Motivating

As we come out of one of the worst recessions in the history of the US, It is a very rare thing to find a story that shows improvement in any sector of the financial and labor market. So, when I stumbled across the article State set to recover sooner than US by Robert Gavin in the Boston Globe, I was overjoyed at the change of pace. Finally! Things are looking up! The story basically compares local economic activity (ie. job loss, home sales, etc.) to the national average of economic activity. The results? Massachusetts (Boston in particular) is standing tall against the red tide of job loss, bank closures, and real estate collapse, but not to be too optimistic, Gavin gave about a paragraph towards the end to note that Boston is NO Utopia. The unemployment rate is still high and the real estate market isn't the gem that it used to be; there is still room for improvement and that improvement will be slow and difficult.

For this entry, I decided to critique this article based on a very solid rubric. Did it answer the following questions: who, what, why, when, where, and how?

• Who? - Massachusetts businesses and Banks which include: Metratech, Kinefac Corp., etc.
• What? - The state of the Massachusetts economy is much better than the national state
• Why? - Because by comparing national statistics with that of Boston, we see that there are significant percentage differences in the amount of unemployment, the real estate market, the numbers of bank foreclosures, and other recession related economic downturns.
• Where? - This growth is occurring in most parts of the Massachusetts economy (referred to in Why?)
• How? - Economists, like Mark Zandi who was referred to in the article, accredit this growth to the amount of "exports and business spending, and technology is a big part of that. That’s important to places like Boston and Massachusetts."

Overall a very motivating article, It gave me valuable information on all parts of the subject including how Massachusetts performed in previous recessions. I would change 2 things about this article. First I would include more quotes from analysts and economists, because this piece only quoted two notable sources. Secondly, I would have moved the closing stories about the real-life, struggling citizens to the front of the article and then concluded it with their return to Massachusetts, as opposed to, tacking on their story at the end of the article like an afterthought.