The Future State of Connecticut
By Jamil Hasan
www.jamilhasan.com
According to a January 9th, 2018 article in the Hartford Courant, Connecticut business leaders acknowledge the state economy is in crisis. Problems range the gamut - from fiscal policy to labor participation to infrastructure. Without the top 357 wealthiest families, personal income taxes on the middle class would be dramatically higher and more businesses like General Electric, AIG, UBS and RBS would leave the state. Where most states witness significant revenues from their major cities, Connecticut sees its suburbs subsidize its cities. Even a drive from Greenwich to Hartford on a weekday afternoon could take up to 5 hours to complete. Raising taxes on businesses has deterred corporate market entry.
All these facts make things sound dire, but there is a solution. Connecticut has untapped investment potential that no other state in the US does. The state provides an opportunity for several new technological implementations that will reverse current conditions and build a bustling economy once again.
But how?
The best strategy is to invest in and build solutions for the three identified areas: transportation, fiscal, and labor. The only way to build a future is to invest in it; through private capital, venture capital, and private equity, hedged appropriately using millennial (e.g. blockchain-based) strategies and future technology applications.
Transportation
I- 95 is a traffic nightmare from Greenwich to New Haven. It takes drivers long commuting times to get to work. The heavy traffic patterns crush local commerce. We live in one of the most expensive areas of the world. With a ton of available capital from hedge funds, private equity funds and venture capital, Fairfield County has the financial resources to be the leading transportation infrastructure hub on a global scale. No other state or country has our ideal geographical layout.
Elon Musk’s Hyperloop has the capability to shuttle someone from New York City safely at over 700 miles per hour to Boston in less than 20 minutes, hereby opening previously unattainable commerce opportunities. The Hyperloop would connect finance, industry, education, government and gaming to create an ideal transportation ecosystem with major cities attainable within minutes. Test Hyperloops are already being built in Germany and Dubai. The Hyperloop project will attract contractors, businesses, and jobs, lowering the effective tax rate and stimulating economic growth.
Fiscal
The cities are fully subsidized by the suburbs and Connecticut is the only state where this is the case. These cities do have access to a tremendous natural resource: water. Shipping, fishing, and different types of production are available along the coasts and rivers. Yet, our cities are almost completely inefficient. They need an overhaul to become opportunities for venture investment.
Smart Cities are prevalent in both Singapore and India and an incubator has been formed in Norway. Data technologies, including blockchain, are transforming cities right now. Short range planning and patience are necessary to create efficient neighborhoods or major portions of cities. These must include the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence, autonomous cars, virtual reality and augmented reality. With data captured via blockchain technology and stored at an intelligent data center at either Yale or Fairfield University, we will create jobs, reduce costs, conserve energy, create clean environments, and design and implement many benefits for the long run. It will also shorten Connecticut’s twelve-year economic recovery plan dramatically while attracting many new businesses to the state.
Labor
The facts are simple. Robots are not coming soon. They are already here. And jobs are being replaced, right now as you read this report. We have a choice to continue social government assistance programs or to train people to have the adaptive STEAM skills for the digital economy – STEAM includes Science, Technology, Engineering, Artistic Creation, and Math. Since people will be living in smart cities and working alongside robots, we need to offer the general public at least a basic understanding. There are now blockchain specific universities with course education for the layman. Kingsland University in Georgia is just one, and others are on the close horizon. We need to invest in the people to think how to best use these new technologies and reward them for learning and earning.
There exist near-term opportunities to create efficiencies and increased profits for investment fund managers. Every step in the fund management process is improved through current blockchain technology applications as they remove time spent on research and reporting. Private permissioned blockchain companies can join existing consortiums with banks that streamline data research and reporting issues and build uniform reliable data discovery sets. Artificial intelligence applications could be deployed in this next year, leveraging data to perform otherwise mundane tasks intelligently while managers spend time on making experience-based investment decisions. Managers could then also spend more time working on building relationships with clients and designing the necessary millennial-based strategies of the future.
Banks can preserve their transaction fees as well by implementing AI robots as tellers, with verification conducted using biometric blockchains. A customer could scan their eye retina to a robotic teller and, by using artificial intelligence, have their account safely accessed and preserved. The banks that currently lose transaction fees because more people are engaging in Bitcoin transactions, could replace those fees with robotic usage fees.
And retailers and manufacturers could access the shared data center to retrieve smart, shared and validated blockchain public data merged with their own proprietary data sets to make market intelligence decisions. A current retailer – Shopin, based in Australia - has implemented this approach and has seen their retail clients achieve consistent 22% revenue increases. The same can be done for financial services companies.
Conclusion
The future of Connecticut is very bright. A sluggish economic environment is fully reversible with the proper education and technology implementation. We have a great many exciting new technologies at our disposal today to put Connecticut on the leading path as a future innovator with the country’s top economy.