Economic Recovery??

"Without an Educated Work Force, Economy Will Never Recover"--Thomas Friedman, NY Times, Oct. 22, 2009

"Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker's global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges," argued Todd Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor.

"This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker's production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home.  So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-a-vis their real income.

When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally."

(My comment: None of the experts and "Talking Heads" on TV ever mention the problem of Outsourcing where lower-paid workers in India, China, etc. are taking high-paying jobs away from Americans.  This situation never existed before during previous recessions.  The Government plans to create new jobs are a failure from the beginning due to this basic fact of the new global economy.)

"But those who have some interpersonal skills--the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect--have done well.

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be.  As Daniel Pink, the author of a "A Whole New Mind", puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper "and just as well", vanilla doesn't cut in anymore.  It's all about what chocolate sauce, whip cream and cherry you can put on top.

So our schools have a doubly hard task now--not just improving reading, writing and arithmatic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We're going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.