why other businesses should be forced to compete with GE while paying taxes GE doesn’t have to.
But a potential Amazon deal raises new questions for me (though, those other questions still remain, especially since asking retail to compete with Amazon on unequal tax footing is a tough pill to swallow).
In part, my questions stem from Amazon’s business model as a leading-edge automator.
It starts with this: Why aggressively chase jobs that are likely to be automated soon anyway?
Economically, the Boston area is one of the luckiest in the nation. But even though we’re clearly in an advantageous position — with top notch higher education, health care and tech — the powers that be are still eager to sell the farm for an economic boost, for more jobs especially.
Here’s my controversial point: More jobs is a lie.
I’ve been around long enough to have seen “job creation” used to justify all kinds of outlays of public money and resources that would be otherwise undesirable. Corporate tax breaks to create jobs, cutting environmental regulations to create jobs. Most of the time, the promise of jobs falls pretty far short of the billing. But the bill is always paid in full.
Maybe we should just stop doing things that hurt our communities to create jobs that never seem to materialize.
But on the other hand I understand it. There are not enough good jobs.
And unless we see the writing on the wall, that might be a permanent condition.
Amazon is a terrific case study. Their incredible growth as business comes from a set of innovations which make it more convenient and cheaper to get stuff — and the automation of human work is a huge part of that.
Amazon can’t keep growing forever, fueled by eternally increasing demand for more stuff. There is a limit to this. We already make way more stuff than we need and much more than the planet can sustainably provide.
None of this means we shouldn’t innovate production. Innovation has brought us the ability to have more than we need of just about everything. But as we innovate, we need to think about what makes the system work for real people. We should be skeptical of the promise of more jobs, and we should be gearing up to make sure the coming disruptions don’t undermine people’s quality of life.
If I could sit down with Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, I’d ask him what he thinks the biggest problems for people in Boston are (and if he doesn’t mention affordable housing as number 1, he isn’t listening), and how on earth Amazon coming here solves those problems.
There is an underlying assumption for Mayor Walsh and many other politicians that worries me to the core: That a higher volume economy is always better. In Boston’s case, it just isn’t true.
If you abandon that assumption, you can focus on improving quality of life first and foremost. Maybe that means improving the economy, but maybe, actually, that does nothing to help people.
What are Boston’s real problems, and what will actually solve them?
These are the questions that we could be asking if we weren’t chasing the shrinking job pool with our increasingly stretched public dollars.
If Amazon wants to move, let them do it on their own dime. We have other problems to solve.
