The big problem with trying to envision–let alone shape–Seattle’s economic future is that we cannot see into the future. And history shows that the people who say they can, mostly can’t.
Here’s an example more than a century old. At the end of World War I, Seattle opinion leaders were imagining the city’s future in world trade. And the market they selected as the most promising for Seattle was… Siberia.
I’m not kidding. Siberia was It. The politicians said so. The Chamber of Commerce said so. The Seattle Times said so.
You could see it on a map. Siberia is 7.7 times the size of Alaska, the territory that had made Seattle rich — and Siberia was stuffed, its promoters said, with timber, minerals, fish and animals with pelts worth millions on the Seattle Fur Exchange. Siberia was crying out for American capital and know-how. Siberia would be the next Alaska. But it wasn’t, and a century later, it still isn’t.
In 1997, George Russell spoke to the Seattle Rotary Club about his recent tour by investment managers of China and Russia. Which of the two big countries had the brightest future? “My bet is on Russia,” he said.
George Russell was no fool; as CEO of the Frank Russell Company, he was the most highly regarded investment guy in Washington. But he didn’t know the future of trade.
Consider the future of industry. Back again to 1918: on November 23 of that year, two weeks after the end of World War I, a Seattle daily newspaper had an interview with Edgar N. Gott, vice president of the Boeing Airplane Company. The company was barely three years old. It had 250 employees working at the Red Barn on wood-and-canvas biplanes for the U.S. Army. And the war had just ended. So what was the next big thing?
Gott knew: Airplanes! The beginning of air mail was right around the corner, he said. Soon, airplanes would be carrying express packages formerly carried by railroad. “Following the successful demonstration of these lines — and they cannot fail of success,” Gott declared, we would have “passenger air routes.” Once companies like Boeing had more powerful engines to put in aircraft, they could offer “gigantic plane forms, capable of carrying enormous loads,” Gott said. “In the not remote future, we will see air freighters and passengers of immense size rush across city and state, continent and ocean.”
The interview with Edgar Gott might have been the most important economic story of that year, but it was in the old Seattle Star, a sad excuse for a newspaper. The Times and the Post-Intelligencer paid no attention to it. Seattle’s civic leaders had their attention on shipbuilding, an industry with 140 times the jobs provided by Boeing. World War I had brought Seattle 35,000 shipbuilding jobs. The government said the work would continue. Local opinion was firm: It had to continue. It was too important to the city for it not to continue. Except that it didn’t. Within a few years, all the shipyards were closed.
Sometimes people get the future partly right. In the 1980s, Seattle investors had an infectious enthusiasm for biotechnology and computer software. They were right about software, which was as big as Bill Gates said it was. About biotech, not so much. Biotech became one of Seattle’s industries, but not the giant originally imagined. Drug development has a hog’s appetite for investor money, sometimes for little result. And when the scientists do hit a billion-dollar jackpot — and several Seattle companies did — the stockholders have taken the profit and run. The industry calls this “strip mining.” The drug survives; the companies don’t. Some of the people who created the companies — scientists, managers, investors — set up new ones, using what they’ve already learned. Forty years on, the company names are different, but the industry is still here.
Whatever Seattle’s industrial future is, history suggests it will not be a revival of industries that have fled to Asia, Mexico or some other place. It will be something new — something more like drug development and software than milling lumber or assembling iPhones. An industry that is profitable enough to pay high wages. Maybe it will be artificial intelligence. We have two of the big players, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. AI might be a good bet — but we don’t know.
Think back to the Eighties, when everyone just knew our future was “high tech.” And they were not entirely wrong. But if someone had said, “Actually, the next big thing for Seattle-area industry will be the emergence of world-famous retail chains. One will offer a 21st century version of the Sears, Roebuck mail-order catalog and make its founder one of the richest men on the planet. Another will open warehouse stores selling TVs, clothing, groceries, toilet paper and roast chickens on one floor — and this retailer will sell only to dues-paying members. A third company will cover the globe with shops selling $5 cups of coffee.
Would we have believed it? A few visionaries did, even if the rest of us did not. It’s best to admit that we don’t know the future. The best we can do is to get ready for it, and not block it.
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Bruce
Great reflection on our ability to predict the next big thing or hundred little things. Love the quotes from Eco Conferences past. I wonder how rebuilding our national democracy and federal systems of healthcare, labor protections etc will contribute to our PNW economy?
Gott was correct. We now have –
“passengers of immense size”.
I fear that Seattle is going to regress to being a provincial city, as opposed to an aspirational city of the past decades. Political impasses, retrenched arts, no driving economic leaders. What I suspect is that tourism will drive the new economy, with the drawbacks of seasonality, low wages, and poor multiplier effects — tourism being the bottom of the barrel for economic development. As for the more exciting drivers — Eds and Meds, Tech Magnet, Asian orientation, Euro-style city like Vancouver — I don’t see the political leadership to select one and stay with it. Meanwhile, climate refugees will lull us into thinking that we don’t have to make hard decisions.
David Brewster,
Why do you think that political leadership is a factor of any kind?
(So long as leadership is not some sort of teenage socialist fantasy leadership.)
I think the worst thing that could possibly happen is for our political leadership to get involved with choosing winners and losers. You know them — you have met just about every last one of the, over the last 50 years — do you feel comfortable giving them your public money to invest with?
“Benign neglect” would be perfectly fine.
The best we can do (and it’s perfectly excellent, in fact) is to
1.support good schools &
2.preserve the rule of law.
That’s what a public economic development program should consist of:
— good schools
— preserve a society of law.
Pretty much everything else is a waste of money.
Good news, or bad? Sounds more good, to me. Tourism not so much, but if “aspirational city” is what happened to Seattle in the preceding decade, I’m with Emmett Watson, maybe righter than he knew.
To me, the wild card is the University of Washington, whose ambitious master plan was OK’d by the council a few years ago despite acknowledged catastrophic traffic consequences and inevitable housing problems. In the unlikely event they realize their industrial ambitions, it’s SLU North, and another chapter like the chapter before.
Predicting is a no-win game. However, leaping in fearlessly, I’ll predict that it will be Education that saves us: Seattle’s institutions of higher learning that attracts students from around the country and world. Along with that, think about California, Oregon and Washington taking on vaccines in response to RFK’s vaxx avoidance. We have the medical structure and expertise to maybe become the new CDC.
Gott was Bill Boeing’s cousin and plant manager. From all accounts it was a stressful relationship.
Boeing’s real right-hand idea-man in his earliest aircraft-development business (who likely would not have given a news interview) was Navy Captain Conrad Westervelt, then based in Seattle to oversee military contracts with Puget Sound shipyards.
Westervelt was an Annapolis and M.I.T. grad and became Boeing’s close social friend. They both loved the idea of flight. Together they built their first aircraft design: the”B & W” seaplane.
On the side at that time, Westervelt was courting Boeing’s next door neighbor, Dorothy Stimson, who later founded King Broadcasting. He failed in romance, and the Navy soon called him to WW I military active duty. But Westervelt remained a key national player in military procurement, continuing to help Boeing win contracts. And achieve true business success.
Gott soon grew tired of his secondary role with his cousin and took a job with European aircraft manufacturer Fokker (a Boeing competitor) who needed an American executive to enter the U.S. market. Boeing was furious. He vowed never to hire another relative. But a few years later, his engineers urged him to hire his wife’s relative, Thorp Hiscock, a Cornell-trained, WW I ace pilot who was experimenting with radio technology. Until then, there was no way for pilots to communicate with staff and technology on the ground. Hiscock, who died in 1934 at age 41, found the solution for workable air-to-ground radio and provided many safety inventions that made Boeing’s future a bankable business, with airmail contracts using its planes powered by air-cooled engines, passenger service that became United Airlines, and eventually the B-17.