Where is Mississippi’s future heading?
By Charlie Smith
Gross domestic product is the most basic and important measurement of an economy, and a new statistic allows it to be tracked at the local level for the first time.
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released in December what it called “prototype estimates” of GDP by county for the years 2012 to 2015. It plans to eventually provide that data each year. What that means is the local areas can track over time the worth of what they produce, including the value of things they make there (goods) and things they are paid to do (services).
The University Research Center, a state agency that does nonpartisan economic analysis, looked at the data from Mississippi in its January newsletter. Although the GDP numbers are now four years old, they still reveal some long-term trends that bear watching. Here are three that jumped out to me:
1. The metro Jackson area is important for the entire state. Its three counties (Hinds, Rankin and Madison) create 25.2 percent of the state’s GDP. The next areas in size are the Gulf Coast (Harrison and Jackson counties) at 14.2 percent and DeSoto County at 4.8 percent. Those former two sit on the state’s edges and benefit primarily from things outside its borders (the Gulf of Mexico and Memphis, respectively).
So Jackson forms the economic heart of Mississippi. Perhaps that’s always been known, but the GDP numbers drive it home further — and create a reason for putting statewide resources into our lone metro area that has long suffered from a lack of infrastructure investment and a hard-to-address racial separation.
2. This may seem paradoxical to the first point, but Mississippi has to figure out a way to build up its rural counties. Less than a third of the counties produced more than three-quarters of the GDP, according to the University Research Center analysis. Those areas are doing relatively well, with a manufacturing base and new stores and homes being built.
But the majority of the state by land area is losing people and struggling to find its place in the 21st century. The economies in those places were dominated by agriculture from the state’s formation up until the mid-20th century followed by low-wage factories that have now moved to where they can get away with paying employees even less in Third World countries.
Where does that leave those rural Mississippi communities? No one seems to know, but the good news is that Mississippi is in the middle of what I would call the most desirable area of the country based on geography (the South, with plenty of land and water and blessed with good weather most of the time) in the most desirable nation in the history of the world. Sometimes the many problems distract us from those two basic factors that bode well for the longterm prospects of Mississippi.
But rural economic development must be a priority, not just in the 10 or so thriving counties that control the vote in the Republican primaries and thus dominate the influence of state government. Conservative rural voters need to wake up and make sure the GOP establishment reflects their interests before blinding voting a party-line ballot.
3. Finally, at a much less significant level but of a weird interest to me, when is Mississippi going to shut down Issaquena County? The tiny speck on the Mississippi River in the South Delta has only 1,300 or so residents, and accounted for exactly “0.0 percent” of state GDP in 2015, according to a map produced from the data. The University Research Center noted that the actual amount is 0.02 percent. It has made sense for years to merge Issaquena with adjacent Sharkey County to save money from having two Boards of Supervisors, courthouses, etc. Obviously, the locals won’t like it, and it will require re-teaching school children how many counties the state has (81 instead of the current 82). But it’s past due. The GDP numbers help illustrate that — and a lot more.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at (601) 736-2611 or csmith@columbianprogress.com.
Tyrann Mathieu beat the odds
If you are not an LSU football fan, it can be difficult to like Tyrann Mathieu, the defensive back better known during his days in Baton Rouge as the Honey Badger.
His athletic ability is not in question. He was a star at LSU, winning the Chuck Bednarik Award as college football’s best defensive player. He has spent six years in the NFL, first with the Arizona Cardinals and this past season with the Houston Texans. His current teammates say he is a locker room leader and motivator.
But for all his talent on the field, Mathieu always came across as the self-important, entitled athlete who thought he could ignore the rules and get away with it. Because, after all, he was the Honey Badger. Not quite. LSU had to dismiss him from the team for multiple substance violations, usually involving marijuana. And before Arizona drafted him, the team did plenty of research and even elicited a pledge from its star defender, former LSU player Patrick Peterson, that he would take Mathieu under his wing and make sure he behaved.
A revealing profile of Mathieu in The Washington Post goes a long way toward explaining why he has behaved so immaturely at times. The bedrock reason will resonate with many.
Mathieu, it turns out, lacked something as a child that most of us take for granted: parents. His biological father has been serving a life prison sentence for murder since Mathieu was 2 years old. His grandfather died at age 5. An uncle was killed, an aunt died in a car wreck.
Mathieu was the only one of his mother’s five children that did not live with her. As a child, he once asked her why, but she wouldn’t tell him.
“Mathieu, 26, has, for better or worse, conditioned himself to be comfortable in chaos — including that of his own making — in part because, years ago, he vowed to reach football’s mountaintop not because of size or speed but through fearlessness and will,” the Post reported. “That would be the only way to convince his family, specifically his mother, that he was worth something, that Tyrann Mathieu was worth keeping.
“Therefore, there would be no fight he wouldn’t pick, no cage he wouldn’t rattle. And with confrontation as his superpower, he would be lifted from the urban decay of New Orleans and into the college ranks ... and eventually the NFL.”
Against the odds, it has worked out for Mathieu. He gets paid millions of dollars a year to play a game. He has gone through rehab for his marijuana addiction and says he’s clean. He and his girlfriend have two kids and a nice home.
Relatives have told Mathieu that his mother’s story is nothing dramatic. They say she was an immature young woman who wasn’t ready for motherhood and had no idea how her decisions might affect her son.
Mathieu’s background is too common. How many kids today are being raised by grand-parents, as Mathieu was? How many of them wonder where one or both of their parents are, and why they rarely see them?
The obvious answer is too many. But it’s certain that too few of these children, wounded by a feeling that they are worthless, can generate the will by themselves, as Mathieu did, to overcome the handicap of parental detachment. This willfulness came with a price, though, and could have cost him a chance in the NFL.
Mathieu once again would like to ask his mother, for whom he now has bought a house, why she ignored him. Ironically, he believes there is a risk to getting an answer.
After all, not knowing why she kept her son away has fueled Mathieu’s overachievements. If one day she tells him, he fears it will douse the fire that made him such a good player.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
