Woe is us.

That is not Vermont’s official state motto (“Freedom and Unity” is) but it sometimes seems that way. It’s impossible to prove this statistically, but it does seem that official, established, Vermont-government officials, academics, editorial writers, and possibly even bartenders-spend more than half their time and energy moaning and groaning about how awful everything is here.

On Saturday, for instance, WCAX-TV (Channel 3),  the state’s most influential television news station, ran a story reporting that “for the first time in decades” fewer than 2,000 new businesses started up in Vermont last year.

The story was legitimate, maybe even important, and it was accurately reported by Keagan Harsha. But it lacked context, and in so lacking fit right into the “things must be awful in Vermont” mindset.

Things are awful in American, which is in a deep recession. Fewer people are starting new businesses all over the country. That’s the context that was lacking.

The point here is not to trash WCAX or Harsha. It’s to question the widespread sentiment that any discouraging news about Vermont, especially its economy, means the state must be doing something wrong. No doubt it is; who isn’t? But an objective look at economic statistics around the country indicates that Vermont is somewhat better off than the other states.

In fairness to Harsha and his bosses, the business start-up numbers come from the Vermont Secretary of State’s office. There was no way any reporter was going to call the other 49 secretaries of state, even assuming that they all keep similar figures. And the latest federal numbers from the Commerce Department are two years old.

Still, it’s possible to find some evidence showing that the economic news in the rest of the country is as depressed (and depressing) as it is here. Federal figures show, for instance, that  ”New Privately Owned Housing Units Authorized” fell last year in Vermont, but at about the same rate as elsewhere. It has been widely reported that Vermont has one of the country’s lowest rates of home foreclosures, arguably the root cause of the recession.  Vermont’s unemployment rate, though rising, remains below the national average.

As to people going into and out of business, a survey by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor run jointly by Babson College and Baruch College showed that the percentage of Americans engaged in new businesses fell from 12.4 percent in 2005 to 9.6 percent in 2007.

That’s a pretty big percentage decrease, and most of it came before the economy went into recession in the summer of 2007.

That figure is not exactly comparable to business start-ups, and at any rate, it’s a percentage drop, not an actual number as reported by WCAX.

Which raises an interesting question: Just what was the percentage drop in Vermont start-ups last year? WCAX doesn’t tell us. It tells us only that there were fewer than 2,000, perhaps the smallest number since 1980. But that could be a tiny percentage increase, or a large one. Without knowing how many new firms opened their doors in 2007, it’s impossible to figure out the percentage of decline, arguably the more meaningful statistic.

The same holds true for business failures. At least 800 Vermont businesses “closed their doors” in 2008, Harsha reported, with not a word about whether this was more than in 2007, or an unusually high number, not to mention any comparison with other states. And look at the comparison: Even in tough times, more than twice as many start-ups as failures. Not, it seems a portent of economic decay.

(The start-up and failure figures are presumably available at the Secretary of State’s office. But efforts to find them on-line over the weekend did not succeed, either because they are not available on-line or because the guy searching for them is a techno-doofus).

Again, the purpose of today’s exercise is not to hold up Channel 3 or its reporter, who seems quite capable, to special ridicule or criticism. The problem is that the station’s approach  was typical of the “woe is us” attitude. The story accentuated the negative, apparently based on the assumption that its audience revels in bad news. The news, to be sure, is bad. But evidence that it is any worse between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain than, say,  between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, or the Rockies and the Pacific, is somewhere between scarce and non-existent.

The danger here is that when a reporter or a scholar comes up with news indicating that Vermont does have a worse problem than most of the rest of the country, or that the state really is pursuing unwise policies-economic or otherwise-it will get absorbed by the noise. As the old story says, sometimes there really is a wolf, but who will know when if the watchmen keep crying wolf when there are only raccoons at play?-Jon Margolis

Tags: WCAX-TV

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Business & Economy, Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.