The Boston Indicators Project, initiated just over 10 years ago, issued its first report in 2000 with the goal of tracking incremental progress through 2030, Boston’s 400th anniversary. At the time, there was little sense that Boston was about to enter a tumultuous new century. The city was at a century highpoint—a global center of the red-hot high tech boom.
The first report, The Wisdom of Our Choices: Measures of Progress, Change and Sustainability, expressed a framework of indicators and measures identified through a rigorous process involving more than 300 experts and stakeholders. Among its findings, the report noted that the booming knowledge economy was separating the economic fates of those with and without a good education.
The second report, Creativity and Innovation: A Bridge to the Future, covered 2001 and 2002, the years following the dot com bust, 9/11 and the 2001 recession. It highlighted Boston’s institutional, physical and cultural assets, but noted as a trend to watch the shift of young people away from Boston, Greater Boston and Massachusetts to lower-cost and warmer US regions, even during the boom years of the late 1990s, due to high housing costs and other factors.
As change accelerated, the next biennial report, Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: A Regional Wake Up-Call, covering 2003 and 2004, noted that the region was suddenly competing for jobs and talent not only with other US regions, but with China, India, and other emerging economies. As workers, jobs, and even corporate headquarters exited the region for greater opportunity or lower costs, the report called for a coherent, collaborative response. To that end, it issued an Emerging Civic Agenda that reflected a building consensus and the confluence of local and regional research findings.
That report sparked a series of civic agenda setting conversations that, in turn, contributed to the creation of a new civic mechanism, the John LaWare Leadership Forum, named in honor of an exemplary civic leader. Co-convened by Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President and CEO Cathy Minehan, Boston Foundation President and CEO Paul S. Grogan, and Sovereign Bank New England Chair John Hamill, the Forum regularly brings together civic and business leaders to review key trends and challenges, identify major initiatives underway to address them, and fill gaps, with a focus on the region’s “pipeline” of jobs, talent and education, housing, and new leadership.
This fourth biennial report covers 2005 and 2006, during which the local and regional economy strengthened measurably, with remarkable progress on the civic agenda set forth in 2004, as detailed later.
However, it has become clear over four biennial reporting periods that instead of tracking incremental progress, the Boston Indicators Project is measuring the local and regional impact of global transformation and chronicling change during one of the volatile periods in human history.
The early 21st century is characterized by the convergence of two enormous cycles of history. The first is the economic pattern of Western exploration and expansion, in place for 500 years, which now is shifting into a new global mosaic with the resurgence of China, India, Brazil, and other formerly colonized nations. The second is the beginning of the end of a 200-year cycle that began with industrialization and expanded rapidly with the extraction of fossil fuels, spurring unprecedented population growth and material consumption and reaching its environmental limit with documented global climate change.
Greater Boston finds itself at the vortex of global change as these two great cycles converge, with effects that are registering on the measures created by the Boston Indicators Project. A global center of innovation and education, a knowledge economy whose industries are squarely in the sights of global competitors, a coastal region at risk of inundation, and an ethnically diverse region growing only through immigration, the “City on a Hill” has as large a stake in the outcome of these global trends as any place on Earth—and as great a contribution to make in addressing them.
Indeed, with innovation a part of the region’s civic DNA, a “revolution” is already underway. MIT is innovating renewable sources of energy and energy-efficient products. Small businesses are developing breakthrough technologies in robotics, telecommunications, and ocean observation. Top educators are advancing a revolution in early education, science and math, flexible school structures, and teacher quality. Policy makers are grappling with the nation’s first universal health insurance mandate. Researchers are inventing the next wave of medicines and building materials. And artists and immigrants are reinventing local culture.
The good news in this report is that despite often daunting challenges, the “City on a Hill” has turned a difficult corner with greater consensus and cohesion than most observers would have imagined possible just two years ago. In confronting its own challenges by tapping its potential for collaboration, efficiency and innovation, Greater Boston is beginning to generate solutions to the world’s great challenges as well. If successful, these breakthroughs— both high and low tech—will spur a new wave of job growth and make the region a powerful magnet for the world’s most creative talent. However, in order to succeed, Bostonians must be vigilant to the huge global forces that face every region, and realize that in order to retain its historic role in the nation and the world, Greater Boston’s communities must work together as never before.
In this time like no other, Bostonians are being called once again to make their revolutionary mark.