Sometimes the simplest words convey powerful meanings.

During an interview at the Jefferson Economic Development Commission’s annual lunch, Susan Bourgeois, Secretary of Economic Development, and Michael Hecht, CEO of GNO Inc., were asked what their measure of success for economic development would be. Secretary Bourgeois’ answer was a simple, “growing wages”; Michael Hecht’s answer was equally succinct, “a growing population”.

Yes, yes, yes, they get it, and now that big crowd gets it too. What better measures could there be for our region or the state to measure how well our policies are working than the positive metrics of growing wages and growing population.

Growing wages indicate that businesses and the jobs they create and sustain are healthy and able to trigger increases in wages corresponding to increases in business income. Growing wages indicate that business owners are confident in the region’s ability to sustain growth and to assure them that they can make and keep growing profits. The result for citizens is that personal wealth and prosperity follow, and that city and parish revenues increase accordingly. The message that political leaders in the region must accept is that the way to increase the people’s share of the prosperity pie, their wages, is not to create policies that result in sharing ever smaller pieces of a shrinking pie, but instead to grow the pie so that individual’s pieces grow by default. Profits must not be subject to political pandering, instead they should be honored as the way to increase economic opportunity for all.

A growing population is related to growing wages because a parish or a city that thrives as reflected by wage growth will automatically grow in population. Simple economics, if a city or parish offers opportunity then people will come. And when they come, they feed that growing economy, real estate prospers, large and small businesses grow to service the growing population, institutions and NGOs build on growing participation and contributions, city revenues increase, and those in the lower economic sectors get to see opportunity where none had existed before. A growing population, reflective of a positive economic climate, is like fertilizer to a garden, not enough and the garden withers, plenty and the garden delivers bountiful crops.

Growing wages and growing population – two related and beautiful concepts, are the only way out of the economic malaise that we have been mired in for decades. Every decision made by political leaders must be based upon how they will impact these two metrics. In order to avoid the trap of government enacting policies that seek to slice that pie ever smaller, no decision should be based upon an assumption that wages and population are stagnant metrics. Just the contrary, every decision, every policy, no matter how minor, must be tempered to answer the question, does this make the pie bigger? Economic development and business leaders and organizations must be vigilant to call out bad policy before it becomes law.
There can be nothing more critical for the future of the New Orleans Region, in fact the whole state, than to be able to see a future of growing wages and growing population. There can be no greater opportunity than now to change course and seek that Nirvana that so many other southern cities have achieved by doing so.