Idaho Challenged by Results of the Human Development Index

TechBoise is a blog, and not a news agency, but that is still no reason for us to slip into rank boosterism. At the same time no one here wants to adopt a sky-is-falling tone. Still, amidst all the constant lists that Boise makes for being a great place to live, work, and raise a family, there is other news to consider.

If you follow Creative Class guru Richard Florida, you saw his chatter about Human Development Index and potential implications for America and its communities. Not familiar with the report? The Measure of America website describes the index and report:

The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009, produced by the American Human Development Project, is modeled on the United Nations Development Programme’s global Human Development Report, which has provided authoritative analysis and a ranked index for countries around the world for almost two decades. The Measure of America, published by Columbia University Press and The Social Science Research Council, is the first time the human development approach has been applied in the United States or any other industrialized nation.

In developing the index, the report considers things such as income and growth, but also weighs things such as “quality education, a long and healthy life, personal safety, a secure livelihood, and a say in decisions that affect one’s life.” All that said, you like me, must by now be wondering where Idaho ranked on this index put together by some of the world’s top scholars. We’ll get to that in a moment but let me first say that the report contains a forward authored by an interesting partnership: Nobel Prize winning Economist Amartya Sen, and Venture Capitalist Bill Draper. I’ll get back to the significance of the Social Science/VC partnership in a moment, but let’s look at the Idaho results.

• Idaho has the lowest Human Development Index west of the Rockies, and one of the lowest west of the Mississippi - joining states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
• Overall, Idaho is in the bottom 10 states in educational attainment and school enrollment, and of the 11 states west of the Rockies scores 10th.
• In median earnings age 16 and over, only Montana has a lower income level than Idaho. That’s right - Idaho was #50.

That doesn’t paint a very shiny picture of the state of our human capital here. But there is hope.

As mentioned in a previous post about Vidoop’s move from OK to PDX, we learned an important lesson: that innovation occurs everywhere. We also learned that even tech innovation occurs outside of engineering schools (again see Vidoop). The first point is great news for Idaho - even with human capital trending on the low side all you need is one guy/gal with a good idea to start a spark. The second point is one I want to talk more about.

The big tech innovations in recent years AREN’T technology based - they are SOCIALLY based. Think about it. Craig’s list? Looks like circa 200 web dev. It’s barely anything more than HTML. Facebook and MySpace? Massive technological leap forward? Nope - just the social application of computer code. YouTube? No more difficult than creating an e-mail attachment. Blogger? Word on the web with cloud storage. These ARE NOT massive technological advancements - they are SOCIAL advancements. So what’s the implication? We need MORE partnerships like Amartya Sen and Bill Draper. It’s all fine and dandy when engineering students build a better mousetrap, but when it fails in the marketplace, they’ll need a social scientist to figure out why.

So - with limited human capital in the state here’s the plan: Idaho needs a bigger innovation tent. The engineers are playing, the VC’s are playing - but even we here at TechBoise have not begun to scratch the surface with including some people who are really on the cutting edge when it comes to tech and innovation.

Examples? I can’t disclose some of the projects that are being worked on by digital humanists within certain of our government agencies (but they can if they come here and leave a comment), but the level of technical competence and ingenuity that is coming down thew pike from the Historians at the Idaho State Historical Society, and from the librarians and programmers at the Idaho Commission for Libraries would blow your mind. And what about private sector companies like Blue Cross? Is no one out there cognizant of Microsoft and Google’s efforts to digitize medical records? Do any of us know what is going on with the Blues?

As I also alluded in that previous post, innovation takes care and feeding to nurture. Because we have a smaller pool of human capital from which to draw, and because that pool is not as deep (yet) as our national counterparts we need to follow the example probably unwittingly set by Sen and Draper and expand our innovation tent to include those that we might not ordinarily think of as innovators. We’re fortunate in that it’s FREE to do and we already do a pretty good job networking among the community and finding pockets of innovation no matter where they may be. Let’s do more of that.

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