Craig Ladwig is editor of the quarterly Indiana Policy Review. His column appears in Indiana newspapers.

Market researchers know that before you can find out why someone quit buying your product you need to find out why they began buying it in the first place. In the case of HVAC, which announced yesterday it will move 2,100 jobs from Indiana to Mexico, the opportunity to learn something valuable is immediate.

Fortunately, Mitch Daniels created the well-funded and staffed Indiana Economic Development Corp. to do just that sort of thing, or so we assumed. A few years later it was reported that up to 40 percent of the jobs the corporation claimed to have helped save or create never materialized. A researcher for The Indiana Policy Review Foundation, Tad DeHaven, dubbed it “press release economics.”

Today’s practitioners of the art specialize in ribbon-cuttings timed to the election cycle and made possible by shunting tax dollars around the state in a program called the Regional Cities Initiative. The rationale is that the public (government) can be forged into a partnership with the private (the economy), a concept familiar to students of the Great Depression.

But someone else is coming to the rescue. The new Indianapolis mayor, Joe Hogsett, whose city loses a lion’s share of the jobs, says he is concerned. “Today’s surprise announcement was without warning and incredibly disappointing,” he told the Indianapolis Star, implying that emigrating companies have an obligation to warn the politically sensitive.

Hogsett has charged his 25th Floor with getting to the heart of the problem — that is, how can the mayor deliver or leverage high enough amounts of welfare and severance, including free education for students of company employees left in Indianapolis, to be remembered next election day and save his own job.

That is understandable but not promising in an economic sense. Our last chance is the odd reader of the actual HVAC news release announcing the decision. Therein, the president of the North America division offered a tantalizing clue, i.e., that his company had once found Indiana’s regulatory climate favorable. “This move is intended to address . . . ongoing cost and pricing pressures driven, in part, by new regulatory requirements,” he said.

OK then, surely there is someone at the Statehouse who can find time in their ribbon-cutting schedule to ask HVAC which exact regulations they found so debilitating, then repeal them. And while they are at it, defund the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and send the staff to Mayor Hogsett’s office to collect welfare.

See, the system works.