We can sell more than our time
Housing and real estate are booming in the Wet Mountain Valley and its surrounding hills. While this growth is welcoming for local business owners, many worry about the lack of a diverse economy, an economy that works outside of just real estate and building. This worry is well placed as the Valley has suffered through two housing crunches since I have lived here. The first was the 2000’s tech stock crash that left half completed mansions sitting on top of hills when the paper profits of no-profit tech companies vanished into thin air. The other and more painful contraction came from the 2008 housing crash. The worst of that crash was not felt until 2012 when housing and building in the Valley were nearly non-existent. This economy is uncomfortably tied to the greater economy. So what does happen when this housing boom inevitably cools or comes to a stop?
That question has been tackled directly by the Custer County Economic Development Corp. (CCEDC) that have correctly understood that the economy here is fragile to housing hiccups. The group has worked to bring broadband to the Valley in hopes that jobs that depend on a good internet connection keep growing for locals. The efforts of the CCEDC are commendable and increased communication to the larger information economy will, and has, provided more jobs to the region.
This editorial is not about what has and is being done, it is more of a brainstorm on the ways we often think about jobs and the economy. The two main lines of reasoning locally are that jobs can come from real estate, building, tourism, and maybe a hightech company coming to town and providing jobs remotely. In some ways, the entire thinking in the Valley is that the only thing the economy here has to offer is the time and labor of providing building or other services. The “time equals money” mindset is so pervasive in this nation that countering the belief is considered an economic heresy. But time is not money. Time is time. Money is money. The current theory is that people decide how much time they want to trade for a desired amount of money. This dogma of time equals money is the reason that we see endless debates in government of hourly wages vs inequality. So, what does the Valley have to offer the world other than our time in the form of labor?
This question haunts my rereadings of Peter Frankopan’s book, “The Silk Roads” The book is a retelling of world history that focuses on the center of world trade, and how that center has shifted back and forth through the ages, in the area of central Asia we know as Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Over thousands of years, the center of world trade has shifted west in the time of Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire, and back to the east towards China, India, and the Arab empires. The constant of world history is the trade that happened endlessly between the east and west and every point in between.
That trade is still happening, and while now the west keeps going west till it reaches the east, humans seem to have a natural desire to trade with other humans across the globe. The riches and costs of that trade is the engine behind much of history. These traders did not think of money as time, at least not like we do today with accurate clocks. Instead, they were on the lookout for a good that someone wanted over there and would pay a fortune for, and a way to buy that good cheaply somewhere else for much less, hopefully making a tidy profit between the two parties.
Of course I am simplifying as these trade networks are, and were hugely complex organically forming networks of goods and people. But the point is that traders think in terms of profits, not of time, as money. For them, money was money. What does the Valley have to offer its own citizens and the wider world in terms of trade? Is it only time? When I am not at the Tribune, I am raising beef and selling it to those here and along the Colorado Front Range. There is something special about the high altitude grass and beef that makes our cattle in the Valley particularly tasty. Ranchers in Florida are not blessed with tasty grass. I think in pounds sold, not in time per pound. And I am always on the hunt to make the difference between cost and sale ever wider.
Others locally here are also experimenting with what we have to offer. Greenleaf Forestry is taking unwanted trees and turning it into finished products. Same with Ken Wisecup in Silver Cliff. I do not know all the things the Valley has to offer, but the more we think about it, the more I am sure it will turn up, as history has always been about trade and rarely about time. — — Jordan Hedberg
