Louisiana – proud to be a laggard in business

Yesterday, the Times Picayune’s “Money” Section announced in bold headlines: “La. held ground in economic quake.” The point of the TP story was to highlight an AFL-CIO report that showed that Louisiana hasn’t felt much of an economic slowdown from the bursting of the tech bubble. Gee, I wonder why?

The bursting of the tech-bubble is called “an economic quake,” and next to the headline is a large map (unfortunately not online) that shows, through color-coding, how each state was affected by the “economic quake.” Amazingly, Louisiana is completely white, which means that we didn’t suffer at all (hurray!). Of course, neither did Alaska, Montana, Vermont and Oklahoma. Wonderful. Just call us the “Five Horsemen of the Tech Apocalypse.”

Seeing this story featured in the “Money” Section tells you a lot about why Louisiana has such a poor economy. Only a moron would fail to grasp that it isn’t good news that we were left out of the tech bust (because it means that we have no tech industry at all). You need an educated workforce to have a technology industry, which we don’t have. We have people who can’t write stories about economic news that are above an 8th grade level.

Is the lack of an educated workforce our only problem? Most certainly not. Just recently our most populated County/Parish was just rated as one of the 13 litigation ‘hellholes’ in the Country, which is the sort of pedigree that businesses look for when deciding where not to move to. Way to go Louisiana!