Thank heavens it’s Election Day, so we won’t have to listen to the people who want to be governor go on and on about the economy anymore.
OK, hopefully that got your attention. Charlie Baker and Martha Coakley never stopped talking during the campaign, but the subject of the state’s economy hardly ever came up. Can you remember anything either of them said about it?
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So here’s a brief but important reminder for the person who will actually become our next governor (you’ll know who you are by this evening): Massachusetts doesn’t have just one economy.
It’s worth pointing out, because the big picture — our aggregate economic numbers — looks decent in Massachusetts. That’s why the economy was a nonissue in the campaign.
The unemployment rate, 6 percent in September, is roughly in line with the rest of the slowly recovering country. Other standard measurements, like gross domestic product, also make the Massachusetts economy seem to be making progress.
But there are really lots of smaller economies at work in the state, and some of them are disturbingly polar opposites.
Normally, I don’t use a lot of space urging governors to do something about the economy, because their actual power to influence it is so limited. But the huge gap between many haves and have-nots in Massachusetts is such a pressing social problem that it should become a front-and-center issue for our next governor, regardless of his or her inability to do much about it by taking any single action.
That gap isn’t an entirely new issue. It’s usually discussed in Massachusetts as geography — east versus west, rich cities and poor cities — and all that is as true as it has ever been. Just compare downtown Springfield, which might eventually crumble into dust without a casino, with many parts of Boston, where it’s hard to avoid construction cranes.
As in the rest of the state, the jobless rate in Springfield has improved over the past year. But in Springfield, that means a seasonally unadjusted rate that shrank a percentage point to 10.2 percent in September. Cities such as Fall River and New Bedford still struggle with unadjusted jobless rates of about 10.5 percent. A few other Massachusetts cities also reported double-digit unemployment.
“Technically, we’ve recovered from the Great Recession, but this [expansion] has been characterized by a striking disparity between the economic outcomes of the incredibly dynamic Greater Boston region and the rest of the state,” said Michael Goodman, director at the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Even people like Suffolk Construction boss John Fish — Mr. Business in Boston — will bend your ear about the need to export some the city’s booming commercial opportunities to other parts of the state. He is worried about what will happen if the economy doesn’t expand its Greater Boston footprint.
But there is another kind of economic gap right here in Boston. It is driven by the cost of living in a city that is booming for some people, but not for many others.
We are building thousands of luxury condominiums and apartments — unprecedented construction that is catering to the very wealthy. Meanwhile, the government reported last week that homelessness in Massachusetts has grown by 40 percent since 2007 — worst in the nation.
The cost of living, as in paying for a home, is only the most dramatic way that Boston’s economic gap affects people who live in and around the city. Like regional differences, this is not new, but it’s a bigger problem than ever.
No individual can fix economic problems like that. But our new governor should be talking about them to everyone.
Steven Syre is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at syre@globe.com.