The Incredible Disappearing Job: A five-point plan for creating jobs

As most people know or at least intuit that the low unemployment rate masks the real job situation for many millions of Americans. 

My Time.com essay today, The Incredible Disappearing Job, offers a five-point plan for addressing the problem.

The Dejobbing of America: How to create jobs and what job seekers can do in the meantime.

My latest Time.com article offers fresh ideas both on what society can do to create jobs and what individuals can do in the meantime.

A Blueprint for Increasing the Number of Good Jobs in America

THE PROBLEM
Perhaps 50 to 100 million Americans can't or won't be able to sustainably make a living. The unemployment rate of 7.4% doesn't count the millions who are earning at or near minimum wage or who have given up trying to find work

Most of the fastest-growing jobs require high-level skills (like software developer) or often don't pay a living wage (janitor, retail clerk, caregiver, etc.) And ever more full-time benefited, stable jobs are being replaced by part-time contract gigs, automation, or offshored workers.

The disappearance of full-time good jobs has been accelerating for decades, in part because of the growing gap between the cost of hiring an American full-time compared with getting the work done using the approaches listed in the previous paragraph. When an employer hires an American full-time, s/he must pay, for example, Social Security, family leave (paid leave in CA, planned in others), and growing worker-compensation and wrongful-termination claims. Such claims are likely to accelerate further as people get more desperate. And when ObamaCare kicks in, employers will be required to pay thousands of dollars per 30+ hour-per-week employee every year. A likely result will be that many employers will replace yet more full-time workers with part-timers.

The percentage of people unable to earn a stably sustainable living will likely increase further because, on average, the low-skilled poor have more children and because "comprehensive immigration reform" will legalize 11 million people, many whose skills, education, and English language are insufficient to, ongoing, earn a living wage.

INADEQUATE SOLUTIONS
Education. The most politically palatable and, in theory, sensible solution is education. Alas, at least a half century of concerted, expensive efforts to close the achievement gap have been far from successful. Yes, school achievement has risen slightly among the poor but the abilities and skills required to consistently earn a middle-class income have increased far more. Low-skill agricultural and manufacturing jobs have declined while high-tech and knowledge work have burgeoned.

I believe our best shot at making education the magic pill we wish it would be is to create Dream Homework: a complete set of dream-team-taught online, interactive, lessons, K-12, available online and used by teachers to replace the reviled standard homework. That way, every child, rich or poor, would be taught daily by some of our most transformational teachers. Thus the school day could be devoted mainly to providing the one-on-one support that only a live teacher can provide.

Job retraining. Job retraining is also an inadequate solution. That too has been tried for decades, with staggering costs and staggering lack of success.

Raising the minimum wage. Instinctively, it feels appropriate to raise the minimum wage to a level at which people can live decently. Unfortunately, many people don't add even minimum-wage value to employers. For example, many people learn slowly, are unreliable, alienate coworkers and customers, steal, and/or have serious physical or mental disabilities. Many employers would pay to not hire such people, so their net value to the employer is less than $0! So if the minimum wage were raised to, for example, $15, many more low-skill workers would be unemployed. Employers would think about many employees, "This person doesn't add enough value to my workplace to justify $15 an hour plus all those benefits and risk of employee lawsuit." True, raising the minimum wage to $15 would improve the lives of millions of Americans who are paid less than $15 an hour plus benefits but who are worth at least that. But a "living wage" would also render unemployed millions of would-be workers who add less than $15 an hour of value.

A SET OF APPROACHES MORE LIKELY TO HELP
No one approach will solve this problem. Candidly, I'm not convinced that even implementing all of the following would make those 50-100 million people consistently earning at least $15 an hour plus benefits. But these are my best shots at what would help.

K-16 entrepreneurship education. New businesses create jobs, so teaching students the art and science of entrepreneurship should create jobs while abetting society. Of course, the school curriculum is already packed. So what could entrepreneurship education replace? Replacing one or two days a week of physical education with entrepreneurship education might offer the best tradeoff. 

That said,, unlike entrepreneurs of previous generations, those who create websites, software, etc, create few jobs: A few geniuses are needed to create the first product. Then unlike traditional manufacturing, it's reproduced and distributed electronically, no people required. Yeah, a few marketers etc. are needed but no major increase in employment, especially for those with intellectual, social, and emotional capability below the 90th percentile.

Three-year easing of regulations for new businesses. (suggested to me by Robert Neuwirth.) Many people contemplating starting a business are daunted by the government-imposed costs and regulations. A temporary easing could create more businesses and, in-turn, jobs. 

Taxpayer-funded jobs.  I envision a WPA-like program, in which taxpayers fund an Assistance Army that would, for example, build infrastructure, bring more tutors to K-12 classrooms, provide better in-home support for shut-in seniors, beautify riven inner cities, and fund visual and performing artists to enrich their community. 

Reducing taxes on small business. The public is not aware that America's 30 million non-corporate businesses pay taxes at individual rates. The average top marginal rate for the 23 million sole proprietorships is 47.5 percent, higher even that the rate for the 7.3 million S-corporations of 44.5 percent. That kind of tax rate on top of other employer mandates from Workers Comp to Social Security to ObamaCare provides a major disincentive to hire more workers. 

Nanopayments. Jaron Lanier, in his new book, Who Owns the Future?, argues that much work goes unpaid and could become so. For example, millions of bloggers, tweeters, digital photographers, Amazon review writers, YouTube video uploaders, etc. might be able to make at least sideline income by charging pennies per view, automatically charged to a user's credit card. It's difficult to envision enough of the public being willing to pay even a penny for what they currently get for free but the benefit of such a system would be so great that I believe it's worth a societal effort to try to make nanopayments the norm. A smaller version of this already exists on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and for $50-100 projects on taskrabbit.com, and for $100 to $1000 projects on standard freelancer sites such as freelancer.com, odesk.com, 99designs.com, and elance.com.

Encourage the share economy. Websites are helping people make money by sharing what they already own: their home (AirBnB, car (RelayRides, getaround, zipcar, Uber) and money, for example, Kickstarter.

Get the public to embrace patchwork careers. Of course, full-time, stable jobs offer advantages: Many people like having a routine, a regular place to go to work, a job they can grow comfortable in, coworkers that become friends, whom they pass the years with. Alas, such stability may be impossible for many of those 50 to 100 million people and perhaps for many others. 

Many people so dislike the idea of earning their living from multiple part-time, low-pay, often temporary jobs that they'd rather be unemployed. Other people are daunted at having to look for multiple jobs, perhaps frequently. Those are legitimate concerns but patchwork careers do have advantages, for example, variety, flexible schedule, and more learning opportunities. Perhaps a campaign of public-service announcements, a la the anti-smoking and anti-drug-abuse initiatives, might convince more people to pursue a patchwork career.

Get the public to learn to live on less. As said earlier, I fear that all of the above will only partially address the problem. So I believe the public needs to realize that The American Way--trying to spend your way to happiness--may be not only unrealistic but unwise if not a downright fool's game. Beyond the basics, most people find contentment through rewarding work, relationships, and creative outlets, not buying that brand-new car or 20th pair of shoes. 

Dear reader, I welcome your ideas and your reactions to mine.I plan to send a revised version of this to Jaron Lanier in advance of his appearance on my radio program, where we will, on-the-air, brainstorm a plan for increasing the number of good jobs in America.

Video of My CBS Interview on Where the Jobs Will Be

I was interviewed yesterday on CBS News in San Francisco about whether government can create jobs and the impact of another Obama administration on jobs. HERE is the link to that interview.

What Should Government Do to Create Jobs?

This morning, the CBS-News producer of the show I'll appear on tomorrow emailed me. He asked, "Is it okay if the host asks you, "What should government do to create jobs?"

HERE was my response:

Create Jobs: Replace Geometry with Entrepreneurship

I'm writing a series called "What's the Big Idea?" for the Washington Post.

It will offer fresh solutions for big problems. The first is a way to create jobs: Replace Geometry with Entrepreneurship.

If you'd like to comment on it, you'll get more readers if you write your comment on that Washington Post page and then copy and paste it onto this blog.

Why the Obama Jobs Plan Won't Work...and What Would

Today, creating jobs is Job One, and I worry that the Obama Jobs Plan will fail. Here are reasons why:

• Both sides of the aisle advocate extending 99-week employment checks to more people, on the belief that redistributing money to people likely to spend rather than save it, will thereby create jobs. Alas, that has a serious side effect. Nearly all of my unemployed clients, in the confidentiality of my office, admit that each time there's an extension in unemployment, they feel less pressure to look for a job. They're just sitting around.
  
• We've already tried a trillion-dollar stimulus and it created few jobs. It's oft been lamented, "The job stimulus didn't stimulate and those shovel-ready jobs weren't." That doesn't inspire sufficient confidence that it's worth spending hundreds of billions more of our money on another round of "stimulus."
• Funding jobs with taxpayer dollars means taking money from the taxpayers (those most likely to use money to create jobs) and redistributing it to those least likely to.
• Once any government-stimulus-spending-created jobs are completed, continuing taxpayer-funded money will be required to keep the recipients employed.
• Many of the infrastructure jobs are make-work. For example, when politicians say spending will be on roads, they don't say they'll be building roads, which would relieve congestion. Radical environmentalists are making that nearly impossible. Instead, the road money heavily goes to repaving existing roads. I don't know what's going on nationwide, but where I'm driving, I'm seeing the repaving work that is funded by the previous round of taxpayer-funded stimulus, and those roads really don't need paving, certainly not enough to justify the cost to us the taxpayer. The main result is that I'm forced to sit in more traffic because of the repaving work going on, and which seems to take far longer than it should.

A Better Jobs Plan
(Regular readers of this blog will recognize two of the following three ideas. I apologize to you, but in light of the currency of the Obama Jobs Plan/Act, I wanted to present these ideas within that context.)

I believe that just the following three ideas would create millions of enduring, pro-social, offshore-resistant jobs.

Entrepreneurship Nation
Both sides of the aisle agree that government stimulus spending, at best, is a jump-start., that permanent job creation must come from the private sector. Most people also agree that entrepreneurs, while providing better, faster, cheaper goods and services, also create jobs.

So why not replace just a fraction of our arcana-larded K-16 curriculum with entrepreneurship education? For example, most high school students spend many hours deriving geometric theorems, balancing chemical equations, memorizing historical facts, and untangling the intricacies of Shakespeare. Could it be reasonably be argued that those are more important for all students than learning how to start an ethical yet successful business?

While some entrepreneurs are born not made, much is learnable, especially if taught not by ivory-tower academics but by successful, ethical businesspeople. I imagine that many, especially the retired, would be willing to do that even as a volunteer.

America Assists
It's widely agreed that buying non-essential "stuff" is unlikely to lead to happiness. Don't we all know people who live in an impressive home, who replace their good used car with a new one, go on costly vacations, and buy lots of la-di-dah clothes and jewelry, yet after a brief "shopper's high," aren't that much happier, let alone more kind? Yet we seem to be addicted to trying to shop our way into bliss.

But what if the government launched a public service campaign like its successful anti-smoking campaign to encourage the public to replace some of its buying of "stuff" with buying of services that hold greater promise of improving their quality of life. For example, hire a part-time:
assistant to:

• help care for your newborn
• a homework helper for your older child
• a personal assistant to do errands, laundry, wait for the repairperson, etc.
• a personal geek to teach you the technology you're afraid of
• a health care system advocate to help you get the care you need, affordably, in our labyrinthine, scary system
• a companion for your aging relative

Each of those jobs promise to significantly improve the life of the hirer and family. And the employee, piecing together a few such part-time jobs can make a reasonable living doing work that's unquestionably beneficial and ethical. Importantly, most of those jobs require only a modest skill set. Even many high school dropouts could likely find one such job they could do well enough.

How would hirers and employees match up? Just as they do for other jobs: hirers would place ads, for example, on Craigslist. If hirers want a professional to do the screening and payroll, they could turn to employment agencies. That would create yet more jobs.

Crowd-funded businesses. Today, it's very difficult for new businesss to obtain funding because banks are reluctant to invest in unproven entrepreneurs and because of massive government regulations. I'd waive those regulations for new businesses seeking up to $50,000, thereby allowing them to solicit financing on what I call crowd-financing websites. Potential investors could visit the site, read thorough various start-ups' prospectuses, and invest as little or as much as they wanted, from $1 to the maximum the new business wants up to the aforementioned $50,000.

Dear readers, as always, your comments are welcome.

A More Potent Approach to Creating Jobs

At the risk of hubris, I believe that my two-plank plan for creating jobs is far more potent than what's being proposed by others. I've written about this previously, for example, HERE and HERE, but perhaps it will be more compelling if I verbally explain it:

My Ten Worries About America and How I'd Address Each

Here is the latest iteration of my plan to reinvigorate America. It addresses job creation, health care,k-16 education, U.S. involvement in the Middle East, our electoral system, the national debt, taxation, ethnocentrism, ethics, political correctness, even an ethical approach to improving the gene pool.

Regular readers of this blog will find most of the ideas familiar. Indeed, it is a revision of an earlier post but hopefully it's better thought-through and presented. And this is video; the previous version was audio.

The video below is 12 minutes long. To read the transcript, click HERE.

The Jobless Non-Recovery: Why There Are So Few Good Jobs

A reader asked me why there are so few decent job openings.

Here is an expanded version of my answer. You'll note that it includes liberal, libertarian/conservative, and apolitical explanations.

• Per Marx, unbridled capitalism results in the rich putting maximum profits in their own pockets and letting as little as possible dribble down into new hiring. When employers do hire, no matter how rich, they usually pay the worker as little as possible, thus exacerbating the gap between rich and poor.
• Ever more can be automated. That means, for example, that every innovation--for example, the iPhone, requires only a relative few people to create it, and ever fewer people to build it.
• In the era of the Net, sales can often be done more efficiently by replacing expensive commission-based salespeople with a great website and interface.
• It has become so very expensive in the U.S. to hire an employee: On top of Social Security, MediCal, disability, unemployment insurance, Americans With Disabilties Act expenses, and state mandates, there's ObamaCare, with paid fraud-riddled "family leave" on the horizon. And then there are the financial and human costs of the ever increasing wrongful termination, sexual harassment, workers compensation, and racial discrimination lawsuits. While, of course, some of those claims are legitimate, ever more are not--In this tough economy, it's more tempting to try to steal a windfall from the employer.
• Because ever more work product can be transmitted over the Net, employers find it feasible to offshore many more jobs. And the early experiments in offshoring have yielded important lessons--more of those offshore workers are doing a good job.
• The U.S. will be ever less competitive against low-cost countries, especially in Asia, with their ever higher-quality workforces.

I am coming to conclude that even people who lack the gift or burning desire to be self-employed should consider learning that art. Running your own simple business will likely be one of the U.S.'s few remaining sources of well-paying, stable employment. To that end, you might want to read my article, The Un-MBA.

AmericaWorks: A Blueprint for Permanently Increasing U.S. Employment

AmericaWorks has three components:

America Aides: The government would encourage people to hire homework helpers for their children, mentors, tutors, and personal assistants for themselves (e.g., to learn technology, Spanish, or English), members of a U.S. Beautification Army for their home and block, and companions for their aged parents.

Hire An American: Encourage job seekers to post their resume on usajobs.gov. The federal government would market this database globally, encouraging other countries to offshore to the US.

Career-Friendly Curriculum, K-16. Replace material needed by few, for example, quadratic equations, with material needed by most, for example: financial literacy, entrepreneurship, service learning.

AMERICA AIDES

Well-paying jobs will require ever more skills, abilities, intelligence, and drive. For the millions of Americans who cannot realistically be expected to acquire high-enough levels of those attributes, I propose America Aides. The government would mount a public awareness campaign on the wisdom of people hiring aides throughout the lifespan: as homework helpers for their children. in their career (as, for example, tutors in technology, Spanish or English, or as career or personal coaches,) for their homes and apartments (a member of a U.S. Beautification Army) to weed, paint, clean out garages and basements, recycle, etc. and for their aged, living-alone relatives.

For example, with brief training, even many low-ability people could be trained to successfully be one-on-one aides in classrooms and to seniors living alone. Imagine the peace of mind of having someone daily visit your aging parent to ensure they've taken their medications, walk to reduce the likelihood of blood clots, and keep them company to combat the loneliness common among the live-alone elderly.

AmericaWorks would, with modest government investment, create millions of rewarding, ethical and, importantly, not-offshoreable jobs that would improve the quality of life for millions of Americans and for the nation as a whole.

HIRE AN AMERICAN

Job seekers would be encouraged to enter their resume into a national jobs database: usajobs.gov. That would be made available to all government, private-sector, and nonprofit employers, worldwide.
To encourage international employers to hire from that database, the U.S. would launch an international marketing effort to promote the benefits of hiring American--for example, the creative and innovative spirit that is core to being American. Just as many American businesses have been convinced to hire offshore employees, the new American workforce, improved because of the revamped education system described above, would become more attractive to the world's 200+ other countries. American workers could become known, for example, as among the world's most intrapreneurial.

CAREER-FRIENDLY CURRICULUM

Elementary school

The curriculum would increase career exploration: via videos, reading, guest speakers, field trips, etc., to make career selection a part of kids' consciousness. There would be entrepreneurship programs, for example, by creating in-class businesses, e.g., divide the class into two healthy snack-making/selling businesses. In that context, kids would learn to assess risk-reward and think entrepreneurially (find a need and fill it ethically). Those skills would be threaded--at ever more demanding levels--through the curriculum, through college. In parallel, modules on service learning would be included--encouraging students, early, to consider careers in government and the nonprofit sectors.

Parents would be encouraged to create an ethical entrepreneurship-friendly atmosphere at home.

High school

Prior to entering high school, in consultation with counselor and parents, students would select a career path based on a review of the child's academic record and an inventory of her or his career aptitudes and interests.

Importantly, high-quality career paths that don't require college would be available for students whose record suggests they'd more likely be successful and happy without attending college. Such programs would lead to apprenticeships, jobs at the elbow of entrepreneurs, the military, etc. They'd end up with such careers as MRI machine tech, chef, military officer, small business owner, etc. Students who are not academically oriented are much more likely to find successful employment through such paths than being force-fed Shakespeare, simultaneous equations, and chemical reaction formulas. Students and parents would be reassured that choosing a career path does not consign themselves to a life in that career--many of the skills taught in that career path would be applicable to many other careers. To ensure opportunities to excel, there would be honors classes in non-college-bound career paths.

It should be stressed that today's growing pressure to prepare an ever higher percentage of students to enter so-called four-year colleges (fewer than 40% graduate in four years) is destroying countless lives by forcing students into abstraction-filled academic paths where they are far less likely to be successful than if they had pursued a high-quality path that doesn't lead to a four-year college. According to the U.S. Department of Education, of the 200,000 freshmen at so-called four-year college each year who graduated in the bottom 40% of their high school class, three-fourths do not graduate even if given 8 1/2 years! And most of those who defy the odds and graduate do so from low-prestige colleges and with easy majors such as art or sociology, which impress few of today's let alone tomorrow's employers. Most of those students end up with huge debt, having enduring a multi-year assault to their self-esteem, and are less hireable for good jobs than if they had taken a non-college-requiring, high-quality career path in and/or post-high school.

For all students, effective oral and written real-world communication would take precedence over the use of onomatopoeia. Learning how to assess risk/reward would take precedence over geometric theorems. Understanding how to critique a research study reported in the media would take precedence over learning atomic structures. Strategic planning would be prioritized over macroeconomic theory. Financial literacy would take precedence over literary analysis.

Each high-school student would be paired with an mentor (probably online) who would communicate with the teen and perhaps offer him or her an after-school or vacation volunteer or even paid position. Each school would have a mentorship coordinator to prevent and address problems and to encourage people to serve as mentors.

Professional associations of the major careers would be encouraged to carefully review how much pre-service training is truly needed. Training length has increased at a time when, because of the availability of just-in-time information on the Internet, training length should be decreasing. In addition, career training often isn't best provided by universities--Those research- and theory-based professors are often less able than master practitioners to provide effective career training. Making the above changes would both improve training and increase the number of trained professionals--because of the lower cost and time of training.

Students would be required to complete interactive modules in technology, succeeding in business (e.g., how to run a planning meeting), how to manage a nonprofit or government agency, and ethics, which would be anchored by students role playing commonly occurring ethical dilemmas.

While parents should be allowed to have their children opt out, a comprehensive sex education program should be provided starting in middle school or certainly in high school. Teenage and unwanted pregnancies are too likely to produce a child who will grow up to be minimally employable. As in the ethics module, core would be simulations of critical incidents, for example, explicit "lines" commonly used by teenagers to seduce.

College

Colleges would be required to disclose to prospective students a College Report Card: for each major, the percentage of students who graduate within four years and, within a year of graduation, are earning a middle-class living. These data would be disaggregated by high school GPA and SAT score. The College Report Card would also include--for varying freshman achievement levels--the average freshman-to-senior growth in reading, writing, critical thinking, and mathematical reasoning.

Starting at freshman orientation, students would be required to take programs in career selection, job searching, obtaining internships and/or starting a business.

U.S. higher education leads the world in research produced but lacks in teaching quality. The core reason is that professors are hired and promoted heavily based on research productivity. That requires a skill and value set too different from what's required to teach undergraduates. Those hired to teach undergraduates should, at minimum, be required to complete a teaching bootcamp.

As stated earlier, courses in career-related majors should more often be taught by master practitioners than by research-oriented professors.

This proposal was developed by Marty Nemko. He holds a Ph.D. specializing in educational program development and evaluation from the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently taught in U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. U.S. News & World Report called him "Career coach extraordinaire." At ABC-TV's Summit on Education, he was introduced him as "The Ralph Nader of Education." He can be reached at mnemko@comcast.net or 510-655-2777.

My Job Stimulus Plan: How to Grow a New Army of Ethical Entrepreneurs

With unemployment and underemployment so high, there's a temptation to provide quick fixes for creating jobs. And those may indeed be necessary for political as well as practical reasons, but the most potent approach requires time.

If President Obama were to ask me for recommendations on how to create jobs, #1 on my list would be to grow a new army of ethical entrepreneurs. In this article, I present the blueprint for doing so.

First, the definition:What is an ethical entrepreneur?An ethical entrepreneur:

• has the antennae to smell out opportunities for ethical, valuable new products and services that could be provided by a company.
• the power to persuade the boss, investors, the government, or a nonprofit to invest in the creation and dissemination of the product or service.
• will only start a business that's profitable when considering the triple bottom line of profits, people, and planet. Additionally, it must be a business that will be profitable even though salespeople are ordered to be scrupulously honest: fully disclosing product weaknesses, delivery dates, and extent of post-sales support, and in which salespeople are required to discourage potential customers from buying if the product is inappropriate for that customer.
  

Why Creating More Entrepreneurs is Crucial
Only entrepreneurs can create permanent jobs because government can only create jobs to the extent of tax revenues, and those come from businesses. Without entrepreneurs, there are no start-ups. Without intrepreneurs (entrepreneurs who work within a company,) large businesses can, at best, grow slowly: selling more of their product as population increases or as the result of marketing efforts.

Increasing the number of ethical entrepreneurs would increase the chances of millions more Americans making a good living, especially those not academically oriented. Today, so many such people struggle to pay the rent, spend so much time looking for their next job and after landing one, living in fear of getting laid off because of a personality dispute, because it's a project job with a built-in end date, or that their job will be shipped to a low-cost country. Instead, a new army of entrepreneurs will be hiring themselves as their own business's CEO or as intrepreneurs within a company, nonprofit, or the government.

Of course, beyond creating jobs, entrepreneurs benefit us all by creating new services and products: from soap to the steam engine, glass to google, anesthetic to automobiles, the icebox to the iPhone, housekeepers to hospice.

Entrepreneurship can foster not only commercial products and services but help us achieve our larger societal goals. The Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship's core goal is "to unleash young people's ideas around the issues that matter most to society, from poverty reduction to climate change, and to foster a global culture that recognizes entrepreneurs as drivers of economic and social prosperity. "

How do we encourage the development of a new army ethical entrepreneurs?

Primarily by suffusing the K-16 curriculum with ethical entrepreneurship education. From kindergarten through college, the curriculum would include hands-on opportunities to learn ethical entrepreneurship. They would apply principles of budget, finance, persuasion, ethics (See above,) etc., to create small enterprises, guided not only by the teacher, but by inspiring, ethical entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs. (The latter are people who use sound business methods to create non-profit ventures aimed at improving society.

How could entrepreneurship education be fit into an already packed school day? Lengthen the school day and school year, which brings the additional advantage of ameliorating the nation's child care problem. Also, pare elements of the existing curriculum that are less important than entrepreneurship. Could anyone reasonably argue that it's more important that all students know geometric theorems than learn ethical entrepreneurship? Than deciphering Shakespeare's arcane allusions and vocabulary? The intricacies of the periodic table of chemical elements? All those wars from the Peloponnesian to the War of the Roses? The celebration of multiculturalism to which so much time is devoted in today's curriculum?

The K-16 inclusion of ethical entrepreneurship education should be supplemented by out-of-school activities. In that regard, the U.S. could learn some lessons from abroad. For example, a recent issue of The Economist , reports that "According to the British Enterprise Week’s website, Britain has nearly 3,000 events designed to inspire and educate young and aspiring entrepreneurs, from a workshop on “Growing Your Business” in Ipswich to a “Could You Be A Million Maker?” contest in Blackpool, in which school and college students create their own mini-enterprises."

What about adults? Certainly courses in entrepreneurship, already offered by the Small Business Administration, state employment departments, colleges, and by the private sector should be more publicized and expanded as needed. SCORE, an SBA-program that matches aspiring entrepreneurs with retired executives should be expanded. Ethics are too small a component within most such courses. Ethics, as defined earlier, must be made central.

I believe no initiative has greater potential to create jobs, innovation, and, in turn, improve the world than to grow an army of ethical entrepreneurs, and I believe the above model could make it happen.