Economic Geography

Results are not always what you expect, but in such
cases new insights are frequently generated that advance
our knowledge base
One of the wonderful experiences in economic geographic research is that you
encounter findings that are not what you thought you were going to obtain. My
discovery of the importance of non-earnings income described above is a case in
point, and many years later my former student Peter Nelson and I codified this into
an extended economic base model (Nelson and Beyers 1998). This was followed by
another student, Andy Wenzl, being clever enough to implement the model that
Peter Nelson and I conceptualized, and to show that county income structure was
systematically related to differences in size in Washington State (Wenzl 2003).
When I undertook a large NSF project in the mid-1990s, by chance I was
awarded some additional funds to do many more interviews in rural America.
One of our findings from this research – and this was not anticipated – was that
there was a cohort of producer service firms out in rural America that were not
dependent upon local markets. They sold almost all of their services someplace
else. A fair chunk of these businesses were proprietors, and following a term
coined by the now-defunct Center for the New West in Denver, we labeled these
people ‘Lone Eagles’. Alongside them were businesses with employees who were
also found out in the rural West, and we labeled these firms ‘High Fliers’. David
Lindahl and I wrote a paper about these firms, that we had no idea would be
uncovered in this research project, and there is only one project in my entire
career that has led to more e-mails and telephone calls (a study of the Mariners
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William B. Beyers

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discussed in the next section) (Beyers and Lindahl 1996). I continue to have 
telephone calls from all over the United States from people observing the same
phenomenon – small firms with nonlocal markets, and in Europe it has been
recognized that entrepreneurs of this type are also important. Research of this
type has challenged (unexpectedly) long-held biases about the power of the
‘world cities’, and Fortune-500 corporations. This is not to say that they are
unimportant, but rather it is to say that there are other factors operating on the
economic landscape as well. We would never have discovered our Lone Eagles or
High Fliers without costly survey research, and it was only serendipitous that we
received the funds to do these interviews.