On October 2nd, President Trump announced a successful renegotiation of NAFTA, the previous trade deal that President Trump called the worst deal ever for the U.S. worker.  The new USMCA which will replace NAFTA as soon as Congress signs its approval, will give workers an opportunity for more prosperity for themselves and their families under the new trade deal.  Workers involved in Mexican car manufacture, for example, under the USMCA will get a wage floor so that they will be able to earn more and this provision also supports more car manufacture sites in the U.S. by evening out wages across trade partnership nations.

Renegotiation of the trade partnership between Mexico, Canada and the U.S. also resonates well with the new tax strategies that the Trump administration passed earlier this year.  Both of these successful negotiations support better conditions for workers in the U.S. by changing our approach to trade.  When other nations are penalized for their tariffs against American products they are brought to appreciate the consequences of unfair trade.  There has been a need in America for fairer trade since NAFTA was passed. If Congress approves the USMCA they will help global trade and U.S. trade and U.S. jobs.

President Trump pointed out in his Tuesday speech which announced the success of the renegotiation that without the threat of tariffs he would not have been able to apply pressure to bring trading partners to the table.  It looks like President Trump has succeeded in the NAFTA renegotiation and hopefully, Congress will support his efforts.

The recent hearings in the Senate to confirm or decline the Judge Brett Kavanaugh nomination have shocked the nation.  But they haven’t shocked the nation enough.  I say that because getting a job is supposed to be about doing a job.  The filter for keeping out unqualified applicants is important.   Nowadays though, we’ve moved away from a simple evaluation of a person’s job abilities.  I keep hearing that a person’s online reputation and even their credit rating can influence employers.  I think that applying a new standard of being accusation-proof is a wrong one.  This new standard has come about because of social media.

I think that shocking the nation and creating chaos in the nomination process may have been the whole point of bringing forward accusations of inappropriate behavior that may or may not have happened 36 years ago.

In the Information Age, in a time when people are trying to know everything about everyone I think that knowing everything about everyone is a bad idea.  Scouring the shadows for a person who will gossip or make up a story without any evidence in order to undermine an accomplished career is a mistake.  Brett Kavanaugh is a person who has served in our nation’s courts for years.  He is capable and qualified for this Supreme Court position and I hope that his nomination goes forward to an approval.

As the “me too movement” has carried itself forward in a hysterical wave of hearsay, I would like to say that hearsay is not the way to understand happenings.  Evidence is.  Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony doesn’t rise to the level of evidence for many reasons including her inability to say for sure where or when events that she described happened.  She also isn’t a credible witness to her own story because she wasn’t sober.  Her story illustrates very well why young women and young men shouldn’t go to unsupervised parties with underage drinking.  But it also serves a political purpose.  She has delayed the Kavanaugh confirmation.

Blasey Ford claims that the only certainty she holds is the certainty that she was “mashed-up” by Kavanaugh.  Although this accusation has blocked Kavanaugh’s confirmation, it doesn’t rise to the level of a criminal accusation according to legal experts.  A more appropriate accusation may be against Blasey Ford as a slanderer.  Blasey Ford as a psychologist knows that her story isn’t about trauma.  The events that Blasey Ford describes fall short of “trauma” because her life wasn’t in danger.  Although she may have been afraid of being raped, there wasn’t a threat that endangered her life.  The only clear purpose of her story has been to muddy the waters of Kavanagh’s accomplished life with her accusation.

None of us should have to live under a microscope.  If we accept that we can be scrutinized for unfounded gossip, or for accusations without proofs or witnesses, how can we retain a footing in the sensible world of work and public life?  Gossip can invade life with wild and unsupported stories.  It can sour the private and public life of an accomplished and hard-working person.  Gossip shouldn’t affect a person’s job and a good boss doesn’t invite gossip into the workplace.  A better Senate wouldn’t invite an unsupportable accusation into public hearings for Kavanaugh.

Jobs are about doing.  Evidence is also about doing.  Evidence is about what, when, who, how, where, and sometimes why an event happened.  Events happen in three-dimensional space and require a grid of supportable facts.  Without basic three-dimensional facts, a person’s suffering must remain a private suffering.  How can it deserve to occupy public space if it doesn’t occupy physical space?

Evidence of wrongdoing sometimes loses its way in the prosecution of crimes against women.  Women who have experienced a violent act against their person suffer and some choose not to accuse their attacker.  The cost to society of violence against women is high.  The cost of violence to women is high for those who have experienced that violence.  That is a problem.  But relying on hearsay in lieu of evidence is bad.  How can our justice system function without relying on evidence?  Our justice system has sometimes failed to defend the right of women to be secure in their persons.  Substituting hearsay for evidence doesn’t repair that fault.  Even though this confirmation hearing isn’t a court proceeding I think it is more reasonable to keep to evidentiary standards than not to.

Nowadays, the word “tolerance” seems so far out of our lexicon.  A live and let live attitude seems far away right now.  Can’t we all try to avoid harming others?  Can’t we try to avoid condemning a person without evidence of wrongdoing?  It is just too easy to make up a story to undermine a person’s accomplishments in order to achieve a political goal.  We as a society shouldn’t accept unsupported accusations or allow such an accusation to undermine a judge’s accomplishments or his ability to do a job that needs doing.

I was amazed to hear the press coverage for Donald Trump’s and Vladmir Putin’s joint press conference that happened in Finland on Monday.  Unintelligent comments from the press included a journalist’s description of the kinds of responses that Americans would have to the conference even before it happened (oh no!).  A journalist actually described discord breaking out as she imagined it would between people who support the President and people who oppose him.  I was appalled that a journalist was describing effects that she wanted to happen, probably as a response to press narratives just like the ones that she was giving.

That journalist didn’t recognize the possibility of change.  She didn’t recognize that peace could be good for almost everyone.  She didn’t acknowledge that American debt already calls for a cessation of wars.  She must have been a practicing neoliberal reporter who wanted to continue with advantages to the media and to the military industrial complex that have happened under a system of constant war making.  I think that her reporting was even worse than the circus-like atmosphere that the U.S. press has exhibited in response to the President over the last two years.

This reporter and others like her have overlooked millions of American brains that can think for themselves.  Americans can be open minded enough to avoid being always either for or against President Trump.  Don’t be surprised, American press corps, when much of America turns the sound down whenever you characterize people’s responses to events even before they happen as though you are a tailor that can shape those responses to your foolish whims.

I am in favor of fewer military bases and less military adventurism.  I see war as another form of malinvestment that hurts more people than those few who profit from war making.  Neoliberalism has led to numerous kinds of malinvestments that surround us all today including car loans and house loans and student loans made to people who can’t afford to pay them off. Bad loans hurt the economy.  We’ve also seen experimentation in finance with the use of derivatives which crashed the American economy in 2008.  And of course we see full-blown risk engagement in the stock market.  Neoliberalism leads to perverted uses of money that destroy rather than build.  Neoliberalism is the ultimate example of highway robbery.

When President Trump speaks in favor of a strong military to support American defense, when he negotiates for a dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear weapon program in favor of economic development instead of war posturing, when he conducts diplomacy with Russia to improve our relationship with them, he garners increasing support from Americans who also want that.  I am one of them.

If you are puzzled by our strange American press coverage, by the discord that we see around us, if you’d like to learn about the ideology of neoliberalism and other earlier American political ideologies, grab a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism, available at Amazon.com.

I went to Forbes this morning to read an article by Grace Totoro, from Feb 2018 entitled, “Can’t Find A Job?  Here’s Why Your Employability Strategy Isn’t Working.”(1)  I had already read a different article written by Katie Zavadski in 2014, from The New Republic, entitled “The Pharmacy School Bubble Is About to Burst.”  (2)  These two articles reflect some of the job market problems and imbalances that Americans face in their frequent job pursuits.  These articles do not support today’s often heard declarations that there’s a skills gap or there are too many jobs for the number of applicants.  I think they both show that there are new kinds of problems in the American job market.  Thank you to both of these sources.

I graduated from high school in 1982.  Several people suggested that I get a pharmacy degree because I liked chemistry and biology and because I was a good student who liked learning and didn’t mind studying.  When I went back to school for my second degree in 2001, I heard once again that pharmacy would be a good field for a lucrative career.  In fact I’ve always observed a consistent demand for pharmacists.  I guess that this long trend is now over.

According to Zavadski, the pharmacy industry in 2014 had 5 graduates for every 4 jobs.  Despite the increasing length of time and money required to get a pharmacy education (5 years specialized training plus 2 years of preparation in some programs), there weren’t enough jobs anymore to employ all recent graduates.

Educating institutions had seen a chance to make more money by educating more pharmacists.  They increased the size of their pharmacy programs.  They also lengthened the time investment required for a student to get a pharmacy degree, and the institution made more money on tuition and books.  But the institution’s profit appetite didn’t match job availability.  Institutions of learning had increased the size of their ambitious pharmacy programs beyond real market demand.  Of course, some of those pharmacy degree holders who can’t find work as a practicing pharmacist will be drawn to related professions such as pharmacy research which will require a further PhD. investment or they may teach pharmacy classes in the overstocked pharmacy education marketplace.

Still, pharmacists do better than web designers, for example.  A few months ago, I spoke to a young web design degree holder who told me that half of her fellow graduates hadn’t gotten a job in web design.  She was working as a book-seller at Barnes and Noble where I was buying books to learn about web design as a possible job skill.  I guess that web design might also be a dead-end about half of the time.

After I found out about pharmacy school employment shortcomings, I read the Forbes article.  In addition to the by-line by Grace Totoro credit is shared with the Forbes Coaches Council.

In the real world, a lot of American jobs have been outsourced to other nations with cheaper labor (or a foreign worker has gotten an H1-B Visa and replaced an American worker to earn a lower wage in a skilled profession).  The Forbes article claimed that automation has destroyed other jobs.

The author went too far however when she described outsourcing and automation as a kind of reductionism and then gave the Dictionary’s definition of reductionism.  I don’t agree that outsourcing and automation are reductionism as stated by Totoro and the Forbes Coaches Council.  When speaking about reductionism, I think that they were really talking about algorithms which have been used to automate the evaluation of potential employees.  An algorithm is a simple program that uses math to make an evaluation.

The article wasn’t supposed to be humorous.  But it was funny to imagine the advice that Forbes was giving in the context of algorithms.  Algorithms have been used in the hiring process for a long time now as I mentioned in an earlier post that looked at the effect of algorithms on employment.

The Forbes article suggested that job seekers should ignore employment statistics.  That may be because there are so few jobs in some communities.  Maybe a job search in a job-scarce community is a hit or miss job opportunity depending on luck.  Also the Forbes Coaches Council may distrust the validity of job statistics generally.  I suppose that a government statistician might be affected by political pressure to make our economy look better than it is.  Maybe the American job landscape changes so fast that a statistician can’t keep up with it.

Forbes suggested also that job seekers should be aware that their prior investments in obtaining credentials will not provide them any job security.  Some pharmacists and web designers would perhaps agree.  Education return-on-investment is looking pretty bad for some people right now.

The Forbes Coaches Council suggested that people shouldn’t even try to get a job unless they know someone who’s already been hired at the company who will vouch for their character.  Is this a way to circumvent a hiring algorithm?

Going back to the bad idea in the Forbes article that automation and outsourcing are reductionism and that reductionism “is the practice of simplifying a complex idea, issue, condition or the like, especially to the point of minimizing, obscuring or distorting it,” I think the author should have mentioned algorithms.  The definition of reductionism sounds a lot like the unfortunate damage that is sometimes done by algorithms.  It would be better to acknowledge that using algorithms to hire people is causing problems and that declining wages and labor outsourcing have also caused problems in the American labor marketplace.  And because of these problems, a lot of people don’t know what to do to get a job.  They have lost their connection to any kind of economic prosperity.

At no point did the Forbes Coaches Council offer a way out of uncertainty in the job market.  None of their suggestions would make a person feel empowered to determine their job search’s success.  Apparently a job seeker can’t just go out to the job market and get a job— either with training or with talent.  Job search strategies of the recent past will not avail you, say Totoro and the Forbes Coaches Council.  According to Forbes, there’s no amount or kind of training that will deliver guaranteed success.  Perhaps that’s why Totoro suggests that the job seeker should hire an employment coach.

There may be an odd humor in the ability of algorithms to mysteriously seep into everyday life.  They are everyone’s hidden stumbling block.  And no one takes responsibility for them.  The idea that an employment coach can help the hopeful job seeker in a world being run by algorithms is both pointless and sort of funny.  When you are an unemployed expert, hire another expert and at least give them a job.

If you’d like to learn more about neoliberalism, financialization and globalization or about political ideologies across American history, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

(1) Grace Totoro, Forbes, “Can’t Find A Job?  Here’s Why Your Employability Strategy Isn’t Working,”  Forbes Community Voice, Forbes Coaches Council, Feb 1, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/ 2018/02/01…job-heres-why-your-employability-strategy-isn’t-working/#6e93ce6f5020, accessed 22 June 2018.

(2) Katie Zavadski, The New Republic, “The Pharmacy School Bubble Is About to Burst,” September 29, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/119634/pharmacy-school crisis-why-good-jobs-are-drying, accessed 22 June, 2018.

 

It’s easy for a person to wish they were smarter.  If only each of us were smarter, wouldn’t it be easier to solve all of our problems?  But it’s probably not just a question of smarts.  It may also be a problem of limited time and also what kind of temperament a person has.  Here’s something to think about that might help in understanding the likely impact of Big Data, and perhaps the disappointing outcome of trying to make humans smarter by using Big Data.

We all know that some humans are geniuses.  But if you imagine making a genius smarter, would that person be able to accomplish more in their lifetime?  For instance, if we could install a computer chip into a genius’s brain to give them more smarts…I’m thinking of people like Leonardo Da Vinci or Sigmund Freud.  As we think of Leonardo and Freud we can’t help but notice that they aren’t a genius of everything.  Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius of science and mechanics but not psychology.  Sigmund Freud was a genius of psychology but not of science or mechanics.  They both knew something about anatomy but each of them was inclined to study and excel in a specific area and they spent all their time doing that.  There wasn’t time enough to do everything and probably they also were inclined to focus upon their area of expertise.  Would having a chip in their brain give them more time?  No.  And would it make them inclined to learn about everything?  Maybe not.

Let’s think of using an external source of smarts.  Think of using Big Data instead of installing a chip inside a person’s brain.  Imagine that this would make a large amount of information accessible to a person.  If we think about using Big Data in the workplace or anywhere else, it may be of use to remember that there’s only so much time to evaluate data and make use of it.  And there’s also a talent constraint.  A person who wouldn’t care about trend analysis may not be helped by Big Data trend information.  They might not be inclined in such a way that the data can become meaningful to them.

If the whole human potential to learn and become aware of the world is held by the total population of humans on earth, then each human being can posses only their small fraction of that total human potential.  Humans need each other because we each possess only a small amount of the total human potential.  We need each other for social interaction but also to get help in areas where we don’t excel but where someone else does.  We need specialists who have the time to help human society by doing what they do best.

This realization works against today’s fascination with the empowering potential of Big Data.  Some have believed that using Big Data can make everyone a genius.  A huge amount of information or Big Data can be plugged into an algorithm that is supposed to be a mathematical model of some tiny facet of a problem that is being considered.  It might be employee performance or sales or productivity, for example.  The information can be run through the algorithm thousands of times.  Some people imagine that this process would be a kind of higher intelligence or AI.  But being plugged into only an algorithm, means that both the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithm can multiply errors in the Big Data.  That can lead to brutal consequences, like the Great Recession which was caused when Quants made imperfect assumptions and put them in algorithms that were used with Big Data.

Some have imagined that Big Data can substitute for human judgement and they have wanted to de-skill a variety of professions like medicine by using diagnostic trees, for example.  A skilled doctor can use his or her experience to decide on a treatment and would probably get to a diagnosis faster than a doctor using a diagnostic tree.  But if the goal is more billable tests, the diagnostic tree would probably increase profits.  If profitability is more desirable than treating a patient with greater skill and efficiency, de-skilling the medical profession might seem attractive unless and until you also consider increased costs for unnecessary treatments and increased mortality on the patient’s side.  Diagnostic trees in medicine can cause brutal patient outcomes and alienate doctors.

De-skilling teachers has also been tried using a testing regime and teaching to test.  Teachers have been fired because of evaluation algorithms that were misused upstream by a previous teacher.  Big Data run through an algorithm just can’t take the place of human experience and judgement.  While Big Data can provide new perspectives about information in large quantities, plugging Big Data into an algorithm will never provide a balanced perspective like the kind that a human being has because of having long acquired experience with information considered in context with real happenings.  An algorithm provides a much narrower perspective.

I think in the age of Big Data the importance of each person’s potential to make a contribution is being overlooked.  I think that human beings are just as important as they ever have been.  And they are almost as limited with Big Data as they are without it.  Big Data can collate a lot of information.  But what use is information or analysis except in the context of what’s meaningful to a person?

Do you think that Big Data can make anyone who isn’t a good manager into one?  Not everyone is capable of realizing why information might matter in the context of the workplace.  Having even more information might not help at all.  There’s been a lot of talk about robots replacing humans in the workforce.  Setting aside the economics of robots, do you think that a manager or analyst can use Big Data to get rid of the need for specialist humans?  Can a manager use Big Data to replace a person with a large learning and experience investment and substitute a robot running on a program?  Or can a manager substitute just anyone as though people have interchangeable training and aptitude?  I don’t think that can work.

As more disruption continues in this economy which has been at the mercy of Big Data and algorithm analysis for almost two decades now, I think greater caution is in order.   Big Data has even more limitations when it is plugged into an algorithm than people have limited genius.  We have seen some brutal consequences when Big Data is plugged into narrow math formulas called algorithms.  Instead of more of that, I would rather see more respect for what’s possible in human society and for each person’s potential to contribute.

If you’d like to learn more about three ideological periods in American politics and how our economy works with our politics, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries and Amazon.com, today.

 

President Trump promised workers in the U.S. that he would fight to reduce unnecessary regulations, simplify the tax code and fight for American prosperity.  He promised to fight to protect American jobs.  He said that he wouldn’t forget the American worker.  Lately, President Trump is getting bad press for his efforts to negotiate with China to reduce our trade imbalance with them.  Why would he do that? And who will likely benefit and who might experience harm?

According to Roger L. Ransom in Coping With Capitalism: The Economic Transformation of the United States 1776-1980, “Tariffs save jobs.”(1)  And that’s just what the American worker needs right now.  Alexander Hamilton during the classical liberal period in early America raised most U.S. revenue through tariffs on incoming goods when he used his American System.  His system of tariffs helped to protect American manufacturing and agriculture.  In fact Hamilton’s American System may have inspired China to add tariffs to foreign products in order to protect Chinese industry.(2)

In the recent past, other American presidents have tried to negotiate with China to reduce its tariffs on American products by asking for a change in China’s policies.  But no change happened.  Trump is trying to renegotiate by raising tariffs on Chinese products in order to make trade more fair and reduce the trade deficit.  This policy goes along with his new tax policy to encourage more products to be made here in the U.S. where making these products will employ U.S. workers.  He may succeed where Bush and Obama failed because he was able to pass the new territorial tax system first.

Who will likely benefit and who might experience harm as tariff policies change?  Since the economy is a complex adaptive system under stress, the economy may change in surprising ways.  Outsourcing may become less profitable.  Some workers may gain and others may lose employment because global corporations will be stressed by changes caused by new tariffs.  Growing jobs by changing our tax policies and now adding tariffs will move our complicated economy towards new outcomes but it will take some time for some changes to happen.  Other changes may be quicker.  Some products from abroad will become more expensive and that may discourage Americans from buying some of them.  But President Trump is changing our trade policies in a way that may eventually help American workers to get a job and keep a job.

If you want to learn more about the American economy and our politics pick up a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com, today.

(1)  Roger Ransom, Coping With Capitalism: The Economic Transformation of the United States 1776-1980, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1981, p.162.

(2) Mel Scanlan Stahl, Political Catsup With Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism, Fast Car Publishing, Spokane, WA, 2015, p. 13.

Many workers have worked at a company that has been bought out.  What are buyouts, do they tend to be profitable and why do they continue?

Buyouts can be classified legally as mergers and acquisitions.  Mergers, according to Wikipedia, are “a legal consolidation of two entities into one entity”.  Acquisitions, according to Wikipedia occur when “one entity takes ownership of another entity’s stock, equity interests or assets”. (1)  We all know about mergers and acquisitions.  They are buyouts that can cause people to lose their job.

According to Wikipedia, there have been seven waves of mergers in the U.S. since 1893.  The Fourth wave happened between 1974-1989 and involved “Co-generic mergers, Hostile takeovers and Corporate Raiding”.  The Fifth wave happened from 1993-2000 and it involved “Cross-border mergers, and mega-mergers.”  The Sixth wave happened from 2003-2008 and it involved “Globalization, Shareholder Activism, Private Equity and LBO’s (leveraged buyouts)”.  The Seventh wave since 2014 involved “generic/balanced buyouts, horizontal mergers of Western companies acquiring emerging market resource producers.”  Mergers and acquisitions continue across the American business landscape.  They can cause enterprise liquidation. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce speech, “2018 State of American Business Address,” there are now half as many public companies as there were in 1996. (4)

Many of these buyouts used borrowed money.  American tax law taxes profits more than debt and this tax policy encourages indebtedness and buyouts that use borrowed money.  Also companies can buy out a company with debts and use those debts to cancel out taxable profits.  And firm to firm transfers of goods under the same corporate umbrella aren’t taxed so that’s another potential tax savings.  Current American tax policies support mergers and acquisitions.  In fact tax policy may deserve the lion’s share of credit for why mergers and acquisitions happen at all.

According to Richard E. Caves, “Effects of Mergers and Acquisitions on the Economy: An Industrial Organization Perspective,” there’s little evidence that buyers earn much when they buy out another company.  Often they lose money. (3)  And the company being bought will sometimes experience a transient gain in stock value but it tends to be short-lived.  Synergy is a term that describes what everyone hopes for in a merger.  It is the hope that there will be a beneficial effect so that combining two companies will create a greater level of efficiency.  But synergy is hard to actually achieve in a buyout. (3)

Years ago American jobs lasted longer than they do now.  People could work at the same job for decades just a few generations ago.  That isn’t true for most workers today.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) compiled some job tenure numbers using the Current Population Survey.  These are short tenures.  According to the BLS, in 2016, workers in management occupations had a median tenure of 6.3 years, architecture and engineering had a tenure of 5.5 years and legal occupations a tenure of 5.5 years.  Service occupations only lasted a median of 2.9 years.  Workers in the public sector “had more than double the median tenure of private sector employees”. (2)  This may be true because public sector jobs aren’t as vulnerable to the effects of M&As as are private sector jobs.  And workers don’t have any confidence that they can maintain their previous salary after a buyout.  They sometimes have to start over with a smaller salary.

Another way that M&As may affect us all is by devaluing education.  University enrolments have been falling for many years now and the trouble started after the Great Recession.  After the Great Recession,  there was an enormous inflation in tuition.  With that cost inflation, the price of a degree today may not seem worth it for a brief job opportunity.  Think of the difficulty of acquiring expertise in almost any profession only to discover that job tenure is shorter than the training period.  This may be why private firms are now having more difficulty finding qualified candidates.  Can the skills gap in the United States be due to mergers and acquisitions that lead to overall shorter job tenures?  Could shorter spans of employment lead to less expertise?  According to the article by Richard E. Caves, “technical efficiency decreases significantly as the extent of corporate diversification increases.” (3)  And with prices for cars and houses so high, the American worker is also less mobile than in the past.  It just isn’t worth relocating for a five-year employment opportunity.

When you look at mergers and acquisitions, they are mostly about moving large sums of money around.  Globalization, financialization and neoliberalism are all about mobile capital.  But what about the health and welfare of American families?  Poverty has increased since the Subprime Mortgage Crisis and M&As have continued on apace.  M&As harm job security, may devalue education and undermine skilled employment in America.  In order to restore and protect American job security, it seems obvious that tax policy should no longer encourage debt and M&As.  Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com to learn more about financialization, globalization, and American political ideologies.

(1) “Mergers and Acquistions,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Mergers_and_acquisitions, accessed 07 Mar 2018.

(2) “Economic News Release, Employee Tenure Summary,” https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm, accessed 14 Mar 2018.

(3) Richard E. Caves, “Effects of Mergers and Acquistions on the Economy:  An Industrial Organization Perspective,” https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents-03-07-18/converence/31/conf31f.pdf, accessed 07 Mar 2018; In the Merger Boom, Ed by Lynne Browne and Eric Rosengreen, 1987.

(4)  “2018 State of American Business Address”, http://www.uschamber.com/speech/2018-state-american-business-address, accessed 22 Feb 2018.

 

According to press reports this week, in Feb 2018, there’s an emergency in our public schools.  People are dying there in mass shootings.  What would happen if the emergency of school shootings were taken seriously?  What would happen if there were a National Public School Holiday and all public schools were closed?

FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) once closed all the banks in a Bank Holiday until plans were laid to reorganize banks by instituting Glass Steagall, by adding the SEC and FDIC insurance.  There were both winners and losers when FDR did that.  FDR made gold illegal to own and confiscated it.  People who owned gold lost out.  And before the banks were closed, there were bank failures where people lost their money.  There was terrible anxiety during the Bank Holiday all across America.   There was suffering.  And discomfort.  People weren’t happy that American banking would change because they couldn’t see whether it would work out for them.  After the dust settled though, American banking grew more solvent and stable and that was a win for everyone.

Isn’t the death of so many defenseless people in public schools more important than bank failures?  Students and teachers are losing their lives.  Isn’t that worse than having banks fail because they are insolvent?  Doesn’t the death of these children and teachers indicate a kind of public school insolvency?

Right away, I can imagine the terrible fear and trouble that closing America’s public schools would cause.  We can begin with public school employment.  Right away, teachers would worry that their jobs would go away.  Administrators also would worry that their jobs would go away.  Janitors jobs, cafeteria personnel, gardeners, special education trainers and maintenance people’s jobs might come to an end.  Maybe these people should be paid for a period of time while public schools are changed.  Perhaps for a transitional period paying them would help to depoliticize part of the change.

Parents would worry if public schools closed about how they would educate their children.  They would worry also about how to keep them safe without public school teachers to watch over them.  But closing public schools might be like having a long summer vacation.  Parents deal with alternatives for their kids during summer vacation and Christmas vacation.  A School Holiday might be like the other ones that parents are used to but it might lead to some changes after the Holiday was over.

How can we change public schools?   What criteria matters in our public schools to determine if they are good?  Can children get an education without public schools?  How can we make schools safe and effective?  Should we consider decentralizing them or making them smaller or home-schooling by computer?  Although the jobs that people enjoy as part of our public school system are important, they aren’t important enough to keep the schools open in the context of serial killings.

I once had a conversation with a retired teacher that affected me a lot when she said that the only reason that poor kids even have a chance at getting an education in America is because of the public school system.  That retired teacher didn’t want schools to become privatized because she was afraid that they would become too expensive for poorer kids to attend.  However, public schools as they are now are expensive too and families with school age kids count on taxes to fund them.  What if families got paid directly for an education alternative with their kids out of public schools?

How can kids get a better education?  How can a child’s education in America get accomplished in a way that offers meaningful skills and learning?  Some say that public schools are failing to provide a good education to a majority of students.  And people have noticed that providing more money to American public schools isn’t solving our schools’ problems.

Under neoliberalism, almost everything in America has become regulated into a state of permanent disaster and various stakeholders are more than willing to block change.  Stakeholders want to stop changes that could disrupt whatever advantages they already have.  In the case of the public school system that has become undeniably true.

American public schools have become a mixture of concentrated problems.  The Great Recession increased poverty and homelessness among America’s children.  That has affected our schools by bringing more disadvantaged people in.  Poverty has put pressure on teachers because of increased absences and social suffering.  Algorithms to monitor teacher’s performance have gotten some good teachers fired.  That’s one of the problems that lies at the root of public school teacher shortages.  Many American kids are being medicated with psychoactive drugs and some of those drugs may cause mass shooting as a side effect in some students (1).  Despite warnings on some prescribed drugs that they may cause suicidal ideation, some parents want to continue using them and these drugs provide a big profit for pharmaceutical companies.  Can we do without them?  Some people want to regulate guns differently while others think that regulating guns differently won’t reduce mass shootings. (2) Our dysfunctional schools call on us to bring more money and hire more administrators and buy more drugs and test more teachers and test more students and extract more money from tax payers.  But beneficial change in public schools has seemed impossible.

Think of all the fighting among teachers and teacher’s unions, beween various kinds of administrators, between teachers and administrators, among people who design basic skills testing and algorithms for evaluating teacher and student performance and drug companies that want to defend their profits, between federal oversight and local oversight of schools.  Think of conflicts between those who want public tax money to go to public schools and those who want it to go to private schools.  Think of strife breaking out during School Board meetings.  Think of how many problems meet and clash in our schools.  Now think of how little public schools have changed for the better over the last 30 years.  It’s well past time to stop picking sides in the debates about public schools.  Let’s not argue anymore.

Our public schools may have reached a state of emergency.  What would happen if American public schools took a long Holiday?  At the very least, there would be no mass shootings at public schools over that period.  And without vested interests blocking change, people with fresh ideas might have a chance to present those fresh ideas as new opportunities .  Maybe a variety of new options could be tried in different regions of our nation.  Give the kids some homework away from public schools.  Pay school personnel to stay away from school for the transition period.  Close the public schools.  In the context of mass shootings, they aren’t safe.  And they aren’t good at educating students for today’s workforce.  Find a solution that’s different from what we have now.

If you would like to learn more about three American political ideologies including classical liberalism, modern liberalism and neoliberalism buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com available now.

(1) Jon Rappoport, “Mass Shootings and Psychiatric Drugs: The Connection,”  Feb 22, 2018, https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/mass-shootings-and-psychiatric-drugs-the-connection/.

(2) The Anchorage Daily Planet, “Gun Hysteria,” http://www.anchoragedailyplanet.com/110446/gun hysteria; printed in the editorial section, and posted by the editor.  It says that the number of school shootings has been misrepresented and far fewer mass shootings have occurred than the popular press has been claiming.

The kind of information that I want to find in any news source allows me to learn about the world that I live in.  Today, I found an article in Forbes that discussed the workplace in 2018.  The article was written by Dan Schawbel, on Nov 1st, 2017 and the title is “10 Workplace Trends You’ll See In 2018.” (1)  The author makes predictions every year, based on conversations that he has with people in the workforce and also based on surveys conducted by other researchers.  You can read this year’s predictions and probably even go back to look at past years.

In the first paragraph, Schawbel states that he is writing to benefit organizations (instead of individuals) with this analysis.  His article has the Forbes optimism about business but it isn’t only optimistic.  Some workplace problems are cautiously noted in the piece.  I’m using his article to summarize some of his main points that I think you will be interested in.  I’m also going to add some points of my own.  I’ll tell you “Schawbel says or notes or writes,” when it’s his point of view.

In his first numbered trend, Schawbel notes the importance of human conversations and contrasts them with e-mail interactions.  He says that one in-person conversation carries as much weight as 34 e-mails.  One of the changes in our work-world has involved computer mediated and networked communities.  Schawbel cited research conducted by Mahdi Roghanizad and Vanessa K. Bohns. that shows that people prefer the face-to-face interaction instead of computer e-mail back-and-forth.  Instead of e-mail improving productivity, it has now become clear that face to face conversations are more productive.  Some companies have brought their telecommuters back to the work-site to facilitate the face-to-face interaction.

Another trend is a new recognition in the corporate environment that in-company training and retraining to adapt employees to a changing workplace matters more.  In fact it’s now needed because new employees can’t always be found quickly to do what a company needs doing.  It is costing companies money when they can’t fill an open position with a qualified candidate.  Workplace environments are changing so fast that old skills are quickly outdated.  That means that new skills training has to become an ongoing company investment.

Also new skills are coming onto the workplace all the time.  No one’s ready for that new skill and universities can’t keep up with new skills training.  That makes constant training an essential ingredient to a functioning workplace, so that workplace openings to do new things can be filled quickly– even if it is with long-established but retrained workers.  In a later point, Schawbel notes disruption in education.  Inflation has been one problem in education but so has lackluster and unavailable employment opportunities to degree holders.  Without a good return on a university investment, fewer young people are motivated to pay for one.  Many young workers are seeking training off-campus now.  Some students seeking an untraditional road to an education for in-demand skills go on-line or buy training materials to study at home.  An in-house education of in-house personnel will help educate workers for exactly the job that is needed by the corporation–one that is tailored to suit the corporation’s needs.  It was once expected that people would pay for their training and that an employer could hire a fully qualified worker.  But if the workforce shortage of qualified applicants continues, I think that it may become necessary for corporations to train people after they hire them.

Many people are eager to see what happens in the workplace as algorithms come closer to simulating human interactions.  Schawbel wrote about chatbots which are computer programs that gather and report on certain kinds of data that can help managers to be more informed in the workplace.  He gave an example where a chatbot could report to a manager when an employee calls in sick.  Of course, a chatbot interaction won’t be the same as a human interaction, though the ability of such a program will probably continue to grow and the availability of programing that can do trend reporting may put some people out of a job.  In his last point, Schawbel mentioned workplace stress.

With shifting workplace environments, educational debt, financial insecurity, uncertain changes constantly washing over them in their job role, workers according to Schawbel, are stressed-out and unhappy.  Some companies are providing assistance to pay off tuition debt and others are becoming more proactive about supporting employee mental health.  Will this make a difference and will the changes washing over everyone in the workplace lead to successful companies in the future?  Are these changes worth it?  Will people continue to choose to work in these environments and for how long will their careers last?  Will AI algorithms achieve more automation and will people want that in the workplace or will it become less effective over time as e-mail has proven to be?

James Tobin (1918-2002), the Nobel prize-winning economist, once noted that Information Technologies make money only for people and companies that manufacture the technology.  The companies that use IT in the work environment constantly must invest money in order to buy it,  and then continue to invest to retrain people to use it and replace it as it continues to evolve.  With the stock market being so highly valued at this time in history, IT companies have gotten a huge financial boost and IT has really taken a leadership position in trends that affect companies across America.  But can IT earn a continued hegemony at the end of QE, when the stock market changes back to more authentic market conditions?  Only time will tell.  If you want to learn more about the history of political ideologies and their impact on technological changes that have happened across America, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com.  

(1) Schawbel, Dan, “10 Workplace Trends You’ll See In 2018,” Forbes, Nov 1, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2017,11/01/10-workplace-trends-youll-see-in-2018/#4aa494604bf2, accessed 9 Jan 2018.

another resource for learning more about information technologies and the history of Silicon Valley is:

(2) Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2017.

 

The Tax and Jobs Act was renamed because of the Byrd rule to a Bill: “To provide reconciliation pursuant to titles II and V of the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2018.”(1)  This is not the surprising part of the bill, but I had to mention it because in the ensuing discussion I will use the shorter name and I don’t want you to think that I’m misleading you about the true name.

What surprises me the most about the Tax and Jobs Act is that its territorial tax design was discussed during the Obama administration, even though our former president didn’t try to change the tax structure as President Trump has done.  According to an article from 2012 titled, “A Global Perspective on Territorial Taxation,” (2) by Phillip Dittmer, “every independent U.S. advisory board working group, and federal agency tasked with exploring tax reform has recommended that the U.S. pivot toward a territorial system.”

Advocates for a territorial tax plan, Dittmer wrote, included President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and the Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.  Even the House Committee on Ways and Means in 2011 recommended territorial taxation.  What occurs to me when I consider the widespread Obama administration support for a territorial system is to wonder why the democrats voted against Trump’s plan.

What I learned from Dittmer’s article is that developed economies like the UK and Japan have been moving from a worldwide tax system like the one we had before the Tax and Jobs Act was passed to a territorial system.  His article explains that the worldwide system has had fewer advantages in a global context than the new territorial system has.  I would say that the main purpose of the new tax structure is to support global businesses without causing as much damage to our domestic business operations.  When President Trump says that it will bring jobs back to the U.S., he may be right because with a lower corporate tax rate, the U.S. becomes a more attractive base for corporate and small business operations.  More foreign owned businesses may also set up here.  The lesser tax rate for bringing already earned overseas profits back to the U.S. may also encourage capital to go to work by being invested in the United States.

I was surprised to learn that the worldwide tax system was designed to support globalized business operations and so also is the territorial tax system.  I didn’t really expect that they would have the same goal of supporting globalization.  They just do it in different ways.  It may be the case that during the early period of globalization, the worldwide tax system was better.  Now that globalization has evolved and there are more developing economies than the world once had, the territorial system is better.  It will help global companies operating abroad to take advantage of markets there, and it will help Americans to have a more profitable business tax structure at home.

There are several ways that a territorial tax system may make doing business abroad easier and tax collection at home easier, too.  Under a territorial system, foreign companies headquartered in the U.S. won’t be taxed for the profits that they earn abroad.  That makes it easier for American companies to do business abroad.  They don’t have to consider the influence of tax subsidies paid to offset foreign taxes (which made high tax nations more attractive) or deferred taxation that kept money out of the U.S. Treasury.  And transnational companies may choose to invest more here in the U.S. because of the lesser tax rate and the convenience of operations at home.

It remains to be seen what this new Tax and Jobs Act will accomplish for the United States.  Will it bring capital back that will be invested in the U.S. economy?  Will it encourage healthier small businesses that compete more effectively with large corporations (that often didn’t pay any tax under the worldwide tax system)?  Will it allow the U.S. government to collect more taxes from corporate businesses at home (because of more investment here instead of abroad)?  Will it encourage more jobs here at home and a more competitive pricing on American made goods and services?  Let’s wait and see.

Finally, this is a long bill and I haven’t read it yet.  To help us all to understand some of the tax provisions that will affect average Americans, I’m including a reference to an article by Julia Horowitz titled, “34 Things you need to know about the incoming tax law,” that may help you to understand some of the details that will affect you in the bill. (3)  Once again we see neoliberalism in the efforts of American politicians to support globalization.  If you would like to learn more about globalization and neoliberalism, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

(1)  Eli Watkins, “Senate rules force Republicans to go with lengthy name for tax plan,” Dec 19, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/19/politics/tax-bill-name-delay/index.html, accessed Dec 22, 2017.

(2) Phillip Dittmer, “A Global Perspective on Territorial Taxation, Aug 10, 2012, https://taxfoundation.org/global-perspective-territorial-taxation, accessed Dec 21, 2017.

(3) Julia Horowitz, “34 Things you need to know about the incoming tax law, ” CNN, Your Money, Your America, http://money.cnn.com /2017/12/20/news/economy/republican-tax-reform-everything-you-need-to-know/index.html, accessed Dec 21, 2017.