Mississippi has to close the 'inventors gap'
Eleven-year-old scientist Gitanjali Rao wins the 2017 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge for inventing a device that detects lead in water. Roselle Chen reports. Video provided by Reuters Newslook
In the last century, Mississippi produced some of the most creative artists, musicians, and writers in the world. But how many engineering, computer science, or consumer product innovations can Mississippians boast? With all due respect to other artists, it is inventions of the more technical and practical sort that drive most state economies. After comparing 2010 census data with state-by-state patent registrations from the 21st-century, I found that Mississippi falls way behind other states in its per capita rate of registered inventions.
This may surprise few given Mississippi’s well-worn spot on the back bench of economic progress, but the size of the “inventors’ gap” between Mississippi and other states should shock the state’s political leaders into action. Massachusetts’s per capita invention rate is fifteen times greater than Mississippi’s. Several other states boast invention rates surpassing Mississippi’s by a factor of ten. While the most innovative regions cluster predictably on the East Coast and West Coast, most states in so-called “flyover country” also fly high over Mississippi. Both Minnesotans and Idahoans, for instance, best Mississippians’ per capita invention rate by 1,000 percent.
Even in the Southeast, Mississippi trails every other state. Tennesseans, for instance, invent at rates 255 percent higher than Mississippians, while the disparity of patents per capita is even greater in Florida (+292 percent), South Carolina (+313 percent), Georgia (+363 percent), and North Carolina (+521 percent). Among states with more comparable educational or racial demographics, Alabama scores higher than the magnolia state by 42 percent, Louisiana by 36 percent, West Virginia by 33 percent, and Arkansas by 18 percent.
The only state with a similar per capita rate of registered inventions since 2001 is Alaska. But Alaska’s slightly lower rate may be attributable to its more insular tribes of Native Americans and its sizable migrant workforce together representing almost a quarter of the population. Alaska’s language, legal, and geographical barriers likely hinder its residents’ opportunities and desires to patent new inventions. On the other hand, Mississippi should claim much higher innovation rates with its greater percentage of English-speaking Americans with closer geographical and cultural connections to American markets. Yet Alaskans and Mississippians share almost equal rates of invention. Needless to say, this is very bad.
This inventors’ gap may help explain why Mississippi’s gross domestic product is also so much lower than every other state on a per capita basis. Or, more likely, the state’s abysmal level of productivity and scant rate of innovation may reinforce one another in a downward spiral. Mississippi’s per capita GDP is so low that if you sliced the economic production of the state like a pie into equal shares for each resident, our individual shares would be much smaller than similarly sliced shares representing other states’ economies throughout America. In fact, Mississippi is such an outlier for the American range of GDP per capita that it falls somewhere between Kuwait and Puerto Rico on this measure of economic well-being, instead of producing at levels closer to its sister states. Based on these bottom-line figures of low levels of productivity and even lower levels of innovation, is it surprising that NBC News and SurveyMonkey released a poll in April showing that Mississippians are much more pessimistic about their economic future than respondents from neighboring states?
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So what can Mississippi do about the inventors’ gap? Education policymakers are taking positive steps toward improving math and science education. Likewise, conscious attempts by lawmakers to improve the business climate of the state also demonstrate some awareness of the need to shake things up. But stronger medicine is needed to get Mississippians creating and producing at healthier economic levels.
In short, direct encouragement of a more grassroots entrepreneurial culture should be the centerpiece policy of economic development in Mississippi. Some evidence suggests that encouraging entrepreneurs and would-be innovators may be more critical than luring larger corporations to change the economic trajectory of a state like Mississippi in the twenty-first century. With empty factories and shuttered strip malls becoming an all-too-familiar sight in the rural areas of the United States, the idea of focusing economic development efforts solely on attracting large corporations that leave these empty hulls behind seems risky at best and crazy at worst. By contrast, when small entrepreneurs fail (and most new American businesses fail), a more eager generation of businesses will rise up to take their chances.
I propose that economic development agencies encourage small-scale entrepreneurs by allowing them to subdivide the leased space in empty buildings, both manufacturing centers and retail centers. Under these controlled auspices, entrepreneurs should be allowed to work in a hospitable environment their first year or two without state and local taxes and without burdensome red tape. This means state and local governments should be easing licensing requirements and regulations in the startup period too. Best of all, the government does not have to provide direct financial support for this idea, if investors are allowed to provide business financing to these entrepreneurs tax-free and with the same shielding benefits that are available for limiting personal liability in corporations.
As this idea democratizes benefits routinely extended to elite corporations and the hyper-wealthy, I thought it should be called “ISLANDS.” This acronym stands for “Innovation Safe-Harbors (for) License-Exempted Activities (and) Non-Taxed (and) Deregulated Startups.” In my view, any empty building blighting the landscape of Mississippi could be transformed into ISLANDS of entrepreneurs. The “ISLANDS Act” is the shorthand for an authorizing statute that lawmakers may want to consider drafting in the next session, especially as they consider what to run on in 2019. Can something like an ISLANDS Act close the inventors’ gap in Mississippi? Maybe, but getting ordinary Mississippians to think more creatively about how to make money as entrepreneurs and investors could be a game-changer in boosting productivity and optimism in a state that is still struggling.
Joe Wallace is a Corinth native, attorney and PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University. Contact him at email@example.com.