I had my monthly phone call this afternoon with Tom Stinson, the mild-mannered, bipartisan and very quotable former state economist, now working quietly at the University of Minnesota.

The ability (or inability) of a governor to single-handedly change the course of a state's economy has been discussed a bit lately, and I asked Stinson what he thinks. Here's a transcript of part of our conversation:

Stinson: "My perception is that governors really can't have much impact in their first term. By the end of their second term, that's when it's beginning to show up. (chuckling) By that time, nobody's running again."

Me: I should do a story about that and quote you on it. You comfortable with that? It's the second term that the governor's impact starts to be felt?

Stinson: "It's the end of the second term. It's six, eight, ten years later. My thought is: What do you do about job conditions and the workforce? You can't change the quality of the workforce in two or three or four years, and it takes the changes in the underlying business climate more than four years to show up. Governors and the president get too much credit when the economy's doing well and too much blame when it's not doing well."

Me: It seems to me that in a 7 or 8 year timeline, towards the end of the second term, aren't there a lot of cases where it's not even clear by then what the governor's impact was?

Stinson: "Oh yeah, I think so. Think about somebody's whose term was coming to a close in 2008, you have the Great Recession starting in 2008 or 2009, you can't blame the economic downturn on a particular governor, so it just wouldn't be clear at all. Or if you had some kind of boom and it took off."

Me: Who were the politicians most responsible for the increase in education spending in Minnesota in the 50s and 60s? (I was referring to the argument that Minnesota's prosperity stems from education investment in the middle of the 20th century.)

Stinson: "I'm not sure as it was politicians. I think it was a combination of public sector and private sector people. The big cigars in downtown Minneapolis were strongly in favor of education spending, spending on K-12. That just seemed to be a widely held belief across the state. We spent a good bit on education."