A close examination of the recent New York Times article, In Wisconsin Hopeful Signs for factories by Peter Goodman, suggests that things are anything but hopeful for Wisconsin’s working people.
Wisconsin lost 31,296 industrial jobs and 413 manufacturers between June 2008 and June 2009, the sharpest decline in at least 25 years.
Given these dismal numbers, a discerning reader might ask what Goodman found so encouraging?
He highlighted recent hirings at two Milwaukee area manufacturing firms.
The first, Rockwell International is a surprising choice since the company’s hourly employment has fallen from more than 1500 in 1985 when Rockwell bought Allen Bradley to 195 today. But hey, the firm just hired a dozen workers, right?
It turns out that Rockwell hired a dozen new workers at its non-union Mequon plant, while the unionized Milwaukee plant has 18 workers with 30 years of seniority still on layoff.
Over in Miller Valley all thirty of the brewers’ hires were vacation replacement workers not permanent positions.
Goodman is more accurate when he notes that manufacturing firms may be “… replenishing inventories after months of weak sales” but the developments at Miller and Rockwell hardly justify the New York Times over the top title: “In Wisconsin, Hopeful Signs for Factories.”
Showing posts with label miller Park. Show all posts
Showing posts with label miller Park. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Miller Park: It's the food, not the economics!
A few weeks ago I authored an article that questioned the economic value of publicly subsidized sports stadiums and professional teams. It generated a surprising amount of controversy since there is near unanimity among economists that professional sports stadiums deliver very little bang for the public buck.
An article in the Sunday New York Times lavishes praise on Miller Park. Not for its economic impact, but for its food.
The article, Buy Me Some Sushi and Baby Back Ribs, by Peter Meehan, who writes the $25 and Under restaurant reviews for The Times Dining section, doesn't rate Miller Park's food numero uno.
The gold medal goes to San Francisco AT & T Park which may no longer have a Bonds, but has "an overgenerous helping of fresh Dungeness crab meat, dressed in a gossamer coating of mayonnaise and piled between two warm slices of sourdough bread that had been scrubbed with garlic and griddled crisp that is to die for." That sounds like its almost worth the trip!
And Seattle may have the worst record in baseball, but its cedar planked salmon, what else, and its "Ichiroll, a spicy tuna roll named after the Mariners’ celebrity center fielder, Ichiro Suzuki" won the silver.
But Milwaukee's own Miller Park with its dome, brats, cheese curds and micro brews took the bronze, despite Meehan's obligatory swipe at our alleged lack of sophistication:
" Of course, baseball food isn’t all about cod, crab and sushi. Some parks excel at using more modest ingredients. Case in point: Miller Park in Milwaukee, a seven-year-old stadium that felt like a cathedral to baseball on the day I was there, when the fan-shaped retractable roof kept me and 41,196 other fans dry.
Like the city it is in, Miller doesn’t bother with cosmopolitan cuisine like edamame, but prides itself on heartier fare like grilled bratwursts and beer. The brats, from Klement’s, have that Germanic sweet spice accent just right, the casings are snappy and each of the three I ate had a good char on it. Another popular dish is cheese curds, which are crisp, not greasy, and have that unmistakable squeak.
And although the stadium’s name is owned by the Miller Brewing Company, the team had the foresight not to muscle out smaller Wisconsin brewers like Lakefront, New Glarus, Stevens Point and Sprecher. The team, after all, is called the Brewers."
I concluded my critique of the professional sports economic development paradigm writing: "So there may be good reasons for rooting for the Brewers. But economic development isn't one of them."
Maybe Major League Baseball needs to commission a new study providing a gastronomic rational for Miller Park. I'm sure there's an economist or consultant who would be willing to make the case for little more than a brat or two!
An article in the Sunday New York Times lavishes praise on Miller Park. Not for its economic impact, but for its food.
The article, Buy Me Some Sushi and Baby Back Ribs, by Peter Meehan, who writes the $25 and Under restaurant reviews for The Times Dining section, doesn't rate Miller Park's food numero uno.
The gold medal goes to San Francisco AT & T Park which may no longer have a Bonds, but has "an overgenerous helping of fresh Dungeness crab meat, dressed in a gossamer coating of mayonnaise and piled between two warm slices of sourdough bread that had been scrubbed with garlic and griddled crisp that is to die for." That sounds like its almost worth the trip!
And Seattle may have the worst record in baseball, but its cedar planked salmon, what else, and its "Ichiroll, a spicy tuna roll named after the Mariners’ celebrity center fielder, Ichiro Suzuki" won the silver.
But Milwaukee's own Miller Park with its dome, brats, cheese curds and micro brews took the bronze, despite Meehan's obligatory swipe at our alleged lack of sophistication:
" Of course, baseball food isn’t all about cod, crab and sushi. Some parks excel at using more modest ingredients. Case in point: Miller Park in Milwaukee, a seven-year-old stadium that felt like a cathedral to baseball on the day I was there, when the fan-shaped retractable roof kept me and 41,196 other fans dry.
Like the city it is in, Miller doesn’t bother with cosmopolitan cuisine like edamame, but prides itself on heartier fare like grilled bratwursts and beer. The brats, from Klement’s, have that Germanic sweet spice accent just right, the casings are snappy and each of the three I ate had a good char on it. Another popular dish is cheese curds, which are crisp, not greasy, and have that unmistakable squeak.
And although the stadium’s name is owned by the Miller Brewing Company, the team had the foresight not to muscle out smaller Wisconsin brewers like Lakefront, New Glarus, Stevens Point and Sprecher. The team, after all, is called the Brewers."
I concluded my critique of the professional sports economic development paradigm writing: "So there may be good reasons for rooting for the Brewers. But economic development isn't one of them."
Maybe Major League Baseball needs to commission a new study providing a gastronomic rational for Miller Park. I'm sure there's an economist or consultant who would be willing to make the case for little more than a brat or two!
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Study misrepresents Miller Park's economic impact
Tax for Miller Park didn't help economy
By MICHAEL ROSEN
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=741107&format=print
Opening day is a time for optimism. Warm weather is just around the corner. Another Bucks' season comes to a merciful close. And this year, we can hope that our Brewers will make a real run at the pennant.
But opening day also raises the question that the Journal Sentinel's Don Walker asked about whether "the stadium has been a net economic benefit to the community." ("Miller Park: Economic promises got it built. Has it paid?" April 4).
Walker refered to a 2-year-old Major League Baseball study by Leon Schur and Swarnjit Arora that gave new meaning to the baseball fans' maxim that "hope springs eternal" when it asserted that: "The direct and indirect economic impact by visitors (Brewers' fans) from outside the area, a majority of whom came from outside the state, resulted in $327.3 million in increased spending and the creation of 4,683 additional full and part time jobs."
These findings contradict all serious research on the economic impact of professional sports. Studies done by independent economists, not those paid for by stadium proponents like this one, are unanimous that there is no real economic benefit from public subsidies of stadiums and teams.
Robert Blade of Lake Forest College, for example, studied 30 cities over 30 years and found that 27 experienced no significant impact from new stadiums, while three experienced a negative economic impact. An anthology edited by Roger G. Noll and Andrew Zimbalist concluded: "A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment."
The MLB study made two errors: It ignores the substitution effect and grossly overestimates the number of out-of-town visitors and their expenditures. Both contribute to overestimating the Brewers' contribution to the local economy. The Schur and Arora argument relies on historical local economic impact multipliers that misrepresent the effect of consumer expenditures on professional sports because sports expenditures are subject to extraordinary consumer substitution away from other local entertainment expenditures.
Brewers' fans have relatively inflexible and limited entertainment budgets. The money they spend on a sporting event is a substitute for other entertainment such as movies, restaurants or eating out. Brewers' baseball doesn't increase the aggregate amount of entertainment spending in southeastern Wisconsin; it simply redistributes it from one form of entertainment to another.
Similarly, most professional sports tax collections, almost $15 million according to the Brewers' study, are also substitutes: As other entertainment businesses decline, tax collections from them fall, something the study ignores.
The study estimates that 57% of Miller Park attendees came from outside the metropolitan area, "a majority . . . from outside the state," and spent an additional "$327.3 million." This is almost double the most successful stadium, Camden Yards in Baltimore, where less than a third of the crowd at every game came from outside the area and the net gain to Baltimore's economy was roughly $3 million a year - not much of a return on a $200 million stadium investment and not close to $327 million.
The study also overestimates the spending of the visitors the Brewers' attract. Fans from Green Bay or Chicago don't spend nearly as much as projected because tailgating, the rationale for the stadium's location, ensures that visitors spend their food and beverage dollars in the communities they come from.
Schur attributes significant job growth to the Brewers. But most sports revenue goes to a relatively few players, managers, coaches and executives who earn extremely high salaries.
Most stadium employees work part time at very low wages and earn a small fraction of team revenues. Substituting spending on sports for other recreational spending concentrates income, reduces the total number of jobs and replaces full-time jobs with low-wage, part-time jobs. Since Miller Park was built, Milwaukee has lost more than 19,000 jobs.
Professional sports expenditures also suffer unusually large first-round leakages from the local economy because players export their earnings to their permanent homes. Moreover, players make inflated salaries for only a few years. They have high savings which are invested in national firms. Most of the millions that Schur counts simply leaves Milwaukee with the players and their investment advisers.
Stadium booster studies fail to recognize that there is an opportunity cost involved in publicly financing stadiums. More than the price of construction, what communities sacrifice in other goods or services to build professional stadiums is critical in determining the benefit to the community. The District of Columbia spent $611 million on its new stadium even as it planned to close a staggering 24 public schools and reduce library hours.
A strong argument can be made that the public dollars that financed Miller Park would have been better spent on education, given Milwaukee's achievement gaps.
Finally Schur and Arora argued that the Brewers are an amenity ". . . helping to decrease the recognized brain drain from Wisconsin." This is circular reasoning. The Brewers have been in Milwaukee since 1970, well before the alleged "brain drain" began. If the Brewers were the solution, we wouldn't have the problem!
The 1994-1995 Major League Baseball strike was a natural experiment that sheds light on the impact of professional baseball on a local economy. If the study is correct, the strike would have hurt Milwaukee's economy. But John Zipp found "the strike had little, if any, economic impact on host cities. Retail trade appeared to be almost completely unaffected by the strike."
So there may be good reasons for rooting for the Brewers. But economic development isn't one of them.
By MICHAEL ROSEN
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=741107&format=print
Opening day is a time for optimism. Warm weather is just around the corner. Another Bucks' season comes to a merciful close. And this year, we can hope that our Brewers will make a real run at the pennant.
But opening day also raises the question that the Journal Sentinel's Don Walker asked about whether "the stadium has been a net economic benefit to the community." ("Miller Park: Economic promises got it built. Has it paid?" April 4).
Walker refered to a 2-year-old Major League Baseball study by Leon Schur and Swarnjit Arora that gave new meaning to the baseball fans' maxim that "hope springs eternal" when it asserted that: "The direct and indirect economic impact by visitors (Brewers' fans) from outside the area, a majority of whom came from outside the state, resulted in $327.3 million in increased spending and the creation of 4,683 additional full and part time jobs."
These findings contradict all serious research on the economic impact of professional sports. Studies done by independent economists, not those paid for by stadium proponents like this one, are unanimous that there is no real economic benefit from public subsidies of stadiums and teams.
Robert Blade of Lake Forest College, for example, studied 30 cities over 30 years and found that 27 experienced no significant impact from new stadiums, while three experienced a negative economic impact. An anthology edited by Roger G. Noll and Andrew Zimbalist concluded: "A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment."
The MLB study made two errors: It ignores the substitution effect and grossly overestimates the number of out-of-town visitors and their expenditures. Both contribute to overestimating the Brewers' contribution to the local economy. The Schur and Arora argument relies on historical local economic impact multipliers that misrepresent the effect of consumer expenditures on professional sports because sports expenditures are subject to extraordinary consumer substitution away from other local entertainment expenditures.
Brewers' fans have relatively inflexible and limited entertainment budgets. The money they spend on a sporting event is a substitute for other entertainment such as movies, restaurants or eating out. Brewers' baseball doesn't increase the aggregate amount of entertainment spending in southeastern Wisconsin; it simply redistributes it from one form of entertainment to another.
Similarly, most professional sports tax collections, almost $15 million according to the Brewers' study, are also substitutes: As other entertainment businesses decline, tax collections from them fall, something the study ignores.
The study estimates that 57% of Miller Park attendees came from outside the metropolitan area, "a majority . . . from outside the state," and spent an additional "$327.3 million." This is almost double the most successful stadium, Camden Yards in Baltimore, where less than a third of the crowd at every game came from outside the area and the net gain to Baltimore's economy was roughly $3 million a year - not much of a return on a $200 million stadium investment and not close to $327 million.
The study also overestimates the spending of the visitors the Brewers' attract. Fans from Green Bay or Chicago don't spend nearly as much as projected because tailgating, the rationale for the stadium's location, ensures that visitors spend their food and beverage dollars in the communities they come from.
Schur attributes significant job growth to the Brewers. But most sports revenue goes to a relatively few players, managers, coaches and executives who earn extremely high salaries.
Most stadium employees work part time at very low wages and earn a small fraction of team revenues. Substituting spending on sports for other recreational spending concentrates income, reduces the total number of jobs and replaces full-time jobs with low-wage, part-time jobs. Since Miller Park was built, Milwaukee has lost more than 19,000 jobs.
Professional sports expenditures also suffer unusually large first-round leakages from the local economy because players export their earnings to their permanent homes. Moreover, players make inflated salaries for only a few years. They have high savings which are invested in national firms. Most of the millions that Schur counts simply leaves Milwaukee with the players and their investment advisers.
Stadium booster studies fail to recognize that there is an opportunity cost involved in publicly financing stadiums. More than the price of construction, what communities sacrifice in other goods or services to build professional stadiums is critical in determining the benefit to the community. The District of Columbia spent $611 million on its new stadium even as it planned to close a staggering 24 public schools and reduce library hours.
A strong argument can be made that the public dollars that financed Miller Park would have been better spent on education, given Milwaukee's achievement gaps.
Finally Schur and Arora argued that the Brewers are an amenity ". . . helping to decrease the recognized brain drain from Wisconsin." This is circular reasoning. The Brewers have been in Milwaukee since 1970, well before the alleged "brain drain" began. If the Brewers were the solution, we wouldn't have the problem!
The 1994-1995 Major League Baseball strike was a natural experiment that sheds light on the impact of professional baseball on a local economy. If the study is correct, the strike would have hurt Milwaukee's economy. But John Zipp found "the strike had little, if any, economic impact on host cities. Retail trade appeared to be almost completely unaffected by the strike."
So there may be good reasons for rooting for the Brewers. But economic development isn't one of them.
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