In West Texas, leaders in business, politics, and civil society thrive on the personal touch.
There’s no substitute for relationships with customers, constituents and community members.
Their families, interests, concerns, and wellbeing matter.
Face-to-face interactions are how you know people, rather than merely knowing about them.
But even a hands-on leader occasionally needs to take a step back and look at the big picture. Much of our day-to-day lives is governed by political forces and economic trends that transcend our local communities.
Nation, state, and economy interact in complex ways. Competent managers, entrepreneurs, public servants, and civic officers need a way to navigate these complexities.
That’s why I put together two new economic dashboards, available for free at my website. I wanted to help West Texans access the most up-to-date economic data so they can make more informed decisions.
I present the data in a clean visual form, so users can easily see where we’ve come from and where we’re likely headed. Navigate to https://www.awsalter.com/dashboards.html to see them live.
The first dashboard, Texas Trends, shows how inflation, interest rates, and labor market trends are playing out in the DFW metro area, the State of Texas, and the United States as a whole. (Shoutout to recent Rawls College graduate Jacob Walker, who helped me set this up.)
These baselines help us interpret the Lubbock labor market, which the dashboard also covers. Unemployment rates, wages, and wage growth are all there.
By comparing these to the relevant state and country data, we can learn about the specific supply and demand conditions that matter most for Lubbock workers.
The second dashboard, West Texas Economic Report, offers snapshots of Lubbock, Taylor, and Howard Counties, with special emphasis on workforce composition and business formation.
For each of these counties—the three largest in our congressional district—you can quickly find past and current information about total employment, average salaries, who’s working in which industries, which industries are growing and which are shrinking, and the overall number of business openings and closings.
Because agriculture is so important to West Texas, I have a separate sub-section that surveys self-employed farmers and ranchers.
I include the number of producers and farms, as well as total acreage and proprietors’ income. Other data sources sometimes undercount these crucial pieces of information. We need them in the report to get a full picture of our local economies.
The things that matter most about our communities—who people are, what they value, how they look out for one another—can’t be plotted on a chart. But the right data sharpens our judgment and complements our relationships, revealing the deeper currents beneath the important decisions we make each day.
That’s what these dashboards are for: to help us better serve our neighbors. So put them to work. Visit https://www.awsalter.com/dashboards.html to see where West Texas stands and where it’s headed.
Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University and the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute. He is also a member of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s editorial board.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Salter says to know your neighbors, but know your numbers, too
Reporting by By Alexander William Salter / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
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By Alexander William Salter | USA TODAY Network
