Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301260115
SECTION: ECONOMY PAGE: EC-15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
VA.'S POWER IMAGE CALLED INTO QUESTION
You can't talk economics without talking numbers. Sorry about that, but I didn't make it up. Spit your venom at John Maynard Keynes or Adam Smith. They're famous dead economists.Keynes or Smith or Barry Bonds or any other great understander of the ebb and flow of money will tell you that Albert Einstein's timeless theory is unassailable: Everything is relative.
The Roanoke Valley is relative to the Commonwealth of Virginia which is, in turn, relative to the remaining portion - however small - of the United States.
We are all linked by a complex web of fast-food franchises, car dealerships, cash machines, game shows, the National Football League and telephone lines.
It is the phones that we'll use as our barometer of economic might and muscle - or lack thereof.
Virginia long has loomed as a regional financial titan because it has two area codes - 703 for us and Northern Virginia and 804 for the populated areas to the east.
North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee also had two, but West Virginia and Maryland had but one.
Telephone area codes are accurate gauges of economic steam because it takes a lot of numbers to exhaust one of them. There are 6.4 million possible combinations of seven-digit phone numbers when you don't use 0 or 1 as the first or second digit of the exchange.
Nobody wants a phone number that looks like this: 029-5473. It looks like a truncated Social Security number. Or this: 602-6339. It looks like an area code (traditionally, area codes have always had a 0 or a 1 in the middle). The phone company has not issued such numbers because they look stupid.
Tallying a state's area codes is much more revealing than counting people. Virginia's population rose from 5.4 million in 1980 to 6.1 million in 1990, but to what end?
All those bodies finagled for us another representative in Congress and we got 13 electoral votes in the presidential election, up from 12 last time, which didn't amount to squat because every one of our votes went to George Bush; President Clinton will eventually nail us for that. That's politics.
Economists don't care about how many electoral votes you wield. They care about how many phone numbers you have.
Phone numbers mean teen-agers are calling Pizza Huts and senior citizens are striking deals with fly-by-night roofers; love kittens are charging horny men $5 a minute for heavy breathing while these men's spouses are in another room retaliating by running up huge bills with Home Shopping Network.
Last year, Maryland got a dose of good news when it was awarded a second area code. Used to be, the whole Spiro Agnew State was in the 301 area code. Now, to phone everything from Baltimore east to the oysters we must first dial 410.
Suddenly, Virginia had to share the elite pedestal of two-area-code regional dynamos.
Then New Jersey - the Bruce Springsteen and Frank Sinatra State - got its third area code (908).
Pennsylvania - Le Grand Pothole - was awarded just last week its fifth area code (610) to take effect a year from now in the Philadelphia area.
And, the cruelest cut of all, North Carolina - the Basketball, Tobacco and Jesse Helms State - early this year learns that it will get its third area code. Greensboro, Fayetteville and Wilmington will form the new 910 area.
This leaves us sucking wind, with no one to look down upon but lowly West Virginia - still saddled with one miserable lonely area code.
Here we are, supposedly a Sun Belt growth machine, and we have as many area codes as such backwaters as Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska and Oklahoma.
Minnesota - MINNESOTA, FOR PETE'S SAKE! - has three area codes. So does Iowa, the Corn with Sporadic Swine State. California has 10!
Most Virginians would trade 10 electoral votes for another area code, merely for image.
Paul Miller works for Bell Atlantic, the extremely large telephone company that stingily metes out the all-important area codes. He says Virginia is a lucky place.
"Just in the past three years," says Miller, "we started using 0 and 1 as a second digit in the exchanges in Northern Virginia."
It was, he boasts, "a much less costly approach of getting at the phone capacity. Setting up a new area code is extremely costly."
Great. Just great. We have to be cursed with a thrifty phone company while all these other states are blessed with spendthrift phone companies that hand out new area codes like Valentine's candies and give the impression that their states are engines of economic expansion.
With the capable assistance of the Virginia Tech math department, we calculate that Bell Atlantic's cute maneuver opens up 1.6 million potential new phone-number combinations.
"A new area code would have come about if we hadn't done that," says Miller. The guy sounds as if he's boasting. "I don't foresee a new area code for Virginia."
You can't evaluate the economy without crunching some numbers.
Virginia's numbers crunch so much they crush.
We are all doomed.