Business

Why Not Rhode Island?

By Patrick Laverty | December 7, 2012 |

In an interview with Brian WIlliams, Apple CEO Tim Cook yesterday said: “We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States. Next year, we will do one of our existing Mac lines in the United States.” The article doesn’t say where in the US that Apple will begin their manufacturing.…

Building a Business Community

By Patrick Laverty | September 28, 2012 |

Recently, we’ve seen a report from RIPEC about the troubled EDC and how to improve it. Everyone wants to improve the business community, or at least they say they do, but as one of the points in the report, Rhode Island lacks a clear vision or path toward making any improvements. Reports like that can…

Talking Teen Unemployment and the Minimum Wage on the Dan Yorke Show

By Justin Katz | July 26, 2012 |

630AM/99.7FM WPRO has posted my appearance on the Dan Yorke show, Tuesday, in two segments. The first is the initial half hour introducing the research from the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity and touching on some conclusions. For the second hour, Economic Development Corp. board member and VIBCO President Karl Wadensten joined us in…

A Decade of Moving Next Door

By Justin Katz | July 17, 2012 |

I’ve been following taxpayer migration data for years, but in a haphazard way. A new study that I’ve coauthored for the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity finally gave me the opportunity to review all fifteen years of available data from the IRS. The picture — from the 2003 beginning of what can only be…

Obama: Businesses Are Lucky & Should Thank the Government

By Marc Comtois | July 16, 2012 |

President Obama: [L]ook, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than…

Fundamental Questions (as in Business Fundamentals) About 38 Studios Running Aground When It Has

By Carroll Andrew Morse | May 15, 2012 |

Say you’ve got a company that has 5 products on the market, and plans to release a new one in the next year. Which products should existing teams and new hires be assigned to work on? Maybe your existing customer base is willing, in large numbers, to pay for a new release of one of…

If You Are Not Careful, You Can Eventually Hit Your Head on a Debt Ceiling

By Carroll Andrew Morse | July 18, 2011 |

There are about a half-a-dozen things I could comment on, in reaction to the announcement by Borders Books today that it is going all-the-way out of business. For now, following on from Justin’s post earlier today, I will simply note this passage from the Wall Street Journal story on the subject…Borders filed for bankruptcy-court protection…

Godin on the “Economies of small”

By Marc Comtois | April 19, 2011 |

Seth Godin has advice for the little guy. Like small business or even a small state. Economies of scale are well understood. Bigger factories are more efficient, bigger distribution networks are more efficient, bigger ad campaigns can be more efficient. It’s often hard to defeat a major competitor, particularly if the market is looking for…

Management as the Science of Squeezing

By Justin Katz | April 11, 2011 |

This interesting article by Matthew Stewart mainly questions the value of an education specifically in business administration, as opposed to, say, philosophy. Stewart notes two general management theories that alternate in emphasis in the popular mind, and this anecdote from the founding of one theory, indeed, from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s invention of the field of…

Open Thread: Combined Reporting, Good Idea or Not?

By Carroll Andrew Morse | March 8, 2011 |

Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee has proposed “combined reporting” in his FY2012 budget proposal as a means of raising revenue for Rhode Island. Given this is the most technical of the Governor’s major proposed “revenue enhancers”, the floor is open for any insights into the details of how and why “combined reporting” is supposed to…