The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 225

American NYSE J8 Nasdaq J10 Mutuals Jll Small caps J13 12 THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE APRIL 20, 1997 ECONOMIC PRINCIPALS David Warsh i I i "if i Starring Robert Reich 'I A ,1 ne reason the Clinton tion has played so relatively well over the years is that it has been staffed by rich and interesting characters. Attorney General Ja net Reno, for example, has emerged as one of the heroes of the Clinton years. Her decision this week not to appoint another independent counsel to pursue fund-raising scandals was both wise and hard. It's not that the scandals aren't real, but that a special prosecutor is not the appropriate mechanism. Let Congress do this mighty work itself.

Meanwhile, the sentencing of Jim McDou- gal, the utterly broken Arkansas banker and one-time Clinton partner, and the continuing refusal of his former wife, Susan, to rat on her old friends have taken me back to the freewheeling world that was explored so effectively in the thinly disguised novel "Primary Colors." Then, too, I've been reading Rob GLOBE STAFF PHOTO DOMINIC CHAVE 1 Rush-hour traffic begins to back up along Route 109 in Westwood. It gets worse every year," complains Michael Jaillet, the town's executive secretary. Road to. DrosDeri ert Reich's new book. "Locked in the Cabinet" is about the former secretary of labor's four years on the left wing of the administration.

Reich, you may remember, is a charter Friend of Bill: he Lawyer, journalist, 'author, teacher, editor, Reich is nothing if not theatrical. Suburban traffic jams maybe a more accurate economic indicator than Dow By Charles Stein GLOBE STAFF "r' Car count per day '1996 Percent change '90 to '96 EDFIELD Peo Too many cars Here's how traffic volume hac nhanrtorl nn Pta 10Q 9.5 ouum or me. ti "u.yuu in the last six years in the last six years ple move out to this leafy western suburb to get away from the city the noise, the crime, the traffic. JReatfitig North of Rte. 1-95 125,000 144,000 5.1' yuni 'South of Rte.

38 161,000 170,000 But during rush JfTVn Lexington vt f- Neither has the road system. Wtyclf means more traffic. "It gets worse ever year," complains Michael Jaillet, executive secretary of the town of Westwood. The traffic is heavier coming into Boston, it 'is appreciably heavier on Route 128 and Interstate 495. But the change may be most obvious to residents of smaller suburban towns, who once thought they were immune to suc problems.

Towns such as Westwood, Welles ley, and Sherborn are trying with limited success to push back the traffic the way they would an invading army. "Towns are saying no to traffic," aiJ Doug Foy, president of the Conservation Law Foundation, an environmental group involved in the traffic fight "The towns are saying, We want our children to be able walk to the library. We don't want to be come a The comeback of the Massachusetts economy can be measured in a number of ways. The state has added 290,000 jobs' in I the current recovery, which began in 1992. Much of the growth has taken place in the I suburbs, the location of choice for the exr panding technology and medical industrieia More recently, the finance business has moved beyond the city, as firms such as delity Investments and Putnam Investments set up back office operations along InterT TRAFFIC, Page J3 i v.

3 8.3 Wattham Lexington South of Rte. 2 156,000 169,000 Needham North af Great 121,000 135,000 hour, Route 109 can resemble the Central Artery as a solid wave of cars moves like the tide, in toward Boston in the morning and out again in the afternoon. Medfield contributes its share of cars to the wave. The number of registered vehicles in this town has climbed by about 1,000 in the past four years, according to the state. The local high school this year had to ration parking spaces because so many students want to drive to class.

Call it the perils of prosperity. The five-year-old expansion of the Massachusetts economy has produced more of everything -jobs, stores, office buildings, and cars. Lots and lots of cars. There are about 4.5 million registered vehicles in Massachusetts, up 450,000 in just the last three years. The jump even allowing for some exaggeration in the numbers is remarkable when you consider the state's population hasn't grown at all.

Plain Are. Mitton 1-93 Jast of Rte. 13ff 144,000 160,000 't and the future president met on their voyage to England as Rhodes scholars; they have been close friends ever since. The book is decked out In a jacket evocative of "Primary Colors," and its form a highly personal diary gives it the same air of being taken behind the scenes of life in Washington today. In fact, of course, the book is an artful construction, designed to highlight Reich's role as the administration gadfly of the Left and to conceal.

Passed over with a single sentence, for example, is Reich's central embarrassment at the beginning of Clinton's first term. The president's old friend and manager of his economic transition team was eliminated from consideration for a number of policy jobs for which he bid, before being fobbed off with the Labor Department rather as John F. Kennedy sent off John Kenneth Galbraith as ambassador to India, in order to remove him as far as possible from the policy-making process. But the cavernous Labor Department building on Constitution Avenue is not as far as Dehli, and dissents from administration policy by the presidential friend were a colorful staple of Clinton's first four years. The stimulus package.

The raid on the Bridgestone Tire plant in Oklahoma City (after which the company closed the factory.) The attack on corporate welfare. The campaign for corporate responsibility. None had any measurable impact. Even Reich's big triumph, the passage of the minimum wage bill, was as much a tribute to two professional economists who worked for Reich, Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, who don't even get mentioned in the book. Yet an undeniably homey air emanated from the Labor Department, where Reich hung a portrait of a distant predecessor, Frances Perkins, to remind everybody of the Roosevelt administration.

A wonderful communicator, Reich never lets a strict construction of the facts get in the way of a good rhetorical flourish. Lawyer, journalist, author, teacher, editor, he is nothing if hot theatrical long ago he began his courtship of his wife, Northeastern professor Clare J)alton, by casting her in a play. Indeed, a sense of the dramatic is absolutely central to ''Locked in the Cabinet" Aside from the occa- WARSH, Page J3 9.5 Westwoo boutn or tastbt ua.uuu SOURCE: jttate Departmenrnt of Transportation GLOBE STAFF MAP Small Business: At Mathworks, support fun success 5 Local banks CEO Jack Little believes in power of his workers and their ideas lend personaljj touch to firms! By Jerry Ackerman 4 GLOBE STAFF i By Kimberly Blanton GLOBE STAFF It's a good thing Jack Little is one of Boston's most successful entrepreneurs, because he might've flopped as a stand-up comic. Unless, of course, he packed his audience with his employees. Delivering a monologue on his company's history to new employees recently, Little describes his life, in 1984, hacking software code in a house in the hills above Palo Alto, Calif.

His wife-to-be traveled frequently for her job. And that was a good thing, Little contends. "I could work on Saturday nights and not feel guilty." The audience twitters. At his first trade show, in Las Vegas, Little recalls being angry at partner Cleve Moler for knocking over the company's sign, bending a corner. "It cost me $30!" Little says.

Laughter erupts. Then, one day, customers began call- ing. To fill an order, he'd throw a dis- GLOBE STAFF PHOTO BILL GREENE lack Little stands on the edge of Lake Cochituate, behind Mathworks' offices in Natick. SOUTHBRIDGE It's a wonderful life at the corner of Main and Elm streets ift Southbridge, especially for small businesses in and around this south-central Massachif setts town of 17,000. J4 Southbridge's two local banks, around the corner from each other and with 236 years of community service between them, have shifted into high gear to lend to local small businesses.

By their own accounts, Southbridge Savings Bank and the Savers Co-operative Bank in the past year have quadrupled their commercial lending creating a list of customers who craved a hometown touch. Commercial lending is new to both. Like the building and loan association in the 1946 film classic, "It's a Wonderful Life," they built their reputations on being the people to see for home mortgages and home improye-SMALL BUSINESS, PagM4 INSIDE Charles A. Jaffe: Get your detective gear on, here are some tips to avoid an IRS headache if you plan to sell a long-owned fund. J6 Kenneth Hooker: Dollar-cost averaging her investments may help calm the Nervous Nellie.

J6 mathematicians and engineers who design spacecrafts for NASA and deep-sea robots for oceanographers. The company dominates this growing market niche, analysts said. But Mathworks' magic, its employees say, lies not in its product but in its unorthodox chief executive. In a-world LITTLE, FgeJ5 kette in a Zip-lock bag and mail it off packaging." By now the audience is roaring. Little's jokes even the bad ones are genuinely funny to this crowd.

Little is the 40-year-old chief executive of The Mathworks Inc. His Natick company sells software for nerd a dense analytical program for scientists,.