A group of my students is currently consulting with the Economic Development Corporation of Utah to provide recommendations to the Governor's Office of Economic Development on how to structure Utah's incentive programs to maximize the state's competitiveness.
We have an uphill battle in attracting new business because Utah is perceived as inhospitable. As Rebecca Walsh reported in The Salt Lake Tribune in December 2005, corporate leaders have a perception of the state as clannish and closed-minded.
These perceptions, unfortunately, are serious disincentives to locate in Utah and therefore cost us all a lot. If we change these perceptions, we can do better in attracting business to the state. And the way to change them is to signal that Utah, indeed, welcomes diversity.
If we succeed, the payoffs can be great. Research by Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon University compellingly shows that communities that have large numbers of open-minded people attract more creative and innovative businesses.
Florida correlates the concentrations of high technology business and highly educated workers with three measures of the tolerance of a community: the percentage of households headed by same-sex partners, the percentage of foreign-born residents and the prevalence of designers, artists and writers in the community. Strikingly, Florida finds that the single best indicator of a community's high-technology success is the size of its gay population.
Why might tolerance of gay and lesbian individuals correlate with desirable economic growth? While there is no reason to suppose that people in high-tech jobs are predominantly gay themselves, high-tech workers do tend to be highly educated, have relatively few children, work hard and are well-paid. They therefore seek locations with a variety of cultural amenities such as museums, restaurants, clubs and bars, theaters and vibrant urban residential districts and excellent schools.
The number of gay residents in a city signals - if not causes - the existence of these amenities. It is no accident that cities such as San Francisco, Washington, Atlanta and Austin all have thriving high-tech industries, large gay populations and many cultural opportunities.
Utah, by contrast, does not closely fit this mold. Our state's residents are perceived as being less open-minded than we perhaps are, in part because of the message bills sent by our state Legislature. Until these perceptions are changed, the goal of encouraging high-tech and other high-paying industries to Utah will continue to be elusive.
But we have a low-cost option to encourage economic growth: be more tolerant and let people know.
The Utah Legislature has a big role to play in this effort to improve our reputation. It should change alcohol laws to encourage trendy restaurants and night spots; it must make the quality of our schools and universities a top priority; and above all, lawmakers must realize that enhanced penalties for hate crimes and tolerance for gay and lesbian citizens are more than social issues, they are economic ones, and they, therefore, should pass legislation that explicitly protects the rights of, rather than discriminates against, members of diverse groups.
We all must welcome those with alternative lifestyles and backgrounds, not just for a few weeks, like we did during the Winter Games in 2002, but always. We can all profit by making Utah a more attractive place for a wider range of people; if we don't, we all will pay.
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Harris Sondak is associate professor of business administration and David Eccles Fellow at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. He has been a visiting faculty member at Duke University, the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, Stanford University and the Indian School of Business in India.
