Minneapolis in 1950 was a pretty desolate, cold, forbidding place in the winter, and yet they had a couple of things going for them. First of all, they had a tremendous Scandanavian education ethic, coupled with a 'home-schooling' belief in 'well-rounded' folk that translated into a love of the arts.
Somewhat surprisingly, they voted for computers to augment the grain mills producing cereal, and the result built a formidable Computing Base. There is a new book, by Thomas Misa, director of the Babbage Institute, called Digital State, that describes some of what they accomplished with Control Data, Cray Research, Sperry, ATC, and Honeywell just to name a few. For nearly three decades, they were the true competitor to IBM on a worldwide basis.
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, MECC, was briefly mentioned, but unfortunately Misa missed the real significance of this group. It in fact spawned the Apple Education group, which transformed American schools a decade ahead of any other country, which accounts still today for the leadership America has in software development. This particular factoid was also missed by Walt Isaacson's sweeping grandiose biographical treatment of our wunderkind, Steve Jobs
But my purpose here is to reflect on another element scarcely mentioned in Misa's fine book--> the Minneapolis 5% club. This was conceived by Bill Norris, the CEO of Control Data as a self-taxing scheme to rebuild Minneapolis and St. Paul (the twin cities) for the arts and sciences. Working first with the downtown Minneapolis Club, sort of a brahman Bohemian Grove membership, he convinced them that the larger corporations of the Twin Cities should set aside 5% of their pre-tax earnings and pay it to a local "Development Fund" rather than send their tax dollars to Washington D.C. and hope for grants from the national level back to their fine arts efforts. The good news was that corporate taxes then were even higher than today, so a 5% tax kept locally only cost the companies 2.5% of net earnings. The second piece of good news was that Minneapolis/St. Paul had seven of America's top 50 corporations, so this was sizable money (General Mills, General Foods, CDC, SperryRand, Honeywell, 3M, and Post Cereal). Today, of course, local Minneapolis firms include Sheraton, Target, Best Buy and Cargill -- DID YOU KNOW THAT CARGILL is as large in revenue as APPLE? Yup, foodstuffs are 'big business'.
Today, Minneapolis has more Arts per capita by a factor of five than any other city in America--some sixty-three civic playwright groups for a middling size town. It worked, for their goals. You might have been to the Guthrie Theatre?
It wasn't just 'the arts' but also the sciences. Mayo Clinic owes its strength in part to this initiative, as do many of the best biomedical advances we've enjoyed.
Why am I carrying on like this? Well, just think about it. Pittsburgh took a 2% plan version of the Twin Cities plan and rebuilt the Golden Triangle. If we had a 1% plan for just our top ten companies in the valley, it'd be $740M this past year instead of $34M. The U.S. Treasury would be $250M lighter, which could be made up by repatriating one-tenth of one percent of the squirreled-away money from last year from the same companies in the Bahaman/Irish scams... and we'd have some true outreach money--like $1B over a decade or so for local agencies. That presumably could do some good.
If there were an agreed-on plan for how to use the money, it might even make sense.
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