A Dog Sitter: A short-short story

My Best Ideas

My Medium.com article today offers my best ideas for improving the world.

8 Ways to Support Under-Served High-Achieving Kids: A particularly potent use of your time

Children of the well-off are likely to get significant support toward achieving their potential. Kids from the multigenerational poor may face challenges that make major improvement difficult. So it may be wise to focus on a middle-ground: high achievers from working-class or blue-collar backgrounds. But how? My Psychology Today article today offers eight ways you might be of value.

Quickie Video in Which I Describe My New Book, The Best of Marty Nemko

Here's the under-2-minute video I just recorded that describes my new book The Best of Marty Nemko: The best 60 of my 3,000 articles for your worklife, personal life, and for making a difference. 

Those articles previously appeared on TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, WashingtonPost.com, PsychologyToday.com, etc. It's available on Amazon.com for $12 for the printed version, $8 for the e-book. HERE is the link.

Realistic Ideas for Making a Bigger Difference

These days, everyone seems to want to “make a difference.” Of course, that’s a good thing but many people define it too narrowly.

My PsychologyToday.com article today may help you feel better about what you’re already doing and perhaps give you some new ideas.

Richard Florida and Marty Nemko on How to Improve the World

Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class, who is considered a significant thinker and policy wonk, and I had an hour-long conversation on my NPR San Francisco show today. Our topic: how to improve the world.

We agreed on some things, for example:

• the need for what he calls a "New American Dream:" replacing materialism with loftier values.
• the need to replace our schools: arcana-filled curriculum dispensed by generally well-intentioned but ineffectual, uninspiring teachers. As he said, 100 years from now, we'll shake our heads in wonderment that we forced students to spend all those years in boredom, in those prisons we call schools.
• that we would more likely live the life well-led if, every time we contemplated doing something, we rated that action on a a scale from -100 (selling crack) to +100 (working to cure cancer.)
• my idea of an Assistants Army. Instead of government make-work jobs, do a PR campaign to encourage citizens to hire assistants: to help in caring for their infant, a homework helper for their child, a "honey-do" assistant for themselves, and a companion for their elder relative.
  
• the need to replace our electoral system, in which our votes are manipulated by a hubristic media and win-at-all-costs, richly-funded political campaigns.
  

Today's media's members have experienced so little life outside academia/ journalism school but are oh-so confident that they know how to fix the world and thus toss off their responsibility to present all responsible sides of an issue. Instead, they do everything in their power to manipulate the electorate into believing what they believe and voting the way they do.

Political campaigns are highly sophisticated Madison-Avenue-inspired propaganda machines paid for by special interests from unions and ethnic/gender-power groups on the left to corporations and fat cats on the right.

What chance does the poor voter have of making enlightened choices in picking their elected officials?

Richard liked both of my ideas for replacing what he called "our beyond-dysfunctional, comical electoral system:"

• Selecting our government officials the way a mutual fund index fund (which outperforms most funds) chooses its stocks: a passively selected panel. (I've written about that HERE).Or if democracy remains the sacred cow:

• 100% publicly-funded two-week long campaigns consisting only of televised debates, a job simulation (running a meeting) and the candidates' voting record and positions, aggregated by a neutral such as Consumers Union or C-Span, and published prominently on the Net and in print.

Alas, I found myself rolling my eyes at Florida's prescription for reducing the racial/socioeconomic achievement gap. He passionately urges us to focus yet more on early childhood. Alas, has now been well established, the billions and billions already spent on a half century of Head Start, Early Start, and even on social workers spending tremendous amounts of time in-the-home of low-income newborns has not reduced the achievement gap, let alone been cost-effective uses of taxpayer dollars.

I responded to Florida by opining that the answer is honesty: to honestly admit that despite having spent trillions (literally) of dollars in the past few decades alone to reduce the socioeconomic and racial achievement disparity (everything from Early Start to forced busing into suburban areas to welfare-to-work job training to high-quality free housing) the gap remains as wide as ever.

Instead of spending yet more trillions of ever-scarcer taxpayer dollars on programs known to be ineffective, we must redirect those dollars to a research effort to find new approaches that are more likely to work.

And, as I've argued in previous writings, yes, environment is important, but so are genetics. To fight the achievement gap only by trying to change people's environment and ignoring the genetic is like fighting Mike Tyson with one arm tied behind your back. We must not viscerally reject genetically oriented approaches to reducing the achievement gap. There are ethical approaches to doing so. I've mentioned these in previous posts but summarize them here:

• Making free birth control widely available in high schools with high pregnancy rates. Especially valuable would be the new-generation implantables such as Jadelle, which is easy to insert and remove but which, in place, lasts at least two years and has been found extremely safe and effective by the highly respected Population Council.
  

• Intelligent Choice. This would be public-service-announcement/education/media campaign to remind teenagers and young adults that in choosing the father/mother of your child, you're choosing the genes you want your child do you have. For example, "Do you really want your child to inherit the genes of that Bad Boy you find so attractive?"

• Starting Life with No Strikes Against You: Depression, impulsivity, empathy, intelligence, etc. all are almost certainly under both environmental and genetic control. We should fund research to enable prospective parents to elect, non-coercively, to have their eggs and sperm examined to help ensure that their baby starts out without a genetic strike or two against them, and if all their sperm and eggs are defective, can elect to have a procedure to replace the defective genes with those for normal or even above-average intelligence, resistance to depression, etc. To ensure that such treatments don't increase the gap between rich and poor, MediCal or ObamaCare would cover those procedures just as they cover most other treatments.
  

It was an interesting hour. Again, HERE is the link to the show.

How Would You Invest a Million Dollars?

Imagine you wanted to invest $1 million dollars so as to make the greatest positive difference in the world. How would you invest it?

The best I've been able to come up with is what I'm calling MentorMatch: the equivalent of match.com but for matching mentors with proteges.

Can you think of something more beneficial?

"Making a Difference:" A Foolish Fad

Everyone's trying to "make a difference." Even right-wing advertisers like American Express are jumping on the "make-a-difference" bandwagon.

Sounds good, right? Not to me. "Making a difference" is code for redistributing fiscal and human resources from the haves to the have-nots. Still sounds good, right?

Not to me. For example, let's say a financial or intellectual "have" decides to devote money and time to a "make a difference" initiative, say, to the cause du jour: environmentalism: trying to cool the globe or restore some swamp (oops, wetland) to a more pre-human state. Do you think he'd make more of a difference doing that or devoting his time and money to providing a program for intellectually and/or emotionally gifted kids: those with the greatest potential to cure our diseases, create an ever more helpful iPhone or Google, or revolutionalize (finally) education? For me, it's not even close--especially when most funds for gifted programs have been redistributed to programs for special education and other at-risk students.

Another example: Let's consider a literacy program. Its students, by definition, have long struggled in learning to read. Even extensive, expensive, one-on-one tutoring will raise their average reading score only modestly--at best, say from a third to a fifth grade level. That will have only a minor impact on that person's ability to be even self-sustaining. Even assuming that government-run literacy program were run efficiently (dubious,) a have who invested time and money on that would likely be of less benefit to society than if he had invested the money and time in high-ability kids.

Let's turn to career. Let's say there's a pair of identical twins. One chose a "make-a-difference" career like social work, teaching the at-risk, or administering a government or nonprofit program for the have-nots. The other twin chose a career, for example, developing a better search engine, car engine, disease cure, or even something more mundane, more accessible to more people, like selling items that offer good value to the consumer: Whirlpool appliances, Toyota cars, or even no-iron cotton. Do you honestly believe the "making a difference" twin would actually have made a bigger difference?

No doubt, this essay evokes an "ugh" response, especially from liberals (oops, "progressives.") That visceral response will likely be followed by a slightly more intellectualized version of "ugh," labeling me "elitist," "mean-spirited," or some such.

I challenge such readers to put aside their reflexive response and instead try to be really honest with themselves: If your goal is really to make a difference, wouldn't you--beyond a humane level of investment in all humans--invest your time and money not on those with the greatest deficit but on those with the greatest potential to profit?

Alas, most of us cannot resist fads--we'll feel compelled to "make a difference."

Keys to Productivity

People often ask me how I accomplish so much. My key principles:

• Before making most decisions, whether it's to support amnesty for illegals or whether I should see a movie, I consciously assess the risk-reward ratio of doing it, including the opportunity costs. In assessing that," I usually think broadly: "What are the risks and rewards for the world?" But I do that thinking very quickly, which leads me to my next principle:
• I rarely ruminate; I take low-risk actions. I usually learn more by trying something than by more-than-brief thinking about it.
• With every task I'm doing, I ask myself, NOT is this the fastest way, NOT is this the best way, but is this the most time- and cost-effective way? So, for example, I am aware that this post would have been better if I took the time to provide an excellent example for each bullet but, especially because I'm so busy these days, rather than not post it at all, I wrote this in the most time-effective way possible.