Elevator Pitch– 29 Words
The problem of income inequality
has many contributing factors but only one root cause: Every day it takes fewer
people to produce the same amount of goods and services.
Letter-to-the-Editor – 175 Words
The problem of income inequality
has many contributing factors but only one root cause: technology. The
prevailing and inescapable phenomenon of our age is this: every day it takes fewer people to produce the same amount of goods and
services. Whether you’re a college student wondering where the jobs are, a
parent wondering why college costs a quarter-million dollars, or someone who
can’t afford healthcare despite working two jobs and being accurately and
ironically described as “underemployed,” all of these problems grow from the
same tree. Only technology has the power to concentrate wealth as it is doing
all across the globe. Yes, it distributes wealth but not nearly as much. If you
are among the winners, you might have worked hard but possibly, hardly at all. And
the waves of unemployment will continue in increasingly tumultuous peaks amidst
falsely reassuring troughs until all remnants of the industrial age are gone.
We must act to balance the benefits of technology against its effect on the
overall populous or only time will tell the new outcome.
One-Page Essay
Why College Graduates Don't Have Enough Jobs: Wealth and Distribution in the Age of AutomationEvery day it takes fewer people to produce the same amount of goods and services.
This one inescapable fact is dominating our era and is at
the root of all our other financial problems. All other factors, however contributory, are
merely that—contributors, not sources.
If you're wondering why we are stuck in an endless cycle of
high unemployment, the answer has been in front of us for about 40 years: the increasing
pace of technology. Study any problem, not just jobs, but the gamut of
modern ills from gun violence to overpopulation, and while many factors may
come into play, at the root you will always find technology as the enabling
source. And if you somehow haven't heard the financial news from other
struggling countries, the problem is not unique to the US.
Back in the '70's the news focused on automation taking jobs, but for some reason it's as if we're now surprised at the way it's played out. Yet it's clear that human labor will be replaced by new efficiencies until all remnants of the last 100 years' work world are gone. And this is likely to occur in increasingly larger waves.The most likely upcoming wave is the Postal Service. After that telecomm will lose another tier of labor as Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous. And when younger technologists finally become tomorrow's politicians, perhaps tax simplification will translate into tens of thousands of fewer IRS jobs.
To solve any problem you need an explanation—a mental model—that correctly assesses the circumstances. To figure out where the jobs are you need to figure out wealth and its distribution. Wealth is the sum of the necessities, niceties, and healthiness that a society enjoys. (It's not that complicated.) Distribution is more subtle. Ever since the hunter-gather days,when wealth was distributed evenly—if sparsely—among everyone, society has been on a relentless progression, through the agrarian culture, to the industrial age... in which individuals have ever-increasing ability to accumulate—concentrate—wealth.
Technology has always been the lever in the equation. It estimated that in 1900 an American farmer could feed 25 people; today that number is around 1,000. Until recently, the jobs that were displaced were replaced in time. But that process is no longer able to take up the slack. A recent story in the New York Times magazine epitomized the relationship between wealth concentration and technology: devious trading companies surreptitiously undercut the rest of the people in the market by detecting trades before they are executed on a slower exchange and buying or selling a millisecond beforehand. (Never mind that it shouldn't even be possible, that's another story.) Despite the duplicity of it, that is the state in which we now exist: genuine work isn't completely detached from the genuine creation of wealth, but it is absolutely unnecessary for its accumulation and concentration. By a recent account, half of the world's wealth is now owned by 85 people.
Problems that take many years to create aren't solved in months. But most of this problem has occurred in 50 years, not really 500. And, on the plus side, we don't by any measure have a shortage of wealth. Technology is creating wealth faster than even Americans can consume it. But what to do?
Adjustments could be made on many fronts, such as energy policy, healthcare, and education, but let's examine just the financial front. We need to mitigate the employment shock waves of the upcoming technology tsunamis with laws that balance corporate and personal interests. Plain-and-simple, this means "progressive taxation." And if the concentration of wealth is such that one person possesses the wealth of 42 million people, then the rate of "progression" has to be equivalently steep.
Possibly the best hope, more effective than a minimum wage law, is to enact laws that limit top executive total compensation—no-loopholes for stocks—to a multiple of the lowest paid employee. This still allows unfettered capitalism because it does not put an absolute limit on anyone's ability to concentrate wealth; it simply forces them to bring others along with them. Imagine even a multiple limit of 100: if an executive makes $10 million per year, the lowest paid employee would be $100,000. Or how about a hybrid? (Hybrids always win, by the way.) The portion of executive's salary below the 100 multiple is taxed at X percent; that portion of an executive's salary above the 100 multiple is taxed at 2X percent. Now consider non-profit companies, such as the National Football League. To get the benefit of not sharing as much of their revenue with the public as a profit company does, shouldn’t the executive income multiple be lower… perhaps 10 times the lowest paid employee? Shouldn't such a law be easy to enact for non-profits?
The wonderful engine of corporate America is only that—our engine. It must be balanced by choices we make: choosing activities that produce truly long-term wealth and avoid its ungoverned concentration, and basing decisions on sustainability instead of growth. If we don’t choose the right balance, technology will drive our children off a cliff.
Essay – 4,700 Words
Why College Graduates Don't Have Enough Jobs: Wealth and Distribution in the Age of AutomationEvery day it takes fewer people to produce the same amount of goods and services.
This one inescapable fact is dominating our era and is at
the root of all our other financial problems. All other factors, however contributory, are
merely that—contributors, not sources.
If you're wondering why we are stuck in an endless cycle of
high unemployment, the answer has been in front of us for about 40 years: the increasing
pace of technology. Study any problem, not just jobs, but the gamut of
modern ills from gun violence to overpopulation, and while many factors may
come into play, at the root you will always find technology as the enabling
source. And if you somehow haven't heard the financial news from other
struggling countries, the problem is not unique to the US.
Back in the '70's the news focused on automation taking
jobs, but for some reason it's as if we're now surprised at the way it's played
out. Yet it's clear that human labor will be replaced by new efficiencies until
all remnants of the last 100 years' work world are gone. And this is likely to
occur in increasingly larger waves. For instance, when we are finally forced to
stop moving mail by burning fossil fuels, look for a few hundred thousand
jobs—and not just government mail carriers—to be "made redundant" as
the corporate euphemists would phrase it. After that, perhaps education
will be the next and larger wave. It could be from kids learning much faster
from tablet computers, or from completely universalized testing and
accreditation on the Web. If you're inclined to think that education is immune
to the phenomenon of job loss from automation—and maybe you're right that it's
more resistant than other sectors—then let's move on to telecommunications: as
soon as Wi-Fi is ubiquitous, young people will have completely abandoned
traditional phone service, and thousands more telecomm customer service jobs
will disappear.
But amidst this upheaval in the relationship between jobs
and society, the conversation has progressed little beyond conservatives and
liberals attacking the straw men of each other's characterized extremes: the
liberals, we're told, want socialism where no one has to work and money grows on
trees; and their conservative counterparts want pure dog-eat-dog capitalism,
the underprivileged be damned. These imagined but diametrically opposed
worldviews were typified recently by a Jonah Goldberg article, "Define Income Inequality" (January,
2014):
"Also, income inequality can be a benign symptom. For instance, if everyone is getting richer, who cares if the rich are getting richer faster? ... Dasani is certainly a victim, but is the system really to blame? Dasani's biological father is utterly absent. Her mother, Chanel, a drug addict and daughter of a drug addict. ... Family structure and the values that go into successful child rearing have a stronger correlation with economic mobility than income inequality. America's system is hardly flawless. But if Dasani were born to the same parents in a socialist country, she'd still be a victim -- of bad parents."
To conservatives at Goldberg's extreme, there is no income
inequality problem, just drug-addicted, bad parents. And he simultaneously paints
for us the imagined extreme of what he would have us believe are his opponents'
flawed stance: inequality and capitalism are the socialist devil, and it's all
America's fault. Simplicity and arrogance reign... and the problem and poor
thinking get passed on to you, the next generation.
Contrary to such extreme characterizations, reasonable
people seem to recognize that balance has always been the answer. Capitalism
and its bottomless ocean of short-term self-interest is the engine that has enabled
America to reach its unprecedented height. But social systems, with their
long-term and shared benefits have provided the scaffolding on which we
climbed. Neither is a solution without the other in proper measure. Ultimately
all governance consists of balancing short-term and personal interests against
long-term and shared interests. Right now, adequate jobs hang in correcting
that out-of-kilter balance.
What Is Wealth?
To solve any problem you need an explanation—a mental model—that
correctly assesses the circumstances. Let's start by examining the constituents
of the problem: wealth and distribution.
Don't let anyone tell you that wealth is complicated to
define. It is the sum of the necessities, niceties, and healthiness that a
society enjoys. Does an abundance of natural resources constitute wealth? With
the possible exception of water and freely growing fruits and vegetables, not exactly.
Natural resources are not wealth until you add technology.
And what about an abundance of hard workers? Can a nation
with poor resources make up with hard work what it lacks in resources? Again, not
exactly... not in global competitive terms, not without
technology. Technology is the ultimate lever in the new equation of
wealth. Third world countries can work their peoples' fingers to the bone as
many do in clothing manufacturing, and that might make them highly employed,
but hardly wealthy. When they start to replace the manual labor with
technology, then wealth is produced... and we'd move on to discuss whether that
wealth is distributed. Is a nation wealthy if the masses work like slaves and a
few enjoy the benefits? That's a decision each of us has to make for ourselves.
Technology
Let's revisit our starting proposition about technology and
make the statement a bit more complete:
Every
day, thanks to technology and technology alone, it takes fewer people to
produce the same amount of...
- Goods
- Services
- Food
- Atmospheric carbon
- Insider stock trades
- Surveillance and marketing databases
- Defenseless victims of violence, whether schoolchildren lined up against their one-room Amish schoolhouse blackboard or grown adults killed by remote-control, drone warcraft
Yes, we can make more of the good things with less
labor—jobs—but we can also produce more of every bad thing, too. Foremost among
them, we've had a fleet of hundreds of millions of little carbon-generators
running for 100 years now, and they've nearly completed their mission of
blanketing the planet with insulation. And we have computers that can trade
stocks millions of times per second... for what legitimate purpose? We have
every detail of our lives stored in corporate and government databases. And we
have guns that can kill whole movie theaters or classrooms full of people in a
single moment of rage. (Perhaps you prefer, "Guns don't kill people;
technology does.") Motivations and machinations of all sorts are behind
these problems, but whether it's hunger, generosity, curiosity, greed,
insecurity, or insanity, only technology provides the power that turns motive
into big results.
In the Beginning
Let's focus though on jobs. To understand the relationship
between jobs and technology you have to study how that relationship evolved. In
the hunter-gatherer society, there was one job per family and it was guaranteed
for life or starvation, whichever came first. As soon as you could forage, you
worked 12-16 hours per day and there was full employment.
Then someone threw a rock at an animal and technology was
invented. It wasn't quite Thomas Edison or Bill Gates but it was a start.
Perhaps grandparents could now join the family, thus increasing the
number of people supported per job. Spears quickly followed, then light bulbs,
steam engines, and the iPhone, dramatically increasing the wealth that a single
worker produced.
When seeds were planted and crops harvested, the wealth
really started multiplying and the number of people supported by one worker
multiplied with it. Good barterers started to become successful capitalists and
the concentration of wealth began an unstoppable progression to the state we
see it in today, where Warren Buffet, Sam Walton, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and a
few others possess about 25% of our country's wealth. I'm just picking a wild
number, but whether my estimate is low or high, the combined concentration and
disparity of wealth is greater than it's ever been, and it's only possible
because of technology. It estimated that in 1900 an American farmer could feed
25 people; today that number is around 1,000. By a recent account, half of the
world's wealth is owned by 85 people.
You Didn't Make That
A recent line of public argument surrounded President
Obama's declaring "You didn't make that," referring figuratively to
the roads and bridges that support commerce on which the Sam Waltons of the
world build their wealth. The vitriol then spewed in both directions as the
"S-word"—socialism—was thrown about. But from the dawn of technology
we have been on an unstoppable progression toward greater "social
goods." School students learn the significance of public and private goods
in basic economics classes: Sam Walton couldn't possibly accumulate countless
billions without public roads, a federal banking system, public water and
health systems, ad infinitum. And if you think it through very carefully, you'll
realize there's a physical limit on the amount of wealth that hard work alone can
amass. Comparing an average worker who is as proud of his work as most of us, to
the super-successful, you will probably conclude that the super-successful
person could produce about 10 times the output. But it's preposterous to
suggest that Bill Gates worked a million times harder than Average Joe. Yes,
he's a hard worker and a genius at business and computers, but the difference
is technology, not work. The 85 people mentioned earlier each own as much as 42
million people; do you suggest they worked 42 million times harder?
It's technology that makes it possible to concentrate
wealth... like never before. A single online e-commerce system now has the
power to make millions of dollars with less investment and labor than in the
history of mankind, and by a wide margin. Can we please stop it with the notion
that the super rich are so because of hard work?
The converse argument is also made that technology has good
effects, distributing wealth and making it possible for more people to access
wealth... to get rich. Some refer to this as the "pie getting bigger"
or "a rising tide lifts all boats." There can be little question of
that, but the catch is in the proportions.
Technology's power to concentrate
wealth is vastly greater than its distributing effect. In fact, this ratio of
concentration vs. distribution is the key to understanding our dilemma... and
then doing something about it. All of the major institutions and phenomena of
modern society have an effect on wealth, distribution, or both. Some increase
one or the other; some decrease them. And jobs are almost entirely the result
of phenomena that increase distribution. In all probability, the wealth of
America is increasing faster (!) than it ever has, but without distribution you
don't have a job.
Concentration vs. Distribution
Let's try an exercise. Imagine a pill is invented that
stops your hair from growing at whatever length it is when you take the pill.
If you think this is wildly preposterous, recall that there is already a chemical
that is fairly successful at making hair grow; there's a chance my new pill
could be easier to invent than the one for growing
hair! Maybe the pill is expensive but eventually the price comes down to a few
dollars a year. In 2012 there were about 600,000 people cutting hair in the US.
After this pill goes mainstream, what will that number drop to? I'd guess that
it will get cut in half... and with it, 300,000 fewer job—incomes—needed. Will
the number of dollars spent on hair care be reduced? That's a very different
matter that involves the topic of 'budgets.' Some people will continue to spend
the same amount of money on their appearance, but it won't necessarily involve
labor. It could be hair care products.
Let's try another one. Today I noticed that the gas meter
outside my house doesn't have the same electronic box on it that enables the
water company to collect meter reading data without people walking around. When
the gas company catches up, there go 50,000 more jobs.
Or consider truck driving. Even if you don't believe that
driverless cars will be financially viable in the foreseeable future—they seem
to be technically viable already—imagine a new system to replace much of the
trucking done today: a new light rail system resembling amusement-park roller
coasters could ferry driverless freight modules between and around metropolitan
areas. It might be a fraction of the cost of today's trucks and possibly with
no pollution, since enough solar energy might be collected on their roofs to
counter the much lower friction of their solid plastic wheels. When UPS and
Amazon put such a system in place, today's 1.7 million truck driving jobs will
be roughly decimated.
Get used to it. The waves will only get more erratic—generally
larger—for perhaps another fifty years. Periods of comfort will only be lulls
between peaks and troughs. When the dust is finished settling, money that had
previously been distributed to "hard working" people will no longer
be so, in anywhere near its 1960's, US middle-class proportions... if we
continue with our current habits. With this framework, let's examine some of
the intermediate factors between where we are and the solutions, and how they
affect wealth or distribution.
Growth, Cars, and Houses
Every day in the news we hear our financial report card,
announcing whether our economy is growing and how fast. Are we building more
houses and how fast? Are we buying enough cars? Is the stock market up or down?
Sooner or hopefully not later, it should become clear that we can't build cars
and houses fast enough to stop chasing our employment tails. Growth based on
endless consumption can't possibly be compatible with, well, with anything.
And cars are the worst case, having clearly proven to be the most brilliant
machine ever devised, to chase us from the planet. Think about it in these
numbers: we've produced about a billion little machines spewing toxins and
planet-insulating gasses for a hundred
years; trying to undo that damage in a few years is now looking impossible.
Even if personal transportation is made cleaner, the manufacturing is still a
losing proposition, consuming huge amounts of resources per person. Cars do add
some wealth in the form of freedom and job mobility, but as robots take over
car manufacturing, its contribution to distributing wealth will diminish. And
until the pollution problem is reversed, the negative contribution to long-term
wealth is actually immeasurable.
Except for the pollution aspect of automobiles, the
equation is identical for houses. Home manufacturing increases the distribution
of wealth because it is highly manual. It's probably one of the best activities
in that regard. And it increases wealth because it drives the supply side of
the supply-and-demand equation up, increasing access to homes. But housing is
probably a net loser when you really examine natural resources and overall
energy use. It's a cycle that's unsustainable.
Ultimately using 'growth' as both the daily yardstick and
ultimate goal of economic health is not merely unsuccessful and
unsustainable... growth is the polar opposite of sustainability. With growth as
the goal, the cycle simply won't end. What could possibly be the goal… every
square foot of habitable land covered with houses and cars? Are we insane, or
just collectively dim-witted?
Healthcare and College
These two aspects of American society are dominating the
economic landscape but they're symptoms rather than root causes. And it might
surprise you to hear that they are one-in-the-same problem. Healthcare and
college education are financial disasters because they are the last two major
aspects of our society that cannot be outsourced and off-shored to low-paid
people in other countries. So every mistake and subtle corruption of those
systems, which we have easily tolerated for the last 50 years, is now staying home to roost… but in a new
economy, that now has 50 million underemployed and undereducated people and
half our wealth enjoyed by a handful of citizens.
In healthcare we have a system that originally worked fine:
an insurance system for catastrophic loss was sponsored by the often-risky
workplace and contributed to by nearly everyone. And because our country has
been so rich (mostly on oil energy) for the last hundred years, no cost
controls were needed in the medical world, and none developed. To understand
why none of those circumstances work anymore you must read David Goldhill's
September, 2009 article in The Atlantic, "How American Health Care Killed My Father." To paraphrase
Goldhill's explanation, we now live to be 100 and healthcare expense is no
longer a matter of unexpected catastrophe but routine maintenance. So an
insurance model is totally inapplicable. Add to that the fact that medical
costs and prices are totally hidden, and inflated prices aren't a
surprise—they're a certainty. As for the technology component—the supposedly
expensive MRI machines and so on—Goldhill rightly explains that technology
isn't the problem; it's a whipping boy… just a symptom of a corrupted pricing
model. But technology is responsible for the increased lifespan that is the
root cause.
College turns out to be a simpler matter of runaway costs in
a world that has no tension between supply and demand. Unlike healthcare, no
tectonic plates have shifted underneath college. Instead it's just a world
protected from the forces that provide value in every other sector of our
economy. Although there are thousands of colleges, they somehow are not really
competing on price. Virtually all of the top schools cost $60,000 per year.
Instead of applying their immense endowments to lower the cost of attendance,
funds are doled out in a secret lottery of standard discounts for good
students, disguised as "scholarships." In this upside-down world,
parents fill out a form that discloses every financial detail to the vendor.
How could prices not increase?
Population
In our original proposition, we left out one item:
Every day it takes fewer people to produce the same amount of… people.
Yes, thanks to technology, we create more people than ever.
Infant mortality is lower, more people grow to the age of reproduction, and more
people live longer than ever before. Ultimately technology and population are
the same problem and inseparable. Because of technology we must decide what is
the right number of people for the planet. The number cannot rise indefinitely
so when will we deal with it? A more precise framing of the broader problem
then, is that it is the relationship between technology and population.
New Thinking
Those are the problems, the root cause, and their
relationship. Our current level of problem-solving is limited to repetitive,
vile attacks and inane arguments. To climb out of this trench will require
better ways of thinking and then the words and behaviors to put that thinking
into action.
The first change is to become more rational… but it might
not be what you think. Almost every matter of finances seems to mistakenly
frame the discussion with what are called absolute numbers. The latest example
is the dispute over the debt ceiling, and whether it should be x or y trillion
dollars. But there should not be a debate about the debt ceiling every time we
run out of money because it should be expressed as a proportion, a ratio (as in
'rational'). The debt ceiling should be a percentage of our government's
revenue or perhaps gross domestic product. This same simple-minded flaw hits
every front. In the latest battle over Obamacare, people complain about the
absolute size of companies that must provide healthcare benefits. If the law
used a proportion instead of an absolute number, contribution to the plan would
be based on percentages so the arguments, inequities, and loopholes would
disappear. The same problem occurs with employee benefits in general. If
businesses were required to provide total compensation proportionate to hours
worked, rather than an on-off switch tied to some threshold defined as
"part-time," then another corruption of our system disappears. The
business incentives to make workers part-time would be eliminated.
The next change in thinking is to recognize that all
activities are choices between long-term and short-term impacts. The US is
apparently about to experience a tremendous energy glut from fracking and
horizontal drilling. You probably know of the Marcellus shale in the Appalachian
Mountains, with perhaps 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (Can you change
that absolute amount to a rational fact… years of US gas consumption? It looks
like it might be 20 years' worth.) But not as many people have heard that Williston,
North Dakota contains one of the largest oil fields in the world, (NYT, January
31, 2013). Earlier we stated that all governance consists of balancing
short-term and personal interests against long-term and shared interests. If we
proceed to burn off the Marcellus and Williston fossil fuels as quickly as
we've used energy for the last hundred years, we will have a short-term period
of unprecedented wealth, and possibly do nothing less than hammer the final
nail in the coffin of our offspring… providing that last measure of insulation
to Earth's atmosphere that overwhelms our ability to recover soon enough.
Whenever you hear a small-thinker say that the energy boom will create wealth,
you must ask them to include the words "long-term" or
"short-term" to their statement. Long-term it will destroy wealth as
never before.
The final aspect of thinking is to evaluate each aspect of
society and ask, does it increase or decrease long-term wealth? And does it cause
wealth to be more concentrated or distributed? Most activities involve unclear
combinations of the two effects, and there is no certainty one way or the
other… it boils down to judgment. The only relatively easy choices will be to
avoid activities that decrease long term wealth, irrespective of the effect on
distribution.
The Logic of Job Creation
There are three basic categories of jobs that can be
created: blue collar, white collar, and "no-collar." Blue collar is
labor, white collar are the services from retail through law, finance, and
medicine. No-collar workers are the people creating the technology and
automation that is reducing the number of jobs. Healthcare is interesting
because it spans all three, with laborers in the nursing home sector, white
collar in the acute care sector, and the no-collar workers of the pharmaceutical
and software worlds. Which of the categories should policies attempt to create
jobs in? No-collar jobs are probably impossible to forcibly create. Forcibly
creating white collar jobs is equivalent to creating busy-work and is almost
certain to reduce wealth. Here's an example: pre-tax administrative accounts.
The focus of job creation should be solely on blue collar work.
Do This
We now have a platform from which we can view the landscape
accurately: rational thinking, long-term focus, and increasing wealth without
decreasing distribution. So let's enumerate the specific strategies that must
be pursued if young people—and this is only about young people—want jobs.
¶Mitigate the employment shock waves of the upcoming
technology tsunamis with laws that balance corporate and personal interests. Plain-and-simple,
this means "progressive taxation." And if the concentration of wealth
is such that one person possesses the wealth of 42 million people, then the
rate of "progression" has to be equivalently steep. Possibly the best
approach, more effective than a minimum wage law, is to enact laws that limit top
executive pay (total compensation, no-loopholes for stocks) to a multiple of
the lowest paid employee. This still allows unabridged capitalism because it does
not put an absolute limit on anyone's ability to concentrate wealth; it simply
forces them to bring others along with them. Imagine even a multiple limit of
100: if an executive makes $10 million per year, the lowest paid employee would
be $100,000. Or how about a hybrid? (Hybrids always win, by the way.) The
portion of executive's salary below the 100 multiple is taxed at X percent;
that portion of an executive's salary above the 100 multiple is taxed at 2X
percent. Now consider non-profit companies, such as the National Football
League. To get the benefit of not sharing as much of their revenue with the
public as a profit company does, shouldn’t the executive income multiple be
lower… perhaps 10 times the lowest paid employee? Shouldn't such a law be easy
to enact for non-profits?
¶Enact laws and policies to retain jobs where there is no
impact on international competitiveness. Here's an example. New Jersey is
one of the few states that mandates that gasoline be pumped by employees of the
gas station. This is a perfect example of a job that is now fabricated but can
be beneficial, saving consumers from an often inconvenient task… and providing
some employment in doing so.
¶In education, there is hope that prices will come down on
their own in the future, not precisely from online education but from
improvements that software will make in the learning process. There is,
however, one big change that can be promoted to push the process along:
separate testing and accreditation from instruction. The road will then be
cleared for authentic and efficient judging of the best instruction per dollar.
And the "fierce engine of the American economy," as I've heard it
called, will take over, reestablishing value in all levels education. The best
of breed instruction for every topic will be available to every student on the
Web, whether Malcolm Khan's videos or crowd-sourced games created by the
students themselves. This will
happen, and teachers can then concentrate on the hardest parts of the job.
¶Direct one third of the upcoming energy glut to fund
sustainable energy infrastructure. Reserve another third for the military for
long-term security. The remaining portion can go on the market, but we must put
the true, long-term cost of destructive energy (fossil fuels), into the price
of those fuels. This is called taxation, no matter what the method, and it is
the only solution. The more complicated the method, the more abuse will occur. The
current price of oil and gas is artificially low and is preventing us from
developing sustainable energy sources.
¶Promote the development of small, modular, nuclear energy.
This is the only reasonable strategy to protect the environment from our
rapacious consumption of fossil fuels. One reason for this is that every single
sustainable source (wind, solar, biofuel) also has its costs to the
environment. Once one or two modular nuclear systems are proven, learn from the
French who standardize their nuclear operations so they completely control it.
The American method—endless variety in the name of competition—is an
engineering nightmare that is responsible for the fear-mongering that
undermines the adoption of nuclear power.
¶It remains to be seen if healthcare's runaway prices will
be solved by Obamacare. If not, consider this alternative. First create laws to
force disclosure of prices. Then get employers out of the healthcare mess by not
allowing them to directly provide healthcare; legislate that all compensation
must be financial. The market will then restore the laws of supply and demand.
Finally break healthcare into three parts: preventive, acute, and catastrophic
care. Totally nationalize the finances of preventive care, so that general
health is improved. (Don't have the government operate the prevention in any way, just handle the taxation and
crediting.) Totally leave acute care to
the market, and if Goldhill is right it will settle into high-deductible plans.
Use existing national systems to provide catastrophic insurance but allow
private markets to compete.
¶Finally, pursue activities and priorities that match
population to the wealth of society and the environment's ability to absorb our
effluence. And pray that we don't succeed in neutralizing the actual biologic
process of aging. Today's problems will pale by comparison.
The wonderful engine of corporate America is only that—our
engine. It must be balanced by choices we make: choosing activities that
produce truly long-term wealth and avoid its ungoverned concentration, and
basing decisions on sustainability instead of growth. If we don’t choose the right
balance, technology will drive our children off a cliff.
