Three Steps to a Better America

The responses to the S&P downgrading of America's debt have consisted mainly of blaming the other party and palliative suggestions.

I believe bolder ideas exist that would not only save our financial system but improve our quality of life.

I recognize that these three ideas are easier to recommend than to implement but as Goethe wrote, "Small goals inspire no one."

1. America must scale back its aspirations. It can no longer be the world's superpower. As all empires from the Roman to the British, the American Empire has had its rise and now is in its fall. Partly because of America's hubris, its largess, and its profligacy, and partly because of competition from Asia, the U.S. will unavoidably descend to become merely one of a number of major nations.

So, for example, the U.S. can no longer afford to be the world's policeman: we must get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now. We no longer can afford military bases around the world.

Nor can the taxpayer afford to build fancy buildings (the new lobby of San Francisco City Hall is pictured above.)

Nor can government afford to spend on risky "innovations." Most innovation that government "invests" in is that which every company has rejected as a bad idea. Most government investments are sloppy 10,000ths.

For example, the government now wants us to forget about its ethanol debacle so it can get us to invest in its energy idea du jour--solar and wind energy--despite their physics delimiting them to being no more than a tiny contributor to our energy solution. Indeed that fact is acknowledged by the collective wisdom of the market: the solar and wind stock indices are down 85% from their highs, which, not coincidentally, were when Obama took office.

Similarly, we should not spend more on education. The U.S. has long ranked #1 in per-capita education spending yet our achievement ranks #23, tied with Poland. There is no evidence that 'investing" yet more on education spending will yield an acceptable rate of return. That is especially critical with the U.S.'s economy so precarious. But the phrase, "invest in education" (including the now-proven ineffectual Head Start) sounds good so politicians continue to tout it. We'd be wiser to close down the entire massive education bureaucracy: the U.S. Dept of Education, State Depts of Education, County Offices of Education, and all but a few District Offices of Education. The cost and labyrinthine, often conflicting, mountain of mandates from those bureaucracies improves education little; indeed, may, net, make it worse.

The savings derived from the above should be used to pay down our debt, balance the budget, and eventually, returned to middle- and working-class income taxpayers to spend as they see fit, which would create sustainable jobs., unlike the government's "stimulus" jobs, which have been calculated as costing us at least $278,000 per job, and created "shovel-ready" projects that weren't.

2. Convert health care (including Medicare) into a basic free safety net for the poor and free-market, fee-for-service for everyone else, except for catastrophic care, for which private insurers would provide competing products. The free-hand of the 300,000,000 Americans would drive down cost and improve quality. The government's role would merely be to require health care providers and insurers to provide clear, potent information to enable even the most vulnerable of our citizens to wisely choose their health care providers.

3. Convert from a consumer-spending-driven economy to a quality-of-life driven economy. The public could and should be educated by schools, colleges, and government to recognize that the path to a life well-led and a society we can be proud of involves goals of creative expression, kindness, and societal contribution, not of a new car, bigger house, and yet another pair of shoes.

As always, your comments are welcome.

Reinventions: My best ideas on jobs, education, health care, and campaign reform

I hope to write a book, Reinventions, consisting of my ideas for reinventing 30 of society's linchpins.

My agent suggested I first write an article presenting a few of my best ideas. I've done so and thought you might enjoy seeing the article. HERE is the link.

Should a Law Prohibit Job Ads That Say "Currently employed only?"

I was interviewed today on KCBS on the pending laws in three states that would prohibit want ads that ask for employed or short-term-unemployed applicants only.

Here's an expanded version of what I said:

I understand the urge to feel sorry for the long-term unemployed and thus support such legislation, but would that be fair to job applicants who are employed? I mean, what would you say to the person who has been a good-enough and motivated enough employee to stay employed, even if the job isn't great. Now he'd like to look for another job and he's told that long-term unemployed people will now have as good a chance as he does of landing the job. Would that be fair to that applicant?

And would it be fair to the employer who placed the ad? There are no perfect hiring criteria: an attractive resume could reflect that the person hired a resume writer rather than that he's a better candidate; a college degree is no guarantor of an applicant being better than someone without a degree. In the economy of the last few years, employers often get dozens if not hundreds of applicants for every position. So employers need ways to narrow down to the handful of people they'll interview. The pool of employed people no doubt consists of, on average, better job candidates than the pool of long-term unemployed people. If you were running a business and got a hundred applicants, wouldn't you narrow down, in part, by looking for candidates who were employed or recently unemployed rather than the long-term unemployed?

If the long-term unemployed become a legally protected class, the EEOC or other government watchdog agency would likely require all employers to regularly report the percentage of their employees who were long-term unemployed when hired, just as employers are required to report the percentage of minorities in each employment category.

A similar law is also being proposed to protect ex-felons. If a business, say KCBS, were required to not discriminate against felons and the long-term unemployed, mightn't KCBS's quality be affected?

And if it becomes illegal for an employer to screen out felons or the unemployed, what's the next protected group? Applicants without college degrees? Underskilled applicants? People with difficult personalities? Fat people, ugly people, quiet people, and bald people also don't fare well in landing jobs. Should employers be required to hire a proportionate number of all those and issue quarterly reports to the government to ensure compliance?

We can make everything equal by requiring employers to hire at random. But if we care about quality goods and services for all people and care that employers don't offshore and automate even more jobs than they already do, we should decry legislation that makes it more difficult to hire based on merit.

It's NOT a Man's World, and Hasn't Been for a Long Time

F or a book she's writing, Former New York Times career columnist, Marci Alboher, asked me about the differences between male and female career changers.

I think you'll find my response instructive, not just about career changing, but about why I deeply believe that "It's still a man's world" is an utter canard.

Here is my response to her:

Of course, any generalizations across an entire sex will have many exceptions. That disclaimer made, here is what I have observed over the 3,800 career coaching clients I've worked with over the past 25 years:

Many men today are scared. They feel it's women's era. For example, the unemployment rate is 25% higher for men than for women, and the media and colleges disproportionately present men as inferior to women. Those are just a couple of reasons why fewer men than women try to change careers. They feel they're lucky to have what they have, even if it doesn't feel great.

Here's an even more prevalent reason why fewer men than women try to change careers. Despite societal changes in expected gender roles, many men still feel--perhaps encouraged or manipulated by their wife--to remain the primary or sole breadwinner. So they believe that the risk of making a radical career change, especially to follow their (unlikely to be remunerative) passion, is too risky to their family's financial security. So they stay put. They usually rationalize, "I'll follow my passion when the kids go off to college, when I retire, etc."

But in our economy, which is so fragile and unlikely to turn around for the foreseeable future, and with talk about cutting Social Security for future recipients, many of these men may never afford to retire.

Except for the top few percent of earners (rich executives, doctors, etc) most men will have to work on that non-passion-inducing job until they drop, which is 5.2 years sooner than women--There are 4+ widows for every widower. For so many men within the middle and working class, Death of a Salesman, isn't a play, it's reality.

Marci then asked for more on male career changers. Here was my response:

1. Most men feel they must make their career change FAST. As mentioned, they feel the need to bring home the money. His wife may contribute little or no income but expects that paycheck to keep coming, unreduced. (Remember, women do 85% of the consumer spending.) If a man's attempt to make a career change forces him to cut back on how hard or how long he's working on his current job, he may fear that risks his losing his job or of a promotion and the additional money he feels pressure to get. Such men feel they can't afford to leave their job until they have another source of good income. So they work hard at making the career change for a month or two. But if, after a month or two, there aren't signs that their career change efforts will pay off, scared of the loss of income, they usually give up.

2. More men than women look down on networking. They view "networkers" as people who are trying to substitute a smile for substance, people who do favors for others only so they can get something bigger in return. Such men feel they're more worthy if they put their time into working and into developing their skills rather than in networking. That's one reason why, for example, more men listen to a self-help book on their iPod as they jog rather than, as more women do, jogging with a friend or networking target. My doggie Einstein and I walk around a three-mile lake every day. I notice that when men are in pairs walking/jogging, they're more likely than women to be talking about work. The women much more often talk about friends, clothes, vacation, etc.

On average, men spend less time networking than do women unless absolutely necessary, for example, when trying to change careers. Unfortunately, by then, it's usually too late: For a career changer's networking to pay off, those networking relationships usually need to be deepened over months if not years. That's another reason why male career changers have such a hard time of it.

3. There are tremendous barriers to men setting up men's networking groups. Perhaps the biggest impediment is that they'd be attacked as sexist and pressured, with media support, to shut down. But for reasons beyond the scope of this email, women are not only allowed to set up women's networking groups so without reprisal, they're encouraged to.

4. As I wrote, far fewer men than women allow themselves to even consider a "dream" career that would be low-paying, for example, writer, actor, musician, artist, etc. Following their dream is too unlikely to allow them to keep bringing home that big-enough paycheck consistently. So most men suppress their dreams until retirement, a retirement that is unlikely to ever come. What often happens is they die, leaving enough money to their wife that the wife can, if she hasn't already, pursue her low-pay dream of being a writer, artist, singer, etc.

Why do so few men assert what legitimately should be a right, equal to women, to pursue their low-income-producing dream? My hypothesis is that society's main mind-molders, the colleges and the media, have done such a good job of portraying men as inferior to women, that many men have come to feel inferior and that to justify their existence, men feel they must BE a paycheck, a beast of burden. So they stay on a job, any job. How many women, compared with men, would stay on a job as a pest remover, plumber, roofer, ice fisherman, or even a traveling salesperson who must fly around the country to God-forsaken places to try to sell some widget, or even move their family to places like Montgomery Alabama to get a promotion?

Truly, the most important difference between men and women career changers is that fewer men contemplate it and fewer still feel they can afford to take the often years it takes to make a radical career change. After their 20s, most guys tend to just keep their nose to the grindstone so they can support their family. Career changing usually inhibits their ability to do that.

Marci's response to that email encouraged me to write this explanation for why it's so difficult for men's groups to form. More important, I then go on to explain why it is, nor has been for a long time, "a man's world."

Many opponents of men's groups who nonetheless applaud women's groups, sweep away their double-standard with a cheeky, "All other groups are men's groups."

Marci, that has long been untrue. Nor is their assertion, "It's a man's world" as self-evident as feminists would have us believe.

For example, if it were a man's world, men would have the full range of career options: from stay-at-home non-income earner to actor/writer/artist to CEO. But while women have all those options, a man who chooses the former two is widely viewed as lazy. It would be socially unacceptable. So most men don't even allow themselves to consider such options. Women feel greater freedom to do so. Men are made to feel they must BE the paycheck. If it were a man's world, a man would have freedom to make important choices about their careers. They don't. Women do.

Other examples of how it's far from a man's world:

• Only men are allowed to serve in direct combat in the military, and 99% of the deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been men. Perhaps that's surprising in light of the media's unrelenting attempt to hide that fact with such phrases as "the men and women who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan."
• giving women preferences in Small Business Administration female-set-aside loans,
• women but not men allowed to have caucuses in corporations and government to facilitate women's advancement
• having many social-service programs just for women, almost none for men
• having "targets," virtual quotas, for women hired and promoted to al levels, but not for men
• having female-set-aside scholarships but not for men, even though there are many more female college students.
• women's networking and other organizations are encouraged while men's organizations are attacked as sexist with media-trumpeted demands they be disbanded.
• If a man impregnates a woman, even if she falsely claimed to be on birth control, he's stuck with 18 years of financial and temporal responsibility. Only she has the choice to abort.
• 93% of workplace deaths occur to men.
• And in a most painful example, when women have a deficit, for example, they're "underrepresented" in science, massive nationwide redress is undertaken, even though a recent two-decade study reported recently in the New York Times found that women in academic science fare as well or better than men. But if men have the deficit, even the ultimate deficit, they die 5.2 years younger, all we see are more pink ribbons or other women's health initiatives. There are seven federal agencies on women's health, none for men. 39 states have offices of Women's Health, none for men. Even more unfair, a PubMed review, indicates, as mentioned, that over the past 60 years(!), 95+% of gender-specific medical research has focused on women's health issues. Women claim this is because men don't take care of themselves as well: "If only they'd see the doctor." Well, would those women say that to minorities, who also "don't see the doctor" and smoke and drink at much higher rates than men?
• and perhaps most important to the next generation, a school system that has replaced boy-friendly competition with girl-centric collaboration, boy-friendly adventure stories, with soporific-to-boys tales of girl relationships, and history textbooks disproportionately extolling women from Sacajawea and Pocahontas to Simone DeBouvier and Sally Ride while sparing no pages to pound home the evils of white men from Hannibal to Hitler, Joe McCarthy to Timothy McVeigh, and perhaps worst of all, an insistence on ever more seatwork, which when active boys can't endure, are put on a Ritalin leash at a ratio of eight boys for every one girl.

Rather than it being a man's world, men are beasts of burden, the target of ridicule in the media, and the disposable sex.

I'm glad you said that my previous emails give you a lot to think about. I hope this one does too, Marci.

Child-Driven Education: A Truly Exciting Reinvention of Education

"A teacher that can be replaced with a machine should be." Sir Arthur C. Clarke, futurist and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I have long called for what I call "Dream-Team Taught Courses:" a recorded course taught by a team of world-class teachers, available for download. A local parent or teacher would be on site to provide the human touch. That way, all students, rich and poor, urban and rural, can receive world-class instruction, for example, in difficult-to-teach subjects such as algebra. No surprise, the all-powerful teachers unions have squashed such ideas.

I just learned of a very different and even more radical yet very promising idea for reinventing education: a teacherless-classroom: A group of kids sit in a room with computers. They, with Google's help, teach themselves, based on simple prompts, for example, "Who is Pythagoras and what did he do?" Untrained grandmother-types are available via skype to encourage the kids, ask a few questions, etc. The results have been very promising. And the kids love it.

Of course, child-centered education has been around forever. It hadsearly roots in John Dewey and later, in the 1960s' Open Education movement, for example, Summerhill in the '60s. But the availability of the Internet, especially Google, makes it more likely that this iteration of child-driven education will be more successful.

Of course, much research is still needed to see how this might be optimally used and its limits, but for one of those rare times, I am excited about the potential of an education intervention. It's called Child-Driven Education and was presented in this TED talk:

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:

An Emotional Plea for Colleges to be Honest with Prospective Students: The College Report Card

I seem to have gotten nowhere with a rational approach, so here is a more emotional appeal for you to demand that colleges replace their deceptive marketing practices with a College Report Card. It wouldn't seem that this would be so important but it would dramatically improve the lives of literally millions of people and help America slow its descent into being a third-world country.

Below the video, I provide a transcript of it.

Transcript of the video

An Emotional Plea for Colleges to be Honest with Prospective Students

by Marty Nemko

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this, “I wasn’t a good student in high school but I wanted to prove that I could get a college diploma --I’d be the first one in my family to do it. But it’s been five years and $80,000 and I still have 45 units to go.”

I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: According to the U.S. Department of Education, despite colleges having dumbed-down classes to accommodate to the weak students, among college freshmen who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class, more than three of four won’t earn a diploma, even if given 8 1/2 years! Yet colleges admit and take the money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave college having learned little of value. And I urge you, before you trust me on this, see the frightening results of the definitive national study, Academically Adrift--Google it,) a mountain of debt, and devastated self-esteem from all their unsuccessful struggles at college.

Perhaps worst of all, the aforementioned people too rarely end up with a career that requires a college degree. So it’s not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you’re likely to meet workers who spent years and their family’s life savings, mortgaged their family's future, on college only to end up with a job they could have done as a high school dropout.

Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than non-graduates, but that’s terribly misleading:

• For one, you could lock the college-bound in a closet for four years and they’d earn more than the pool of non-college-bound--They’re brighter, they're more motivated; they have better family connections.
• What also makes that million-dollar statistic misleading is that statistic is retrospective. Yes, in past, when a far lower percentage of high school students went to college, college grads had a big advantage in the job market. But today, when colleges admit nearly any student who breathes, that advantage is far smaller. Now we have an oversupply of college graduates at the same time as employers are automating as many jobs as possible, offshoring as many jobs as possible, turning as many jobs as possible to part-time or temp jobs, to beat the enormous cost of hiring U.S. workers.
• At the same time, the cost of college increases well beyond the cost of inflation and the average-time-to degree increases. The calculus is particularly bad for students with a less-than-stellar record in high school.

There is a desperate need for government to mandate a College Report Card, so prospective students and their families could see--for students with their high school records--their likelihood of graduating, the average amount of learning such students accrue, and the likelihood they'll be professionally employed if they defy the odds and graduate.

Public outcry is the only way we can get colleges to change and for the government to mandate that colleges prominent post on their website an externally audited report card on themselves. So please forward this video to your contacts, especially to college-bound students and to their families, and to any legislators you know.

For much more on the need for a college report card, see my blog: http://martynemko.blogspot.com.