Thwap

The current economy has focused the debate over the United States’ competitiveness in the global job market. The loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States, in favor of places such as China, Taiwan and Korea has been pronounced and has made it difficult for many blue collar workers to find jobs in modern America. Much of the discussion regarding competitiveness centers around education, and rightfully so. However, the discussion often misses the mark because our paradigm for understanding education is completely wrong.

Looking back to education prior to World War II–or more precisely, prior to the G.I. Bill–high schools had the responsibility to give students the skills required to make a living while universities had the responsibility to make students well rounded. Most jobs didn’t need a college degree and most people didn’t attend college. Higher education was required for professionals, doctors, lawyers, engineers and business executives, but not for most people. However, two things changed during World War II: First, higher education became obtainable by millions of people who wouldn’t otherwise been able to afford to go to college because of the G.I. Bill; Second, more professionals, especially engineers, were needed in the workforce due to the consumerization of many of the technologies developed during the war and in subsequent years during the Cold War and Space Race.

As more people started attending college, it became the norm for employers to expect job applicants to have college degrees. This even applied to jobs where college degrees weren’t needed previously and where a college education doesn’t improve an employees ability to do the work. Because of this, it has become routine to expect that all high school aged children will go on to college in order to get gainful employment after school. In response, high schools have increasingly focused on a curriculum for college prep instead of vocational training.

All of this is not to say that a college education doesn’t have value, because it most certainly has an intrinsic value to the student. College teaches students critical thinking skills and it broadens the student’s worldview. While many students bemoan their general education requirements, they are some of the most important classes a university has to offer because it exposes the student to topics and ideas they might not have come across otherwise. However, universities are not vocational schools, they are not designed to prepare a student for success in the workforce. The simple fact is that the economy does not require an entire population to be college educated.

Right now, there are many open jobs across the United States that require skilled laborers, and yet there are not enough people learning these skills to fill the available jobs. This sad fact has been testified to before Congress and spoken about by industry leaders. These types of skills use to be taught at the high school level, in auto- and wood- and metal-shop classes. High schools have cut shop classes in order to offer, and often times require, students to take math and science classes that many of those students will never need.

One solution to the ongoing labor supply deficit in skilled trades is to teach those skills at the high school level, as they use to be taught. Of course, the skill set that’s required has changed, but the curriculum that high schools offer can change too. The existence of for-profit trade schools such as ITT Technical Institute and DeVry demonstrates the needs for such training. High schools need to take up the type of vocational training that can provide students quality jobs, training in computer aided drafting, information technology, precision machining, as well as the more traditional auto- and metal-shop classes.

Within living memory, students could graduate high school and expect to make a decent living pursuing a skill they learned in school. Today, that is no longer the case. The United States no longer has a routine path to skilled labor. High schools need to return to providing classes in the necessary skills so students have the option of attending college or not, and still be able to make a decent living no matter which path they choose. Doing so will help America’s students, the job market, and its competitiveness on the world stage.

In his speech after the Iowa Caucuses last night, Mitt Romney argued that America needs to return to being a meritocracy. However, he astutely avoided using the word “meritocracy”, instead he danced around it, saying “the right course for America is to remain a merit society”. It was as if the word was too big, as if he was concerned that people might not understand him.

Romney’s diction illuminated how he views the electorate. He sees them as uneducated, dumb, or simple. In any case, he believes Americans have a small vocabulary. This shouldn’t be too surprising, politicians have been pandering to the lowest common denominator for years.

What’s striking is the juxtaposition of what he’s saying and how he’s saying it. He is at once saying the best and brightest need to raise to the top, and that you’re not it. He is, in essence, telling the electorate that his policies are going to work against their best interest.

It is easy to understand the draw of a meritocracy. Everyone thinks they’re better than average and will raise to the top if society is based on merit. But, by definition, not everybody can be better than average. It is this disconnect, this misunderstanding of ourselves, that Mitt Romney is praying on.

A meritocracy sounds inherently fair, except when it isn’t. A meritocracy is especially vicious to the common man when merit is measured by wealth and political connections. A meritocracy championed by those in power will use a measuring stick designed to keep power in the hands of the powerful. We’ve seen such a type of meritocracy in the banking industry over the past decade, and we’ve seen it in the history books time and time again. Instead of enabling social mobility through skill, education and hard work, such a system retards social mobility.

Mitt Romney is upholding the morality of a “merit society” to convince the electorate to support his campaign, while at the same time indicating that they won’t benefit from such a society. He is able to do this because the electorate doesn’t know itself and is therefore unable to win the fight between the people and the powerful.

Yesterday, Google unveiled their next foray into the social networking scene, Google+. Over the last 36 hours, there has been more chatter about Google+ than any other tech launch since the iPhone first came out. People are standing in virtual lines around the block trying to get into Google+, with some users figuring out clever work-around to get their friends in.

Over the past 24 hours since I received my Google+ invite, I’ve been playing with it nearly non-stop. In that time, I’ve determined that the Google+ Circles (analogous to Facebook’s friend lists) can be a powerful new way to share the right information with the right people. If used correctly, Circles can make Google+ feel like an intimate gathering of friends instead of a night out at the bar shouting at the top of your lungs.

Circles allows you to decide what topics that you discuss would be interesting to which friends. On Facebook, people share everything with everybody. For example, I have a group of friends that are big hockey fans. During the Stanley Cup Playoffs this year, they would post a status update to Facebook every time a team scored. As somebody who wasn’t following the playoffs and didn’t care too terribly much, this created a lot of noise in my Facebook news feed. I didn’t want to block these friends outright, since they did post things not hockey related that I cared about, but their posts about hockey really decreased the signal to noise ratio of my Facebook news feed.

Google+ Circles enables users to easily change this behavior. I’m a fairly avid cyclist and enjoy watching professional cycling. With the Tour de France starting this Saturday, I’m sure I’ll use Google+ to chronicle my opinion about the race as the much despised Alberto Contador goes head-to-head with our scrappy hero, Andy Schleck. I know that most of my friends won’t care about this, but a couple will. Circles makes it much easier for me to only share this cycling commentary with those few friends that will care, and leave my thoughts on cycling out of the feeds of friends who really don’t care.

But here’s the secret about Circles: if I use Circles correctly, I create value for my friends and aquantances, not for myself. I can’t tell Google+ to not show me hockey related stuff from friends that post about hockey. Google+ doesn’t know which posts are hockey related, and it doesn’t know that I don’t want to know about hockey. It takes my friends putting me into appropriate circles and then using those circles to share the appropriate information with me.

Google+ Circles can be a powerful new way to share the right information with the right people. However, it’s going to take all of us thinking of what each other’s interests are and limiting what we share to those interests. For Circles to be a success, we need to show a bit of empathy and understanding towards one another, and it’s going to require all of us to break our habit of sharing every thought that runs through our head with everybody we possibly can. I, for one, will be ruthless in uncircling people who habitually share things I don’t care about.

If the nascent revolutionaries in Egypt are successful in finding ways in which a movement can leverage social media to remain broad-based, diffused and participatory, they will truly help launch a new era beyond their already remarkable achievements. Such a possibility, however, requires a clear understanding of how networks operate and an explicit aversion to naïve or hopeful assumptions about how structures which allow for horizontal congregation will necessarily facilitate a future that is non-hierarchical, horizontal and participatory. Just like the Egyptian revolution was facilitated by digital media but succeeded through the bravery, sacrifice, intelligence and persistence of its people, ensuring a participatory future can only come through hard work as well as the diligent application of thoughtful principles to these new tools and beyond.

The revolution in Egypt has been branded as Revolution 2.0 because of its egalitarian beginning and leaderless structure. However, leaders started to emerge before Mubarak had even stepped down as President. An article by Zeynep Tufekci on Technosociology examines why these types of leaderless revolutions have difficulty staying leaderless.

(h/t Ethan Zuckerman)

This morning, the House Budget Committee grilled Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on why the Fed isn’t doing more to curb the possible threat of inflation. This line of questioning was opposite that what Congress should be asking: Why isn’t the Fed doing more to encourage robust inflation?

It has become dogma that inflation is harmful to an economy. Inflation weakens the buying power of the dollar compared to other currencies and it reduces the value of cash savings. Conversely, inflation increases the competitiveness of exports and reduces the burden of existing debt. Inflation, like monetary and fiscal policy more broadly, is a tool that can be used and adjusted to improve the strength of the economy. Inflation does not necessarily hurt an economy, unchecked and excessive inflation hurts an economy, but a moderate amount of inflation at the right time can greatly help an economy. This is such a time for America.

Robust inflation would help the United States in three ways: First, it would increase the competitiveness of our exports in foreign markets; second, it would reduce both our private and our public debt burden; and third, it would stimulate spending. Read more…

This is the second of a week-long series of posts looking at the themes President Obama brought up during his second State of the Union address. This series aims to look at what the President did right and where he still needs some improvement.

Our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a “D.”

We have to do better. America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, constructed the Interstate Highway System. The jobs created by these projects didn’t just come from laying down track or pavement. They came from businesses that opened near a town’s new train station or the new off-ramp.

Over the past thirty years, America has been spending its infrastructure. Our roads are deteriorating, levies have broken, and our electricity system has experienced cascading failures. In our efforts to remove bloat and waste from government, we have instead prevented it from maintaining the public goods our parents and grandparents worked and paid taxes to create.

An infrastructure repair and modernization plan is sorely needed at all levels of government. The greatest expansion of America’s infrastructure in history happened during the Great Depression because of the New Deal. Today, we are facing an economy in a similar state as the 1930s. Unemployment is rampant and job growth is non-existent. A government program to put Americans back to work and simultaneously rebuild our infrastructure is the best thing the Obama Administration could do.

Unfortunately, that won’t happen.  President Obama has been running away from the label of socialist since his campaign began. He is, quite simply, a centrist president who would not dream of such an expansion of the government into the economy. He would prefer to give large hand-outs to the biggest banks in order to goose their profits and get the stock market up, since that’s the moderate course of action.

Admittedly, the Obama Administration has put a lot of money into the economy through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and worked to improve our transportation with huge investments in high-speed rail. But these investments are either too small or won’t employ people until far in the future.

President Obama is right to talk about the poor shape of our infrastructure and how it needs to be improved. His talk needs to be followed up with action. Infrastructure is one of the best investments government can make in the future.

Outward! To the stars!

After a month and a half trapped in its mothership, NASA’s NanoSail-D spacecraft has finally unfurled the first solar sail to circle the Earth.

Solar sails, gossamer-thin sheets that feel the pressure of the solar wind, have been suggested as a best hope for propelling spacecraft between the stars. They’re the only known method of space travel that doesn’t require carrying heavy fuel on the journey.

But solar sails have had a checkered history. Only one has ever actually worked: the Japanese IKAROS spacecraft, which launched in 2009 and flew by Venus in 2010.

NanoSail-D looked set to be another heartbreak. It launched aboard the Fastsat (Fast, Affordable Science and Technology SATellite) in November 2010, along with five other experiments. A spring was supposed to push the breadbox-sized NanoSail-D probe into its own orbit. But when the time came, the probe got stuck.

To everyone’s surprise, NanoSail-D spontaneously ejected itself on Jan. 17. Engineers still don’t entirely know why.

Three days later, on Jan. 20 at 10 p.m. EST, the free-flying spacecraft unfurled its silvery sail. An onboard timer activated a wire burner, which cut a 50-pound fishing line holding the spacecraft’s panels closed. Within seconds, the thin polymer sheet unrolled into a sail 10 square meters in area.

Via Wired Science.

This is quite possibly the best review of Minecraft you’ll ever watch. Seriously, go watch it. When you’re done, go buy the game if you haven’t already and waste the rest of your week digging a giant hole in the ground.

Etsy user voodoofabrication calls this a steampunk iPhone stand, saying:

How cool is our “little” addition to our growing line of STEAMPUNK. This wicked little stand will support your iphone, your android, or even your old 1972 rotary phone!

(Just kidding… Maybe!)

I designed the accessory stand to implement my line of STEAMPUNK accessories. Only being the second addition, it’s style is unmistakably Voodoo Vintage!

This little monster stands 7.5″ tall and is 7″ at it’s widest span. The center spar has a lower notch than the rest- which will accommodate a charging cord when the phone is in an upright position.

The stand will also accommodate the phone turned on it’s side for when you want to watch the videos instead of getting some “real” work done…

However, the Make Blog hit the nail on the head, it “would look at home on any Bird-of-Prey or D5 Battlecruiser.”

This is the first of a week-long series of posts looking at the themes President Obama brought up during his second State of the Union address.  This series aims to look at what the President did right and where he still needs some improvement.

We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.

But we have never measured progress by these yardsticks alone. We measure progress by the success of our people. By the jobs they can find and the quality of life those jobs offer. By the prospects of a small business owner who dreams of turning a good idea into a thriving enterprise. By the opportunities for a better life that we pass on to our children.

James Carville popularized the saying, “It’s the economy, stupid,” during President Clinton’s run for the presidency in 1992, and President Obama took that saying to heart for his second State of the Union address. Much of what he addressed was how America can right its economic future and continue the growth it had seen during much of Clinton’s presidency. It’s that type of growth that has become the foundation of the American economy, literally mortgaging future growth for today’s consumption. Unfortunately, that type of growth hasn’t sustained itself over the past decade.

Peter Thiel, in an interview with The National Review, did well describing the misalignment of expectations.

My orthogonal take is that the whole thing happened because there was not enough technological innovation. It was not really the fault of the borrowers or the lenders; the problem was that everybody had tremendous expectations that the country was going to be a much wealthier place in 2010 than it was in 1995, and in fact there’s been a lot less progress.

President Obama, in his State of the Union, continues this unrealistic expectation when he pulls from America’s greatest accomplishments and says those are routinely achievable to continue moving us forward. Yes, we need to strive for greatness, but we also need to prepare for the mundane. We need an economic system that is not reliant upon outsized returns to keep us moving forward, but can use those outsized returns when we win that windfall.

Not only have we as individuals been mislead into thinking and borrowing like 5% growth is standard, but our federal budget requires that type of growth to stay current.  Had the economy grown throughout the oughts like I did through the second half of the ’90s, our economy would be 15% larger and the government would be collecting nearly $3 trillion more tax revenue, which would be providing a significant budget surplus instead of today’s deficit.

The economy is rightfully important, and we need to strive for improved efficiency and new technologies. But expecting that efficiency and technological innovation for our economy to continue to function is a sure recipe for future default.

In posts later this week, I’ll take a look at some of the positive steps President Obama brought up in order to help us reach the growth our economy currently requires. Improved infrastructure, education and new clean technologies are all critical, but we can’t tie ourselves to their success for our continued solvency.