The state of the state is … not really Dayton's doing

Not a single hurricane has struck Minnesota since Mark Dayton became governor. No chief executive in our history has done a better job protecting this state from tropical storms.

On the other hand, the Twins and Vikings haven't played very well under the Dayton administration.

And while the governor has stood idly by as that ISIL situation got out of hand in the Middle East, the boom that Dayton's tenure has brought in domestic U.S. oil and natural gas production encourages hopes for energy independence.

Meanwhile, look around — Minnesota's tradition of vivid fall colors is clearly secure under Dayton's steady leadership.

Rigidly logical readers may protest that matters such as these are not fully under the governor's control — that even though they unfolded on his watch he deserves neither blame for the Twins' pitching woes nor credit for the Bakken oil boom.

But saluting a governor's management of the weather, or faulting his handling of Mideast terrorism, is only by degree more nonsensical than the economic debate in the gubernatorial race between Democrat Dayton and his GOP challenger Jeff Johnson.

Dayton partisans credit him as being the mastermind behind Minnesota's comparatively healthy economic recovery since the Great Recession (it's the main theme of the governor's ubiquitous "Darn good coach" ad campaign). Meanwhile, Johnson and company jump on every disappointing twist in economic statistics to claim that Dayton has actually stunted Minnesota's growth.

Yet in Minnesota, Johnson got in the most recent punch, when quarterly numbers from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics showed job growth slowing here between early 2013 and early 2014, ranking Minnesota, for that period, "dead last," in Johnson's words, in the Midwest.

"It's no coincidence," Johnson declared, "that this spiral to the bottom on private-sector job creation started when Dayton and his DFL allies introduced their job-crushing tax increase plan, and then accelerated after their plan was passed into law."

Actually, it could be a coincidence. It has certainly been entertaining to see Dayton's defenders suddenly discover how unreliable cause-and-effect conclusions can be when based on short-term economic trends — something lost on them when the score is in the coach's favor. But it's true that different data sets and different time periods can yield contradictory results. Faster job growth in Minnesota in previous years may explain a slowing pace later. And so on.

An old economics drollery applies: If you torture numbers long enough, they'll confess to anything.

Still, you can't really blame Johnson for seizing on the suggestive timing of this job-growth slowdown. All of Coach Dayton's economic claims exploit his generally fortunate timing, having taken office just as the national economy was getting back on its feet.

It is a fact that Dayton's comprehensive fiscal program — tax hikes on the rich and on smokers, hefty spending boosts for education and local governments, a minimum-wage increase, etc. — did not take effect until July 2013. And the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data does suggest that the months following that enactment saw job growth level off in Minnesota.

But the sensible attitude to be drawn from all this is skepticism about any claim of quick, dramatic economic results, good or bad, from state-level action. State policies on education, infrastructure and cost-effective public services are important to economic health, but they have their effects over time. Any short-run impact is likely to be swamped by trends in the national economy interacting with long-standing characteristics of states.

A 2011 analysis, for example, in the "fedgazette" published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, examined why every Upper Midwest state suffered less relative job loss than the national average in the Great Recession of 2007-09 — except Wisconsin, where Democrats held the governorship and state Senate at the time. It found four dominant advantages that helped states beat the average — a larger-than-average farm sector (as a portion of the state's whole economy); a smaller-than-average housing bubble before the recession; a smaller-than-average construction sector, and relatively less employment in the manufacturing of "durable goods" (cars, industrial equipment, etc.).

Wisconsin's problem was that it stood out in the Upper Midwest for its reliance on heavy manufacturing jobs — 39 percent more reliance than in Minnesota's more diverse economy.

That analysis doesn't address the post-2011 recovery and whether those same factors account for differences in the pace of states' rebounds. But it suggests that serious economic analysis looks for fundamental, long-standing characteristics to explain differences in state economic performance — rather than supposing that the last state budget or two is always a game-changer.