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