This is the fourth in a series of five columns about Maine’s economy and the future. It is condensed from the book, “Maine’s Next Economy,” which can be ordered at www.envisionmaine.org.

This is an important moment for Maine. Over the next decade, we will define the state’s direction for the next half-century or more. There are two roads ahead for us. On one, we’ll continue to spend much of our energy trying to bring back yesterday’s jobs and lure large companies to Maine.

It is a road that has taken us nowhere for decades.

The other road will take us to a new 21st-century Maine economy fueled by our innovators, entrepreneurs and smaller businesses, where we focus on growing jobs here.

That new economy will be more decentralized and less reliant upon a few large employers. And it will be more resilient when confronting the next wave of changes in technology, global commerce or the machinations of Wall Street.

Taking that second road won’t be easy. The old ideas are deeply embedded in our politics and history.

In any discussion about the economy in Maine, you’ll hear words like “attract” or “bring” jobs to Maine. What you won’t hear much are words like “grow,” “generate” or “expand” jobs here.

Years ago, a wave of mills came to Maine for the free power of our rivers and, in some cases, our vast natural resources. Since then, we’ve invested most of our hopes and energy in waiting for that to happen again, or in trying to lure footloose companies to come to Maine, with vague calls to improve “the business climate” or by dangling tax breaks and giveaways.

While there have been a few scattered success stories, most haven’t lasted long, leaving empty industrial parks and call centers around the state. Overall it’s been a big investment for a very small return.

Most economic development people, when pressed to point to jobs created because of tax incentives, talk about the Wal-Mart they stole from the next town over, or the McDonald’s that got built, as though those companies don’t exist everywhere, tax breaks or not, and they didn’t just replace jobs that used to be in another local business.

This is no small matter. Maine taxpayers now invest as much as a half-billion dollars a year in tax breaks for jobs. How has it worked? The overwhelming evidence is that it hasn’t worked much at all.

Maine gives away tax breaks like candy, without ever insisting that promised jobs actually materialize. Nobody checks in later to see what happened. That leaves us with almost no idea of which tax breaks are working and which are just money down the drain.

Here’s a perfect illustration of how that system works, at its worst.

A few years back, we had a big discussion in Maine about giving tax breaks to a new company that was considering building small aircraft in the Midcoast area and promising 300 new jobs.

We found ourselves in a bidding war with Minnesota. Minnesota “won” by offering the company $300 million in goodies — at a million dollars per job — but it was a costly victory.

Fast forward to today, and the company has produced no new jobs, was months behind in its loan payments and hadn’t built a single new airplane.

After our “loss,” all the discussion in Maine turned to finger-pointing among politicians. Barely anyone but the professional economic development people, and the bankers, questioned the company’s qualifications or the market for small aircraft.

That’s a good argument for getting politicians out of decisions about tax breaks for jobs. Politicians are miserable negotiators, mostly because they’re in too much of a hurry to produce a photo op for their next campaign. As any decent car salesman knows, when someone loves the car too much, they’re going to pay.

Desperation, whether from politicians or a public clamoring for jobs, produces bad decisions and a tendency to believe in what we want to happen, even when it’s too good to be true. Politics, it turns out, is a miserable way to run a bank.

To make matters worse, every effort to measure the results of tax giveaways seems to run up against a stone wall in Augusta. The reason why seems clear enough: They don’t want you to look backwards at the rosy too-good-to-be-true deals they announced with great fanfare. Better to just move onto the next ribbon-cutting.

We should give tax breaks and other assistance to people who actually create decent jobs. But we shouldn’t give them to people who are in the promise-making business, and who aren’t in any way willing to stand behind their promises.

Should we have invested $300 million in tax breaks to create 300 jobs building small airplanes in Maine?

Maybe we should be asking ourselves an entirely different question: What would happen if we invested that same $300 million in a thousand of the most promising small businesses and startups in Maine, in exchange for each one of them guaranteeing one decent new job?

That approach would produce 1,000 new jobs, and maybe more. They’d be easy to measure. And they’d all be rooted here in Maine. What we’d find, if we did that, is that investing in ourselves is not only smart economics, it’s the most effective investment we can make.

For more on how all of that can be done, see final installment of this series next week.

Alan Caron, a Waterville native, is the president of Caron Communications and the founder of Envision Maine. He can be reached at alancaroninmaine@gmail.com.

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