Calling BS on The Republicans This Time

I saw a fascinating documentary last night.  It is Robert Reich's Inequality for All.  He served in various administrations of both parties for all of his career but he can tell you about that. 

I knew about many of the facts and economic trends in the documentary beforehand but what surprised me was that it started much earlier.  The economic trend of minimizing/eliminating the middle class goes back to at least 1970.  In other words, my entire working life has been spent as part of a middle class that has now shrunk almost to the point of invisibility.

He punches holes in one of the biggest Republican lies in current vogue - the 'impairment of the job creators' through asking them to ... well actually pay their current taxes for one thing, or pay a rate that is commensurate with the huge wealth increases they are reaping without contributing anything to the economy...and certainly not jobs.

Reich makes a compelling point that the middle class represents the true 'job creators'. After all, I don't think a CEO of a large corporation making, oh, $90 million per year is going to go out January 1st and say "I am going to create some jobs this year so I can make less money next year." 

No, for the large majority of American businesses, demand = job creation, and the middle class is overwhelmingly responsible for demand in this country and economy.  Of course, if the middle class ceases to exist or suffers huge losses in real income as they have since 1970....there is no demand, and no job creation.  Sound like any economies you know of?

This is a well done, very factual documentary and is done without the usual preachiness of someone on a pulpit.  One gets the sense that Reich is done with Washington politics and wants to very much leave it in his rear view mirror, but because he understands what is going on, he cares about what is going on.

I don't give a fig about voter ID to vote in US elections, but I really think it should be a requirement for every American voter to sit down and watch this documentary and understand it before casting another misguided vote based on the most charismatic candidate, the richest, or heaven forbid based on political party membership!

Update: That whooshing sound you heard was the Canadian middle class zooming by the US, eh?

And Now For Something Completely Different

Sometimes I think Thomas Friedman gets to have all the fun!

To H**l with SATs, ACTs, Give Me Thinkers!!

There is a lot of fluff flying about as to redoing the SATs and possibly the ACTs in reaction to that. The SAT's decision to do away with the essay portion of the tests is possibly the most colossally stupid move that they could have made. 

I swear...I would like to take all of these "universal test" organizations into a waterproof room and then fill it with water!.   They are SO out of touch with the real world.

I have been involved in hiring on and off for the last decade either as an advisor to a hiring manager or a hiring manager myself.  And I can tell you plainly, I have never been so disappointed with the candidates presented to me.   I mean, most recruiters are absolutely, completely worthless, lets face facts - it is an easy field to get into and you don't even have to really understand who you are recruiting.

But the candidates they do send are even worse.  We live in a flat world which is a world of ideas which people much smarter than me have written about. 

We live in a world where ideas are really the only marketable item for the future...and  our college graduates cannot express their ideas in any intelligible format (believe me I have tried to extract/read them).  

If you have the greatest idea in the world you have to be able to intelligently express it, support it, and define it in terms the world will understand and accept.  

Facebook/Twitter ain't going to make it folks....

No Way to Dress This Up Folks!

The US continues its race to the bottom in terms of knowledge/achievement levels for its high school students. 

Not only are we plummeting to the bottom and contesting countries such as Lithuania and Croatia for position, we have the "states rights" folks who seem determined to drive us even further down this road, each with their own narrow-minded ideals, like the folks in Tennessee who tried to declare that 'slavery never really happened'.

We have got to get our act together people -- the countries who are 'cleaning our clock' in education (like China, Japan, Canada, Australia....heck everyone) are all beneficiaries of a strong centrally administered education standards process that applies to everyone in the country (kinda like Common Core?).

Wake Up Call

Thomas Friedman has written about a new phenomenon, a new view of the United States from abroad that is not flattering.  I won't steal his thunder, but I actually had a much earlier, similar experience in about 2003 though I could be off by a year.  I was on a business trip to Taiwan and our hosts took me out for dinner to one of the biggest buffet-style "mix and match" restaurants I have ever seen.  All the choices and ingredients were raw and fresh, you chose the individual items, then they were prepared and brought to your table.  The selection was huge, like a large farmer's market.

Anyway, as we sat down at our table the primary host from the company we were working with sat down across from me and asked (in impeccable English since English classes are mandatory from elementary school onward)..."Why did you elect such a stupid President?".

People in other countries tend to look up to the US, and are disappointed/dismayed when they perceive that something "stupid" is happening, which is part of the theme of Friedman's column.

As for me...I foolishly started down the road of pointing out that the American people had NOT actually elected the "stupid president", but then that led to how the Supreme Court in supposedly the greatest democracy in the world had "appointed" a president. 

Fortunately, just when it was getting really confusing (and embarrassing)...the food arrived!     

The Tea Party Hates the US

The Tea Party heralds itself as some kind of a heroic 'back to the roots' of America type organization, but I and a number of other thinkers I respect believe it is just the opposite.  They are in fact holding us back from the things that need done to undo the damage that has been wreaked on the country by the government and most particularly the "me generation" since the end of the Cold War. 

A Soviet expert on the United States (Georgi Arbatov) was prescient at the time when he said "We are going to do a terrible thing to you.  We are going to deprive you of an enemy."  Oscar Wilde said "In this world there are only two tragedies.  One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

Since the late 80s, the US has turned inward...while the rest of the world took the innovations largely fostered in the US and used them to open up the rest of the world.  In many ways we are now the cloistered, festering, ignorant country that China was before they were 'opened' to the rest of the world. The sad thing is, the Tea Party in particular but all of Washington DC in particular seems to want to keep it that way and nail the doors shut permanently.

The above link is to Tom Friedman's column, and I have just started reading his book (co-authored with Michael Mandelbaum)  "That Used To Be Us".  This linked column is essentially the theme of the book in a nutshell.  Watch this space for a review when I finish it -- it is sobering, yet hopeful reading about the future of the US and what we can yet leave our children if only we can keep the Neanderthals like the Tea Party out of the way.   

The Globalness of Corruption

Interesting and somewhat frustrating TED Talk on the universality of corruption and the difficulty of fighting it when forces like large banks and multi-national corporations like oil and gas companies are willing key players.  It should also be a sobering note to Americans in particular what their gluttonous appetite for wasting energy has done to other people around the world.

There are Alternatives

Here is a very interesting, thought-provoking  TED Talk for thinkers, particularly those with historical or political science interests:

The Real Path to Educational Excellence

Sir Ken Robinson is the individual whose first talk I used in my introduction for readers to TED Talks, a vital resource for all thinkers. Here is his second talk from 2010:  



He recently presented a third talk on his area of expertise.  It is full of his usual wit and wry observations, but this one hit particularly close to home. 

First, because I think "No Child Left Behind" is one of the stupidest, illogical, non-thinking, doomed-to-fail and just plain useless mandates to come out of Washington DC in some time.  It was a green light for educational bureaucrats and a red light for educational excellence and showed just how out of touch with the real world DC is.     

Also, it struck very close to home when in the middle of the talk he mentions some schools that do work --- and wondered aloud why we call them 'alternative schools'.......





This, like many TED talks is well worth watching -- please do if you care about the fact that the US schools have been in serious trouble since before the turn of the 21st century...and most are no more interested in doing something about it now than they were then, except for expensive little "feel good" tweaks like charter schools.  

What is needed is nothing short of a complete upheaval - tear down and rebuild the American public school system, and don't be so arrogant as to assume that we cannot learn anything from other countries whose graduates are whipping ours on the world market - particularly the STEM subjects that drive economies.

US Education - Wake Up!

If your school board or the state school administration is still murmuring into its collective navel about how much to expose our kids to sex ed or which 'version' of the Civil War to teach or which books need banned....better walk right up to them and slap them....HARD!

While Michelle Rhea and other US reformers of education have part of the equation right, it is not the whole story.  If you don't know who Michelle Rhea is, here is a well-done PBS Frontline piece on her and her reform efforts:

The first thing about Tom Friedman that got my interest and attention is his early (before almost everyone else) realization that the world is flat after all in some very important ways. This recent column talks about how progressive school districts and teachers can make a difference by acknowledging this fact and comparing themselves to the world education systems at large.  It is no credit to US education (or to those who blame environment for everything) that middle class US students are pretty resoundingly whipped in all categories by the Shanghai, China lower income students. 

It is possible to do better -- but US educators and the public in general have to give up this inane, outdated idea of local control of everything.  The countries that are whipping our _ss educationally all share one common trait -- they have a centralized set of educational standards and criteria that must be met everywhere, partly for world competitive reasons, but also to insure that you don't have a bunch of little fiefdoms running off in different directions creating their own little islands of incompetence.

The Real Story on Flat Earth Education

We in the US continue to have stupid little, unproductive state and local-level squabbles about student achievement, test standardization, teacher unions and have to laugh at ourselves a lot more these days.

Here is what people who think at the world-level about education are thinking and doing:

School as a Capital Offense

Imagine a place where simply attending school is an offense punishable by death - not just for you, but your family as well.  This is the reality of young girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban and their form of Islamist extremism. Whether or not the one Soviet and two US wars there had any positive impact on it remains to be seen (there is no evidence of this - in fact it seems to be getting worse).  However, as can be seen from this Ted Talk, some of the people are taking matters into their own hands.  

This makes one appreciate universal public education all the more...and wonder at the arrogance and short-sightedness of any American (girl or boy) who takes it for granted...or drops out.  Listen to this young woman's story -- and her passion and thirst for an education...for all Afghan girls.  It will make you see things differently, and provides yet another reason to be grateful that through birth location or naturalization...you are in the US and not any number of other countries in the world.

The World is....Hilly?

I just saw another of the TED talks - this one hits a general theme that is a favorite of mine - the wildly inaccurate perception of "everybody knows" topics, as well as the specific debate about a flat world, globalization, etc.

One of my personal favorite myths is the "everyone is on the Internet" mantra.  When I ask "then why does only 34% of the world's population have access to the Internet?"  I get a blank stare ... and then they go back to 'liking' everything in sight on Facebook.  

Pankaj Ghemawat's video is informative and worth watching (I think there is an implicit case in here for requiring a history/economics/facts test for all voters as well !).




The implicit debate between Tom Friedman's view and this video is not as stark as it may seem.
I found Tom Friedman's books on the subject to be compelling although it is difficult to quantify into hard data the exact degree of 'flatness' such as he describes.   Much of his evidence is 'macro' in scope and based on the perception of the Western world as to markets and economic forces which have certainly shifted to some degree to a 'flatter' view.  

Regardless, I find listening to this type of discussion one of the real rewards of being a thinker rather than a blind follower of trends.....