America's Education Recession

The RHLJ has always been concerned with the state of American education. We also have been a big fan of economist Thomas L. Friedman. So this Times article grabbed our attention.

New York Times: The New Untouchables (click to go to NYTimes.com article)

Op-Ed Columnist

The New Untouchables

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: October 21, 2009

Those who create services, opportunities and ways to recruit work can compete on the world market. That is the key to understanding our education challenge today.

From the article by Thomas L. Friedman, the international award-winning economist:

In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.

A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

And yet many people are more alarmed about the government's spending to invest in education and economic stability (their favorite accusation is "Socialism!" This seems to be on the misguided assumption that all forms of government influence in and on the private sector are inherently evil, unconstitutional, and somehow "unbiblical") than about the only foundations of the country which can support the platform of freedom and prosperity we all long to live on.

At this moment in our history, no government in these post-Great Recession circumstances can have both a balanced budget and the kind of infrastructure improvements we must have in order to get back to a level playing field. The revenue is just not there right now. If we invest--yes, with government-borrowed money--we can slowly but surely build a better economy, one that rewards creativity and innovation of citizens who have the skill-sets needed to succeed. Only by making a bigger pie--the American economic pie which has been shrinking dramatically since Fall of '08--can we ultimately get the government's accounts bak to black.

On the other hand, if we listen to the Obama-haters and the knee-jerk spending-slashers of the tea-party persuasion, we might end up with government spending in the black. However, the pie will be incredibally smaller, and the resulting drop in tax revenue will put a tremendous burden not only on the rich, who will be forced to bear the lion's share of the tax base, but also on the fewer and fewer number of people earning a decent living. (Note: there will be only three classes left: the poverty-stricken, the super-rich, and a new lower-middle class comprised of what once was the thriving middle and upper-middle class.) The average working family will find that their contribution to the government's "healthy" bottom line will amount to a crushing percentage of their income.

We're all in this together. That is the purpose of government: the people of a society joining together for the common good, each contributing a fair share in order to improve conditions of society for all its members. We can petition our elected officials to take advantage of the government's borrowing power in order to invest in a solid infrastructure, the necessary foundation its citizens require in order to compete successfully in today's--and tomorrow's--complex marketplace. On the other hand, we can go with the knee-jerk, anti-government sentiment and demand lower taxes and less government activity. In such case, lower taxes will ultimately result in higher taxes, not to mention skyrocketing unemployment and a stagnant, shrinking economy incapable of competing with other industrialized, globalized countries.

Do the math. If we don't invest in ourselves and our children above our banks and financial-products firms, and above isolationist economic and social policy, we will have an economy that simply can't compete and won't work.

Healthcare Reform: Who are Those Uninsured Deadbeats, Eh?

If you take the time to watch through this video, you will probably be surprised at the demographics of those who have access to healthcare in this country, and those who don't.

The Rutabaga Perspective:

Lesson 1: Why did healthcare move to a for-profit model (and why do health insurance companies have such big buildings?)? Because visionaries realized that people who are sick will buy health care, regardless of price.

Lesson 2: What is Conservatives' latest proposal to provide access to healthcare for those who can't afford insurance (since their idea of telling people not to get sick doesn't seem to be working)? Move 'em off to Cuba, and good riddance.

Writing Passionately From Madison, Wis.: Lorrie Moore

Has anyone out there read Lorrie Moore? I'm curious, since she writes about living in Madison, Wis., where I went to law school for 3 years, joined by my wife, who worked for the state Dept. of Health & Family Svcs., and C.J., who turned 2 years old when we arrived, 5 when we left. Ms. Moore's reviews appear to be very positive, but note that she writes right down to the bone.

In this article, the writer mentions passing by an Indian restaurant near the capitol ("Strolling by an Indian restaurant near the state capitol, she sniffed the air and noted: 'You walk around and you get a whiff of garlic and you feel like you are in a real city.'”), and I know exactly where that is (State St.), and I also know just what that experience is like.

If anything can encapsulate Madison, Wis., it is walking up State Street from the UW to the capitol building, seeing the students, the bars, the fixtures of landmark and personality, and then passing by the Indian and Mediterranean restaurants and taking in those exotic smells, while at the same time knowing that your feet are planted in the heart of the Midwest. It's as if you are surrounded by the entire world, and it's all nearly in reach.

from the New York Times, 9/2/09
Books

Hate, Love, Chores: Lorrie Moore’s Midwest Chronicle

By MOTOKO RICH

Published: September 2, 2009

Lorrie Moore described her new book, “A Gate at the Stairs,” as a meditation on “what it meant to be in this town in the Midwest in this particular time in contemporary America.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/books/02moore.html
this link is saved forever in Permalink; please report if link is broken

Will the European Union be a Casualty of the Global Economic Crisis?

For those who still doubt whether there is really much of a recession or global economic meltdown...

Growing Economic Crisis Threatens the Idea of One Europe
(click on link above for full article on NYTimes.com)

The New York Times, March 1, 2009

By STEVEN ERLANGER and STEPHEN CASTLE

PARIS — The leaders of the European Union gathered Sunday in Brussels in an emergency summit meeting that seemed to highlight the very worries it was designed to calm: that the world economic crisis has unleashed forces threatening to split Europe into rival camps.

The leaders of European Union countries who gathered Sunday in Brussels included, from left, Sergei Stanishev of Bulgaria, Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Andrus Ansip of Estonia, Demetris Christofias of Cyprus, Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic and Lawrence Gonzi of Malta. Olivier Hoslet/European Pressphoto Agency

Article Highlights:

“The European Union will now have to prove whether it is just a fair-weather union or has a real joint political destiny,” said Stefan Kornelius, the foreign editor of the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “We always said you can’t really have a currency union without a political union, and we don’t have one. There is no joint fiscal policy, no joint tax policy, no joint policy on which industries to subsidize or not. And none of the leaders is strong enough to pull the others out of the mud.”
...

With uncertain leadership and few powerful collective institutions, the European Union is struggling with the strains this crisis has inevitably produced among 27 countries with uneven levels of development.

The traditional concept of “solidarity” is being undermined by protectionist pressures in some member countries and the rigors of maintaining a common currency, the euro, for a region that has diverse economic needs. Particularly acute economic problems in some newer members that once were part of the Soviet bloc have only made matters worse.

Europe’s difficulties are in sharp contrast to the American response. President Obama has just announced a budget that will send the United States more deeply into debt but that also makes an effort to redistribute income and overhaul health care, improve education and combat environmental problems.

Whether Europe can reach across constituencies to create consensus, however, has been an open, and suddenly pressing, question. ...

The problems are basically twofold: within the inner core of nations that use the euro as their common currency, which together have an economy roughly the size of the United States’; and within the larger European Union.

The 16 nations that use the euro — introduced in 1999, and one of the proudest European accomplishments — must submit to the monetary leadership of the European Central Bank. That keeps some members hardest hit by the economic downturn, like Ireland, Spain, Italy and Greece, from unilaterally taking radical steps to stimulate their economies.

Germany once vowed never to bail out weaker members in return for giving up its strong national currency, the deutsche mark. But German leaders are now faced with the unpalatable prospect of having to put German money at risk to bail out less responsible partners that do not adhere to European fiscal rules.

Within the larger European Union, fissures are growing between older members and newer ones, especially those that lived under the yoke of Soviet socialism. Some countries of Central Europe, like the Czech Republic and Poland, are doing relatively well. Others, including Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states, are in a state of near-meltdown.

But only two newer members — tiny Slovenia and Slovakia — are protected by being among the countries that use the euro, and there was little support on Sunday for changing the rules to allow more to join quickly.

Many new members have seen their currencies plummet against the euro. That has made their debt repayments to European banks, their primary lenders, a much greater burden even as the global recession has meant a plunge in orders from consumers in the West. Some countries are asking for aid, both from their European partners and from the International Monetary Fund, to prop up their currencies and the banks.

While Western European countries are reluctant, with their own problems both at home and among the countries using the euro, there is a deep interconnectedness in any case.

A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterfiles: Stories

Here's another book, this one published by HarperCollins, 2004. I think I really like this John Murray. Lyrical and scientific and perceptive and diagnostic and meaningful and real and beautifully capturing the beauty within unbeautiful lives. Moving stories of people on the move.

Murray trained as a doctor and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a teaching-writing fellow. He won the Prairie Lights Short Fiction Award for "The Hill Station," and the title story was included in the Best New American Voices 2002, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Apparently he currently lives in Iowa, but we don't have to hold that against him.

Check out the publisher's offering:

Stuff about Butterflies from Barnes & Noble.com

Synopsis

In this remarkably assured debut collection, doctors, scientists, explorers, and collectors face the emotional battles of love, loss, and obsession in exotic locations.

reviewed in The New York Times

Like his characters, Mr. Murray, who trained as a doctor before he became a teaching-writing fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop, has a fascination with detail, with the tiny, distinguishing specifics that can reveal a person's mood, presage an illness or define a place. Many of his people in A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies focus on details as a way of achieving detachment, but in Mr. Murray's case, his orchestration of psychological and physical details results in stories that are as affecting as they are suspenseful. The best of these tales combine the narrative tension of an old-fashioned yarn with the emotional density of Alice Munro's fiction, compressing entire lives into a handful of pages while exposing the secrets and nightmares that connect one family member to another — Michiku Kakutani

If you have read this book, or anything else by Murray, let me know what you think. And as always, feel free to comment on this or any other posting of mine. Do so by clicking the little tiny comment icon below each article. Thanks for participating in The Rutabaga Harvest Law Journal! --Chuck

The Financial Beanpole

ALTOONA, WI -- Ya know, if the banks won't start lending to the businesses who are pleading for capital, and even though we've given those banks an obscene amount of money to do just that, maybe the Federal Government should start doing the lending that the banks should be doing. They're going to buy toxic assets, bad loans, and security instruments no one understands. Why not just start making some good loans, the kind that American businesses need right now.

With a basic understanding of human nature and a guess at the psychology of the business person, I bet that the banks will develop Lender's Envy, seeing the U.S. start making profitable lending transactions, and start doing what they're supposed to be doing.
Sure, all that high finance is far more complex than a schmo like me could fathom. But is human nature any different on Wall Street? Actually, It's probably even more so.

All In all, I think we could recoup our $787 Billion, and then some. Who's in favor of some health care and elementary school funding?!!!

Speaking of John Updike...

From the Editor's Desk

***EDITOR'S NOTE: This post was published just moments before the Editorial Board heard of the passing of John Updike, 76, whose work is discussed herein. This post is therefore dedicated to the memory of John Updike. See "John Updike, Lyrical Writer of the Ordinary," NYTimes.com 1/27/09.

The Editorial Staff is quite enamored with the 2006 collection of essays written by Cynthia Ozick, author of Quarrel & Quandary, Fame & Folly, Metaphor & Memory, and Art & Ardor. The collection at hand, published by Houghton Mifflin Co., is pertinently titled The Din in the Head.

One essay in particular caught our attention, "John Updike: Eros and God." Here are a few excerpts:

The everyday seizes [John] Updike's tireless gaze--babies, adolescents, couples, sometimes in stasis, as in genre painting, sometimes kinetic, like the swoop of a thought. ...

What is notable, and curious, in Updike is that his sexual scenes seem as distanced and skeptical as a lapsed seminarian's meticulously recited breviary, while his God-seeking passages send out orgasmic shudders, whether of exaltation or distress. In "The Deacon," a decaying old wooden church--rotted wiring, warped boards, leaky ceiling, worn hymnals, superannuated remnants of congregants--is nevertheless instinct with holy ardor, and with a kind of intergalactic holiness. ...

His is not a social faith. Though [the short story] "Lifeguard" closes with an exhortation to "be joyful," the Kierkegaardian singleness of the God-possessed, quivering among the darker stars, predominates. This singleness, this historyless aloneness, turns up in the essayist apercus and musings and final exhalations that thread through both plot and plotlessness, alongside the vernacular, between, so to speak, the acts. The acts are tremendously variegated; in the spacious precincts of eight hundred and more pages, human faces teem, landscapes and interiors are elegiacally documented, a thousand three-dimensional objects cast realistic shadows, time is phosphorescent, moods coagulate and dissolve. Updike owns the omnivorous faculty of seeing the telltale flame in every mundane gesture.

For us here at the Journal, such a description of talented writing, itself talented writing, makes us wish to be talented writers.

(For more on the book, see The Din in the Head at Amazon.com)

The Wealth of the Stone

Here is a story handed down through the years by wise folks...

It is said that one day a monk came in from the desert and reached the outskirts of a village at dusk. He had just settled down under a tree for the night, when a young man of the village came running up to him. The villager cried out to the monk, "The stone! The stone! Give me the precious stone!"

"What stone?" asked the monk.

"Last night, the angel of the Lord appeared to me in a dream," said the villager, "and he told me that if I went to the outskirts of the village at dusk, I would find a monk sleeping under a tree, a monk who would give me a precious stone that would make me rich forever!"

The monk rummaged through his satchel and pulled out a stone. "Perhaps he meant this one," said the monk, as he handed the stone to the villager. "I found it along a mountain path some days ago. You may certainly have it."

The young man gazed at the stone in wonder. It was a diamond, perhaps the largest diamond in the whole world, the size of a large rutabaga. He took the diamond and walked slowly back to his village.

All night he tossed about in bed, unable to sleep. The next day, as the sun began to rise in the eastern sky, he returned to the tree at the outskirts of the village and woke the sleeping monk.

And he begged him, "Please, give me the wealth you have that makes you able to give this diamond away so easily."

adapted from Anthony de Mello, Selected Writings, ed. William Dych, S.J. (Orbis Books 1999) 55-56. For more information about Anthony de Mello, go to http://www.demello.org/.

Welcome to The Rutabaga Harvest Law Journal

Why Not Do It All?

I look forward to reading your comments and sincerely thank you for taking the time to read my bloggings. I hope you will continue, even after reading this drivel for the first time...

For my very first post, I will recycle a note I posted yesterday (1/23/09) on Facebook:

Thomas Friedman writes:

President Obama will have to decide just how many fences he can swing for at one time: grand bargains on entitlement and immigration reform? A national health care system? A new clean-energy infrastructure? The nationalization and repair of our banking system? Will it be all or one? Some now and some later? It is too soon to say.

But I do know this: while a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, so too is a great politician, with a natural gift for oratory, a rare knack for bringing people together, and a nation, particularly its youth, ready to be summoned and to serve.

So, in sum, while it is impossible to exaggerate what a radical departure it is from our past that we have inaugurated a black man as president, it is equally impossible to exaggerate how much our future depends on a radical departure from our present. As Obama himself declared from the Capitol steps: "Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/opinion/21friedman.html)

I have been asking, until now just within my own mind, why can't we do all of these major social-contract changes right now, right away, within this very moment in time? How long the moment will last depends substantially on what we decide to do, how quickly we pace ourselves, how well we construct and execute our ideas, and most importantly, how long the attention span of society lasts.

I suppose the other major stalling point will be the bloc of voices that opposes change as a matter of principle--how strongly it objects, the pitch and volume of it shrill screams, and to a smaller degree, the legitimate, reasoned bases for their objections. Typically they will create an ideological prophylactic against any substantial change to the system it defends, despite the fact that in the past the set of ideology has led directly to the problems we now have to repair, to the suffering we currently endure.

So as we go forward into the historical moment--ready to work, equipped for service and primed for change--we must entrust the design and execution of the programs of change to leaders wise in judgment, prudent in action, skilled in political maneuvering, astute and insightful within their fields, clear in public communication, foresighted, sensible, and intelligent. And if opponents of progress try to stall their advancement, then we must become these people with these qualities ourselves, for we, the governed, must be or become qualified to govern.

We must become comfortable with the notion of "radical departure from the present." And we must encourage our new president to utilize the best of his gifts and the gifted people around him to turn crisis into opportunity, opportunity into action, and action into positive, long-term social change.

Best wishes for 2009-13!!!

jdchuck