Here are a few pictures my dad took last summer in the Old Country. A couple of birds were released into the wild by Nordens Ark, an organization that works to preserve and strengthen endangered species.

We can use the updated county population estimates that were released by the United States Census Bureau last week to calculate metropolitan Boston’s estimated population in 2007.

A metropolitan area has an urban core of at 50,000 people and consists of the the surrounding geographic components that are linked to the core through commerce, commuting and other activities. A micropolitan area has an urban core of at least 10,000 people but less than 50,000.

The 800-pound metropolitan gorilla in New England is, of course, Boston, or as the Census Bureau elegantly calls it, using the definition created by the federal Office of Management and Budget, Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH. It consists of Suffolk, Norfolk, Plymouth, Middlesex, and Essex counties in Massachusetts, and Rockingham and Strafford counties in New Hampshire. It is divided into Boston-Quincy, MA (Suffolk, Norfolk, and Plymouth counties), Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA (Middlesex county), Essex county (MA), and Rockingham County-Strafford County (NH).

The estimated population for metropolitan Boston in 2007 is 4,482,857, which is 17,183 - or 0.4% - more than in 2006. The estimated population growth from 2000 to 2007 is 2.1%, or 91,513 people.

The table below shows the population estimates for metropolitan Boston and its main geographic components from 2000 to 2007.

Abbreviations:

B-C-Q, MA-NH = Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH.
B-Q, MA = Boston-Quincy, MA.
C-N-F, MA = Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA.
Essex, MA = Essex County, MA.
R-S, NH = Rockingham County-Strafford County, NH
Cen. = 2000 population count.
% = Percentage change 2000 (census) - 2007.

[3/27/2008 update: Don't take my word for it. Here's the Census Bureau's press release with links to relevant tables.]

(You can of course come up with your definition of what metropolitan Boston is and isn’t. For example, Massachusetts’s legislature has created what it calls Metropolitan Area Planning Council, where the “metropolitan area” covers Boston and 100 surrounding communities (yes, exactly 100 towns and cities). But that’s not the definition used here).

The United States Census Bureau released July 1, 2007, population estimates for counties this morning. Suffolk County, home of Boston, had an estimated population of 713,049, up from 710,139 in 2006, and almost 24,000 more people than the Census counted in the county in 2000. These are pretty dramatic upwards revisions of previous population estimates for Suffolk county. Last year’s estimate for the 2006 population in Suffolk was 687,610 people.

The table below shows the Census Bureau’s population estimates for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, from 2007 through 2006. The Old estimate (”Orig. est.”) column shows the estimates from last year’s data release, while the current estimate (”Curr. est.”) column shows the revised etimates released in 2007. The “Diff.” column shows the difference between original and current estimate, not year-by-year growth in estimated population.

What I call original estimates in the table above are in fact revisions of an earlier set of estimates. In the table below you can can see all three sets of population estimates for Suffolk county side-by-side:

What the table above tells you is that at this time two years ago the Census Bureau thought Suffolk had about 53,000 fewer residents in 2005 than what it now estimates the county had that year.

Since Suffolk had about 100,000 more residents than the city of Boston did in 2000, and since the Bureau’s various population estimates for the county and the city has never been more than about 115,000 people apart, I believe the 2007 population estimate for Boston will top 600,000. The current estimate for Boston’s 2006 population was 590,763, but was changed to 595,698 in November last year, after Boston challenged the estimate (yes, it really was last year, as I wrote initially).

According to the same sources (the 2000 Census and subsequent population estimates) Massachusetts’s population has grown from 6,349,097 in 2000 to 6,449,755 in 2007, suggesting that almost a quarter of the state’s population growth took place in Suffolk County. That seems somewhat hard to believe, but we’ll see what can be gleaned from coming population estimates and American Community Survey updates.

Barnstable and Berkshire counties have lost population since 2000, while Worcester county’s has grown to 781,352 from 750,963.

Massachusetts Speaker of the House Sal DiMasi made an interesting claim this morning in a speech to Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. The speech was largely an attack on Governor Deval Patrick’s casino proposal and part of that attack was highlighting the Speaker’s more “sustainable” economic development proposals. Said the Speaker, according to a document published by Boston.com:

The House recently passed legislation that will invest $1 billion in the life sciences industry, a bill that will allow Massachusetts to retain its spot as the top super-cluster in the industry.

It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

DiMasi had previously declined to project a number of jobs that would be created by the life-sciences bill. I think the Governor and Speaker are wildly overestimating the number of jobs that the bill will help create.

(The Speaker also said something that mystifies me a bit, namely:

We helped Target build a huge distribution center in Westfield, with 1,000 jobs in Western Massachusetts.

I haven’t found any details about that project other than in AP story from a year ago:

The economic stimulus package passed last year is paying dividends, [DiMasi] said, and increasing the tax burden would hamper progress. For example, the state’s $2.1 million investment toward a new Target retail distribution center in Westfield eventually will lead to 1,000 new jobs, he said.

So, are there 1,000 people working at the distribution center, as Speaker DiMasi is implying, or not? Is $2.1 million the entire value of the state’s “investment” in the distribution center?

The distribution center isn’t listed on Target’s corporate web site.
)

As you may have noticed I have made a few changes to the site over the last couple of days. There are two primary reasons for the changes: To reduce bandwidth consumption and to make it easier for the search engines to point users to the content they’re looking for. Most of my traffic comes from image searches and I’ve noticed over the last few months that a couple of the major image search engines are casting ever wider nets. Instead of linking searchers to the specific post that has the image or images the user is looking for they increasingly link them to the month in which the post in question rests. The result is that users have a harder time to find what they are looking for while bandwidth consumption is unnecessarily boosted. I’m currently pushing out 12 GB a month, which isn’t a whole lot in the scheme of things and certainly less than I could do, but at the same time more than than would be required if search engines were a bit more precise.

So what exactly have I done? I have collapsed archive links from monthly to annual on all single-post pages, while the monthly links are displayed on all archive pages. Archive pages now show excerpts instead of whole posts, which hopefully will help engines fine tune their linking to content on this site. The home page will continue to show the entire content for the ten most recent posts. I have also removed the blog roll from single-post pages, which wasn’t an easy decision. I have tried to mitigate it by creating a separate blogroll page to which all single-page posts link. All archive pages and the home page still include the blogroll in its entirety.

Finally, I’ve added a page that lists some current economic and demographic data for the United States (as well as a teaser for the page in the homepage sidebar). It’s actually a concept I’m ripping from a Swedish-language site I’ve been working on every now and then since 1999, Amerika.Nu, and I’ve been planning on adding it to this site for some time. Now it’s finally here, and I’ll expand it over the next few weeks.

When Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick outlandishly claimed that his $1billion life-sciences initiative would create 250,000 new jobs I speculated that maybe the Governor meant it would create 25,000 jobs which over the span of ten years - the duration of the initiative would result in 250,000 worker-years (assuming an extreme front-loading of the creation of jobs).

It now seems clear that he Governor was making similar calculation when he claimed that his proposal to allow the establishment of three state-licensed casinos in Massachusetts would create 30,000 construction jobs, a number critiques found hard to believe. A newly released study by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce sheds light on where the Governor got his 30,000 figure from. Yes, Patrick was likely talking about worker-years, not payroll jobs. States the study:

Estimates of construction labor requirements were derived from the cost of large, recent casino development projects. Construction labor inputs may be measured in terms of the total amount of labor necessary to complete a project or in terms of the average number of people employed during the project lifecycle. The former is expressed in worker-years while the latter is in terms of jobs. The projected total labor requirement for the initial construction is between 30,100 and 34,400 worker-years of labor… Dividing labor requirements measured in worker-years by a three year construction period results in an estimate of 10,000 to 11,500 construction jobs during development.

So there you have it. The Governor cooked the numbers by talking about jobs when he meant worker years.

It may not matter what Patrick is babbling about. The Taunton Gazette reports that state Rep. David Flynn is saying that the Governor’s three-casino proposal is going nowhere in the Legislature.

(Link to Chamber of Commerce report via Dan Kennedy. Link to Taunton Gazette via Universal Hub.)

The New England Patriots have re-signed unrestricted free agent wide receiver Randy Moss to three-year, $27 million contract after a couple of days of increasing nervousness among fans. Moss caught 98 passes for 1,493 yards and an NFL-record 23 touchdowns last year, and then he snagged another 16 receptions for 229 yards and four touchdowns in three ply-off games.

The deal ensures that New England’s offense will be at least as talented in 2007 as it was in 2008. The runningback position is solid with Sammy Morris, Laurence Maroney and Kevin Faulk. The offensive line is set. The only spot that potentially could be weaker than what it was last season is tight end, a part of the offense that has been under performing ever since Ben Coates left after the 1998 season. But that weakness was barely noticeable last year and it probably won’t be this year, either.

Having Moss on the field in 2008 doesn’t just mean quarterback Tom Brady will have his favorite weapon back, it will also give super-productive slot receiver Wes Welker - 112 receptions for 1,175 yards and eight touchdowns in 2007 - the kind of underneath space to work with that he did last season. Hopefully, the Patriots will sign a new number-two receiver to either replace Donte Stallworth, who has signed with the Cleveland Browns, or serve as back up for Chad Jackson, if the latter is finally ready to shoulder an expanded role in the passing game (or, more to the point, any role in the passing game).

Re-signing Moss could also help the Patriots during the latter stages of this free agency period as prospective free agent won’t have to wonder about whether the Patriots will remain competitive. They will, and any aging veteran’s best chance to win a Super Bowl is signing with New England.

In other Patriots free agency news, cornerback Randall Gay has signed with the worthless New Orleans Saints, where crappy players with crappy attitudes congregate to play crappy football, meaning we’ll only hear from him again if he gets himself arrested.

The Boston Globe’s Sean P. Murphy has taken a close look at Governor Deval Patrick’s claim that the Governor’s casino proposal will create 30,000 construction jobs in Massachusetts. Murphy presents evidence that suggests that the proposal will at most create 20,000 construction jobs, and that’s if casino developers build three very large casinos in the state and each casino development hires close to 7,000 workers. The one casino mentioned by Murphy that uses that many construction workers is one under development in Singapore:

In his study, [The Innovation Group economist Scott] Fisher looked at the $2.85 billion casino in Singapore being developed by Sands and projected the creation of about 6,900 new construction jobs. [Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon] Adelson has not detailed how much money Sands would spend on a casino in Massachusetts, but Fisher’s study said a casino in this state would be “comparable in scale” to the Singapore development. Under that formula, three casinos built at a cost of $2.85 billion each would create 20,700.

I assume the Singapore-based casino in question is the Marina Bay Sands resort, the first of two casinos that the island nation’s government has agreed to license in an effort to dramatically increase tourism.

In an 8-K filing to the SEC in November last year Sands reported that there are “an average of 2,000 workers on site” at Marina Bay, but I don’t know how that translates to total number of construction jobs.

It should be noted that the casino was touted as the most expensive in the world when it was announced in 2006. It’s not merely a casino but a so-called integrated resort that is expected to pull in a lot of Meeting, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions business. It’s possible that having four massive convention centers (the three casinos plus the existing one in Boston) would result in a much bigger MICE pie for Massachusetts, but perhaps it is more likely that the three additional convention halls would cannibalize existing business?

Personally, I favor the establishment of one big destination/IR/MICE casino and I really don’t care where they put it as long as it’s more than 15 miles away from where I live.

Regardless of how many construction jobs one, two or three casinos would bring to Massachusetts one is well served to keep in mind that the purpose of a building isn’t to bring employment to construction workers. The number of construction jobs is a poor reason to favor or oppose regulated casino gambling.

That said, would it kill our Governor to stop playing games with job projections?