In 2006, AT&T promised to return 5000 jobs it had outsourced to India to the US. In 2008, having only returned 1400 jobs, AT&T's CEO reports that the company is having trouble finding sufficient numbers of people to fill the positions it has. There simply aren't enough people worth hiring in the US who are willing to do this kind of work.
Let's be clear: this isn't a particularly challenging job. We're talking customer service. I've done it. You answer the phone, you speak courteously with customers, and you resolve their problems as best you can in keeping with established company policies. All you really need to be able to do is be nice while you remember what you're allowed to do. This ain't rocket science. So the fact that AT&T can't find a few thousand people to do this--and they alone in this--is rather disheartening.
I think corporate America is coming to the conclusion that the public school experiment is, on average, a failure. Though there are good schools out there, and though there are lots of people who had good experiences there, Mr. Stephenson is right: any entity which has a 50% failure rate in its final product is irretrievably broken.
I also think it's plausible that rather than wait for the government to fix this, large corporations are going to take matters into their own hands. They'll start targeting kids as young as 16 and get them to sign extended service contracts. The company will provide training to prepare them to hold down a job in exchange for three to five years of employment. Everybody wins. If the student/employee doesn't want to finish the contract, fine, but all they must repay the cost of the training they received.
Obviously this would only work for jobs which do not require a college degree. This would make the stratification of society more explicit, but it's not like that stratification isn't real already, and at least this way everybody gets to work.
Contrary to what this article would have you believe, FDR and the New Deal did not resurrect the American economy. After initial reforms, unemployment did fall some in 1937, but never fell below a catastrophic 14.8%, and rose again to 19% until the draft kicked in, giving employment to millions of American men. The programs responsible for this entirely lackluster "recovery" tripled the national debt. Fortunately for everyone, Congress was able to repeal most of the relief programs in 1943. But it wasn't until after World War II and the deregulation it heralded that the American economy returned to a semblance of normalcy, and that only after half a decade of unlimited demand for war-driven manufacturing (and the national debt was more than the national GDP by then).
Suggesting that a few alphabet soup agencies are going to be able to prevent a recession or cure it is pie in the sky. Even the largest draft in American history--17 million men by 1945--wasn't able to absorb all of the unemployment, and the government had to heavily subsidize industry to produce war material to get the amounts it needed. In the 1930s, the government probably could get away with a borrowing spree, as it barely owed any money. And in the 1940s, borrowing seemed to be the only way of winning the war. But now the national debt is more than half the size of the national GDP (giving the government a 3:1 debt/income ratio). I think we're tapped out. I also think that massive borrowing, which didn't really work in the 1930s, will be even less effective now. Please don't listen to this guy.
In order to not be entirely negative about Obama, I should point out that in some sense I don't think his association with Rev. Wright is that big of a deal. I don't like the fact that Wright seems to be channeling race-based resentment and anger. That's just not helpful. But I do believe that the prophetic role of the pastor, an office which Wright holds, occasionally requires calling out the flaws of the country in which the pastor resides. The language he used may have been inappropriate in that particular context, and it's certainly unpopular, but it's not inherently objectionable. He's pointed at real problems and called on God to judge injustice. I'm all for that, and you should be too.
I saw various YouTube clips of the sermon that got everyone all hot-and-bothered, and my first thought was, "Huh, that's a bit strong on the race angle." That's it. I was kind of taken aback by the commentary afterwards. It's like the culture, particularly the political culture, refuses to countenance the idea of a preacher saying that God will judge the wicked if he happens to be pointing at us.
The upshot of thinking that all people are sinful is that this sort of talk stops being terribly problematic. I'd have been much happier with Obama's speech if he'd denounced the racial divisions Wright seems to be championing while affirming the concept behind them: God will judge injustice, and America, like any other nation, will be judged accordingly. Now that would have taken balls.
I don't think it needs any introduction at this point. I've read it twice now, and both times I was impressed by the style while somehow feeling... unsatisfied. But after hitting the 'net for commentary, I figured out why. Obama is as liberal as the day is long, and though I did like his acknowledgment of resentment on both sides of the racial divide, his rallying cry "is essentially left-wing, with whites and blacks joining hands to raise taxes and government spending, while uniting against their common enemy, the wicked axis of corporations, lobbyists and special interests." Or, as Douthat quotes Andrew Ferguson, "'America is a fetid sewer whose most glorious days lie just ahead, thanks to the endless ranks of pathetic losers who make it a beacon of hope to all mankind.'"
What left me cold here is the assumption underlying Obama's entire speech: people caused this problem, but government can fix it. It just ain't so. But as Douthat says elsewhere, "[H]e isn't trying to win over the gang at the Corner, or movement conservatives more generally; he's trying to win over those voters (and writers) who sometimes think that conservatives make a lot of sense, but whose ideological commitments are ultimately malleable. So of course if you're an ideological conservative you don't like what you hear from him; he's talking to everybody else, but not to you."
I don't really associate myself with ideological conservatism or consider myself a "movement conservative," and haven't for quite some time. If college sent me towards the center, law school as firmly entrenched me there. But I am still committed to the idea that people are broken in ways that more government won't fix. Speeches, government interventions, and billions squandered won't ever stop people from making stupid choices, and though I will insist that history has given certain groups of people a really raw deal, I will also insist that present choices are at least as important.
Obama doesn't really seem to have room for that, believing instead that people are basically okay, that resentments and divisions are undesirable but understandable and resolvable, and that sufficiently good policies will inevitably generate a "just" society. I don't believe any of those things. Quite the opposite, I believe those beliefs are dangerous. I believe that people persistently act in irrational, unpredictable, and self-destructive ways and that any responsible policymaker should assume those things instead of denying them.
So it isn't really The Speech that bothers me about Obama. As John Stewart put it best, this is the first time a politician has addressed the American people on the issue of race as if we're adults. We need more of that, and I have the utmost respect for Obama for doing what he did yesterday. But I have fundamental disagreements with him on very fundamental issues, and liking his take on discourse and method doesn't make those go away.
The NYT is reporting on an apparently growing trend of hipster-types in Williamsburg et al ditching the city and starting small farms in the surrounding countryside. The farms started are organic, unsurprisingly, and they target the premium markets of nearby urban areas.
Small family farms--particularly in the northeast--have been going out of business for years, because agribusiness is really the only way to make money on conventional agricultural products. Sure, there are a lot of old-school farms still around, but success at farming has always depended on luck far more than other forms of making a living, and I'd bet that most farms are only one or two really bad years away from folding up. For example, it would not surprise me at all of the persistent drought in the southeast leads to the shuttering of hundreds of small farming operations.
The reason these young 'uns can make a living at this is because they aren't directly competing with agribusiness (leaving aside for the moment that most "organic" brands are actually owned and operated by major food processors). They're producing small quantities of high-priced goods for rich people, whereas your typical farmer produces small quantities of insufficiently-low priced goods, tending to put him out of business. Let's not pretend that this actually has the potential for a large-scale reformation of American agricultural consumption; what they're doing doesn't really scale, as production per acre has got to be way lower than more modern ways of doing this. But if catering to rich markets is the only way of small farms making a go of it, I think that's a transformation worth making for the aesthetic benefits of keeping small farms around.
I've spent the past two days really digging in to primary documents for a paper I'm writing as a directed reading. I've gotten a lot of work done; locating 18th-century state session laws is a huge pain, especially when they aren't cited properly. But I managed to locate everything I was looking for, and got through most of the 19th-century treatises I found.
The problem? My thesis is more or less shot, because an idea I didn't think showed up until 1954 in Mazer v. Stein is at least tangentially present in New England state laws as early as 1783, and explicitly present by 1842 (in Britain anyways).
Damn.