Many centuries ago, my ancestors chose to adopt the ceremonies that the Roman Empire had adapted itself to (I can see the value of a large political system changing from a multitheistic emotional support system to a monotheistic one, “proving” to the general populace that a single emperor makes more sense than competing emperors), thus participating in the rituals developed under the banner of the Christian religion, including the use of a Romanized language.
This winter, as in all the winters of my life, I received gifts on or about the 25th of December, symbolizing the rebirth of our emotional selves (our souls, if you will) in the midst of the doldrums of days with less sunlight. As I’ve grown older, I’ve given gifts to more and more people in a subconscious attempt to even out or exceed the number of gifts I’ve received, a sort of yin-yang of Christmas, if you will.
As I approached the day of Christmas, I found myself reading “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys, a book that loosely chronicles the life of the author who grew up in the Caribbean islands. Before I could find time to finish the book, the days of gift exchange occurred and I find myself awash in more bundled pages to focus my eyes upon:
- “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell
- “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by Leonard Mlodinow
- “The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal” by Jared Diamond
- “The Story of Chicago May” by Nuala O’Faolain
- “Revolutionary Wealth” by Alvin & Heidi Toffler
- “Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace” edited by Mark Tovey
- “The Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore, a popup book by Robert Sabuda
- Layer Cake
- Memento
- A Clockwork Orange
With all of those wonderful gifts in my possession, what did I give away? Not much, frankly. I made necklaces for my wife and mother. Every other gift which bore my name was purchased with my wife’s money this year – such is the life of a consultant in the idle part of a working 12-month calendar.
Which brings me to the reason for this blog entry, probably my last one for the year 2008.
While I sat in the hospital last night, waiting for a medical professional to stop by the hospital room where my 91-year young mother in-law lay in bed after being admitted through the ER earlier in the day for uncharacteristic body function measurements noted by a home health care worker, I flipped through some old magazines in the patient/family lounge. I skipped over the “Mature Living” and “Field and Stream” magazines I had read on previous hospital visits and picked up a copy of the September 24, 2007, edition of “Newsweek” with Alan Greenspan on the cover. The articles on Greenspan including a general business review of Greenspan’s career by Daniel Gross, an interview ('two-hour tutorial') with Jon Meacham and Daniel Gross and an excerpt from Greenspan’s book, “The Age of Turbulence.”
A paragraph from the excerpt haunted me during my dreams last night, especially the highlighted phrase below:
As awesomely productive as market capitalism has proved to be, its Achilles' heel is a growing perception that its rewards, increasingly skewed to the skilled, are not distributed justly. Market capitalism on a global scale continues to require ever-greater skills as one new technology builds on another. Given that raw human intelligence is probably no greater today than in ancient Greece, our advancement will depend on additions to the vast heritage of human knowledge accumulated over the generations. A dysfunctional U.S. elementary and secondary education system has failed to prepare our students sufficiently rapidly to prevent a shortage of skilled workers and a surfeit of lesser-skilled ones, expanding the pay gap between the two groups. Unless America's education system can raise skill levels as quickly as technology requires, skilled workers will continue to earn greater wage increases, leading to ever more disturbing extremes of income concentration. Education reform will take years, and we need to address increasing income inequality now. Increasing taxes on the rich, a seemingly simple remedy, is likely to prove counterproductive to economic growth. But by opening our borders to large numbers of highly skilled immigrant workers, we would both enhance the skill level of the overall workforce and provide a new source of competition for higher-earning employees, thus driving down their wages. The popular acceptance of capitalist practice in the United States will likely rest on these seemingly quite doable reforms. [bold/italicized emphasis is mine, not Greenspan’s]
It is not an accident that human beings persevere and advance in the face of adversity. Adaptation is in our nature, a fact that leads me to be deeply optimistic about our future. Seers from the oracle of Delphi to today's Wall Street futurists have sought to ride this long-term positive trend that human nature directs. The Enlightenment's legacy of individual rights and economic freedom has unleashed billions of people to pursue the imperatives of their nature—to work toward better lives for themselves and their families. Progress is not automatic, however; it will demand future adaptations as yet unimaginable. But the frontier of hope that we all innately pursue will never close.
I continue to educate myself about current economic and research trends so that I can understand where our society is moving, giving me the insight I need to understand where my skills are best applied. Despite my continuing education, I know my level of intelligence limits my true comprehension of fields such as quantum mechanics and synthetic drug development. In other words, my ability to go from the front suite of a corporate office to the labs of a research university and integrate my knowledge of the two into an in-depth whole would not impress the deepest thinkers of the world but might fool the general person on the street. So if I, with an IQ measured many years ago at a level a standard deviation or two (but not six) above average, realize my limitations, what should I expect of the vast majority of humans living under the rest of the bell curve?
If technology complexity increases indefinitely, how do we keep unskilled workers productive?
In this season of reflection and gift giving (and cuddling up by the fire in the Northern Hemisphere, including me on the chilly December day, even if the “fire” is a set of artificial logs heated by natural gas to supplement the warm air blowing out of the vents of a home central heating/cooling pump system), I say that we skilled workers who have the ability to develop and integrate complex systems should give our unskilled workers the gift of simplifying the usability of technology systems. The gift that keeps on giving, as they say.
We stand up and protest when car manufacturers insist on putting iDrives into mass-produced automobiles. We tear up any user interface that requires more than two or three buttons to operate. We treat every system as if it was an emergency situation that can be handled with the press of a large red panic button to set into motion immediately (or stopped just as easily).
As Greenspan noted, the behemoth of the education system, like a large cruise or battle ship going at full speed, cannot be stopped and turned on a dime in a short period of time. While school experiments such as KIPP are taking place and slowly influencing the way students are taught – the bottom-up approach to building a better functioning society – skilled workers will work on building systems that anyone can use, a top-down approach that hopefully will let us meet in the middle more quickly, not only putting the current topsy-turvy economy back on its feet but make our global society more cooperative and working toward a peaceful solution to many local skirmishes that are caused by economic inequalities that can be tied to poor education and workplace training.
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