Yet Another Example of African-American Racism

I received a press release titled, "Bay Area Welcomes 'Buy Black Only' Experiment"

That press release announced a promotional tour by a top-university-educated couple (pictured, right) who, for an entire year, pledged to shop only at African-American-owned businesses.

In other words, they were proudly proclaiming their essentially boycotting all businesses owned by Asians, Latinos, Whites, and Native Americans.

I find the racism of that troubling.

A goal of their promotional tour is to solicit sponsors to expand their efforts.

When I queried the PR firm (Flowers Communications, which cites among its clients, Sears, Wells Fargo, McDonald's, Honda, and the Chicago White Sox) that issued the press release, I found the response from its vice president, Ronald E. Childs (pictured, center) equally racist:

"Welcome to America. Jewish people advocate patronizing their own business community first, before venturing outside their own, as do Asians, Hispanics, Italians, the Irish, Polish and people of virtually every other culture."

Mr. Childs additionally attempted to justify "Buy Black Only" by citing Jim Crow and lynchings.

Dear readers, your thoughts?

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.

Our Growing Glut of College Graduates

I've long warned against justifying going to college because of the GROSSLY misleading statistic that you earn much more with a college degree. See my previous writings on the topic, for example, this, which first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

But now, college degrees are becoming an ever WORSE value:

• The ever-higher percentage of high school graduates going to college forces professors to dumb down classes. That's a key reason why the percentage of college GRADUATES with good literacy skills is declining (from 40% to 31% in the last decade alone.)
• The glut of college graduates. As the quality of college graduates declines while their supply goes up, employers are loathe to hire them, not just because their supply is high and quality is low, but because government-mandated costs of hiring Americans continues to escalate: social security, workers comp, unemployment insurance, mandated diversity and sexual harassment training, etc. The latest, of course, is the ObamaCare requirement that employers provide health care for not only employees but an extra percentage tacked on to pay for low-income people who don't work for the employer. Ever more, it makes sense for employers to automate or offshore, and to hire what Americans it needs, part-time, temp.
• The price tag of a college education continues to soar, far in excess of the inflation rate. The published sticker price for four years at many brand-name private college is $200,000. And MOST students do not graduate in four years. Indeed, when you look at the 200,000 college freshmen that graduated in the bottom 40% of their high school class, 3/4 of them don't graduate even if given 8 1/2 years! And even if they defy the odds, they usually have attended a third-tier college with an easy major such as sociology, neither of which moves many employers to pay them more than they could have earned straight out of high school. And if such students hadn't gone to college, not only would they not have accumulated all that debt, they wouldn't have had to endure years of boring, too-difficult-for-them courses, and the resulting non-stop assault to their self-esteem.

Well,, I've said much of that in previous posts. What's the most recent data show about college graduates:

ATThe just released national poll of employers is titled: "College Graduate Hiring Declines." The report states, for example, "55% of companies said that 2010 graduates are in a less advantageous position than other job seekers – and the top two reasons are the economic climate and their lack of qualifications."

And this from Bloomberg: College Grads Flood U.S. Labor Market With Diminished Prospects.

W

WhWhen will prospective college students and especially the parents of not academically oriented high school students and their counselors realize that for many students, a wiser post-high-school path is an apprenticeship, on-the-job-training, or career training in the military.

The Most and Least Trusted Professionals

A survey found that the least trusted profession is--no surprise--politician, followed by salesperson (especially car salespersons) financial services "account executives,") and lawyers.

I'd add these to the list:

• clergy. Whether or not they're seducing underage parishioners, they're selling snake oil--trying to convince people to place faith in a God who allows billions of people, including newborn babies to die of agonizing diseases such as cancer.
• chiropractors. Studies not funded by the chiropractic industry show generally low efficacy yet chiropractors market themselves relentlessly, often beyond what they can responsibly claim to cure. The only area that NIH studies find chiropractors helpful for is lower back pain and even there, no more efficacy than treatment by a physician.
• journalists. I have the most disdain for that profession because it has so much power to change society and uses that power so irresponsibly. Although most journalists have experience at nothing other than writing, they have the hubris to believe they know what's best for the world and are so sure of it that they abandon their nearly sacred obligation to present issues in full dimension, fairly, and instead, manipulate readers into believing what they believe and censor or destroy those who dare disagree. Instead of being wise stewards of the marketplace of ideas, they are the Barbarians at its gate.
  

The professionals I most trust:

• Librarians. I find them trustworthy and helpful. (Of course, they have little incentive to be untrustworthy.)
  
• Nurse practitioners and salaried physicians (e.g., those employed by Kaiser). Too many physicians who are paid per patient and per procedure are tempted by financial reward to prescribe treatments that yield them more money, even when not necessarily in the patient's best interests. And because physicians' training is so long, hard, and expensive, they feel entitled.
  
• Philosophers. I think the world would be better run if led by an ideologically diverse tribunal of philosophers.
  

The First Honest Resume

The standard resume helps neither the candidate nor employer to find the right match:

• Job seekers, often with the help of a resume-writing whore, excise or put makeup on their warts and pad their accomplishments more than a flat-chested hooker pads her bra.
  
• Employers are routinely deceived by resumes and at minimum learn little about what the candidate is really like. That's also true of job interviews but I'll save that for another post.
  

Wouldn't a candidate be more likely to be hooked up with his or her right employer if, for example:

• She said she's not a "team player who delights in exceeding customer expectations." Rather, she's motivated by meaningful projects that require her to work by herself, and her resume included a quote from her last performance appraisal that indicates that.
  
• Rather than saying how fascinated he is with the company's widget, he said he doesn't care either way about the widget. He cares mainly that he's working with smart, ethical people and that he gets moderately difficult projects in moderate quantity.
  
• Rather than saying she left her position because the company changed direction, she said she got fired from her job because she couldn't stand her boss who insisted on micromanaging her even though he had half her IQ. She included a quote from her co-worker that attests to that.
  
• Rather than saying, "I'm open to new opportunities," he said, "After three years of sitting in front of a computer all day I've had enough of that, I'm eager to use my people skills."
  
• Instead of filling her resume's employment gap with a series of BS consulting assignments, she said she took two years off to care for her new baby. (Bosses unsympathetic to hiring mommy-track employees will rarely give parents the flexibility and lower workload that involved parents often want.)
• Rather than hiding that he's 60 years old and weighs 300 pounds, he includes a current photo with his application. If the employer doesn't want an old fatty, s/he won't give him the job anyway. The employer would have wasted his time and an interview slot and the job seeker will have wasted the time and energy to prep, go to and through the interview. The right employer will be impressed with that applicant's integrity.
  

I am well aware that many employers will reject an honest resume but if you send out enough of them, the right employer for you will be more interested in you than someone who falsely claims to be a "team player and a dynamic self-starter who delights in exceeding customer expectations."

I'm Looking for a Mind I Can Fully Respect

Last night, I had dinner with some high-powered people including a multi-Emmy-award-winning writer and one of the world's leading experts on gender issues.

I came away, as I usually do from such gatherings, feeling that I don't fully respect their minds. Of course, that could be my own limitations precluding my appreciating them, but in my judgment, they are NOT great minds. They are wildly controlled by their apriori biases, shortsighted thinking, uninformed gut instincts, selective review of data, and fears of candor. And/or they are sophists who entertain more than enlighten, let alone be brilliant, wise, and circumspect enough to have a realistic chance of solving society's major problems.

It saddens me that lightweight thinking artists, from cartoonists to screenwriters to comedians (read Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bono, Sean Penn, and Angelina Jolie) have become greater influencers of thought and public policy than are our Philosopher Kings, e.g., Christopher Hitchens, pictured above, or David D. Friedman. or our great scientific and entrepreneurial minds, e.g. Craig Venter. Especially outside the sciences, the media anoints people as experts more because of their ideology (you almost have to be a liberal) and entertainment value than their brilliance.

Last night reminded me of my desire for probing exchanges with such people, as I've had on my NPR-San Francisco radio show, where I have done hour-long interviews of the likes of Venter, Noam Chomsky, Walter Isaacson, and Alan Dershowitz. The closest I've come in my personal life is my doctoral advisor Michael Scriven, a Renaissance man with particular expertise in program evaluation--a very important and underappreciated discipline.

Of course, such people may consider my own mind unworthy, but is there anyone you suggest I reach out to for an email exchange or interview on my radio show? Last I checked, the likes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul, Goethe, Jeremy Bentham, or Ben Franklin aren't available.

Getting Organized

Here are tips on getting organized from Linda Samuels, who runs OhSoOrganized.com:

• Picture the benefits. Will being more organized make you calmer? More efficient? Improve a relationship? Allow you to entertain? Make you seem more professional?
• To get rid of "important" stuff, say goodbye to everything you haven't used in a year, especially if, on the off chance you really need it, you could replace it. Take a picture of your emotionally important items and put them in a scrapbook. Find a new home for your items: e.g., have a garage sale. If you've inherited a bunch of stuff from a loved one, keep just one or two as a keepsake.
  
• Commit to a sacrosanct 10 minutes a day to declutter. Listen to upbeat music as you clean up. Monitor your self-talk: Say "This will help me live the life I want to lead," not "I hate doing this, and it's a waste of time."
  
• If needed, get an organizing buddy--"I'll help declutter you if you help declutter me."