AN OPEN LETTER TO PAUL KRUGMAN -- YOU KEEP KICKING THE WRONG CAN DOWN THE ROAD!

 AN OPEN LETTER TO PAUL KRUGMAN – YOU KEEP KICKING THE WRONG CAN DOWN THE ROAD!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 17, 2011

As always, on my daily walk I let the gods visit me, what I call my muses, and let them play with my conscious mind, as they will.   

After spending the past couple of weeks in the Balkans, and seeing the sights and talking to people in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary, people seemed to coalesce despite rather than because of their leaders.  Too often they faced disappointment, so they developed a moral center and a reliable compass to chart their destiny.    

No people on this globe, Somalia and Ethiopia notwithstanding, have suffered more and resurrected themselves more often over the past 6,000 years.   

I felt their passion, strength and resolute spirit in an Orthodox Christianity or Roman Catholic faith.  Yes, they war against each other, and have had a tempestuous recent history.  Serbian war criminals, for example, are on the dock in The Hague for such conflicts.  The people still cling to their history. 

So long isolated from the rest of Europe, there is not the tourist exploitation.  I wasn’t hassled in a single shop or kiosk when purchasing an item, or overcharged.  

While the cultural roots of the Balkans have changed little, ours have changed dramatically.  It is not a Democrat or Republican problem, not a liberal or conservative solution that currently escapes us.  It is our ignorance of our basic demographic, geographic and personality profiles.  They have changed radically over the past sixty years, and yet are being ignored.

DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE

Another stimulus package would not put Americans back to work.  Another $ trillion stimulus package would not solve the problem.  Why?

The FDR mindset is not relevant today.  FDR’s National Recovery Act (NRC) was later found unconstitutional.  The Works Project Administration (WPA), however, did turn hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers into employed workers building bridges, highways, recreational stadiums, schools, hospitals, parks and dams.  My da was a WPA employee, and glad to have the job.  He had a seventh grade education.

Demographically, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, only 10 percent of Americans had four-year high school diplomas, and 2 percent had four-year college degrees.  Examine the curriculums of high school and college courses of the 1920s and 1930s, and you can see it was no walk in the park, as it is today.

Today, demographically, nearly 90 percent of all Americans have attended high school and are likely to have some college with more than 60 percent with four-year college degrees, many of them with professional credentials such as engineering, chemistry, nursing, biology and psychology.

Were we to launch a $ trillion stimulus package for jobs, nine out of ten would lack the skills, energy, inclination or humility to perform such menial tasks typical of the 1930's.  We would have to import indentured workers from Mexico and abroad to do the manual labor. 

PERSONALITY PROFILE

It is easy to forget that we have had a sixty-year inculcation of non-consequential behavior that has created a workforce from the top to the bottom, be those employed millionaires or those living off the dole, of workers with learned helplessness and an inclination to complain rather than contribute. 

Baby boomers inaugurated the spoiled brat genre of workers suspended in terminal adolescent with hardly an adult among them.  Subsequent generations -- called Yuppie or X or Y or whatever generations  -- have reified immaturity into a national work habit.  We see this juvenile behavior everyday in Congress, and yet act surprised.

This personality profile is so endemic to our society that it is not noticed, as it is hard to separate what is observed from one’s own behavior.   

We have become a cosmetic culture of not only superficial persona dedicated to instant gratification, but with a predilection to instant and simplistic resolution of our problems.  Consequently, often the problems we solve are not the problems we face.

An army of attractive talking heads, academics, intellectuals, actors and actresses, pundits and problem solvers parade across our consciousness numbing our minds from awareness of the damage done. 

So mesmerizing is this constant barrage that we unconsciously come to mimic the play by creating our own theatre of numbness on Facebook, Linkin, and other Internet outlets, giving them the collective euphemistic tag of social connection, when they are neither social nor connecting in a face-to-face context, but substitutes to conflict management and confrontation engagement.   

We use the remote to change channels on our televisions.  Now, remote has become characteristic of our personality. 

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, there were few if any remedial institutions such as community colleges.  If you didn’t get it the first time, there were few chances for reruns.  Now life is nothing but reruns.  Community colleges have become essentially fifth year high schools designed to prepare students for college when high school failed the assignment.

After WWII, someone came up with the idea that everyone should have access to a college education irrespective of their interest in ideas, much less reading books, attending lectures, taking tests or sitting on their behinds for four or more years. 

Many people like to do things.  They like to see how things work, and to use their hands and minds to work out the mysteries of mechanical things.  Failing to give craftsmanship its due, we see sixty years later that we don’t have enough plumbers, pipe fitters, electricians and technicians, carpenters and bricklayers, landscapers and tailors, bakers and cooks. 

The dignity of work has been prostituted into the idea that only moving symbols around constitute work of real value.  We are now stuck with the results of that preoccupation.  Many, like me, have to hire the simplest job to be done because of a lack of skill. 

GEOGRAPHIC PROFILE

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, we were still basically an agrarian society with four out of five workers in farming or allied to farming in some tangential way.  WWII gave rise to the United States becoming a manufacturing society, but even then we applauded ourselves for making things quickly and cheaply.  Little did we know that would haunt us come the 1960’s and 1970’s.  We manufactured what we liked, and let the world know they could take it or leave it.  Hubris and vanity drove manufacturing, and ultimately over the cliff.

The war saw a shift from the farm into the city with women moving from the home into the factory.  The United States, untouched by devastation, took advantage of the situation continuing to produce at the maddening pace in peacetime that it had developed during the war, as the world was its willing customer. 

Like many of my generation, coming of age during WWII, I was the first in my family to receive a college education.  Moreover, I reaped the advantages of the times, soaring in my career, but always as an outsider.  The frenzy never made sense to me, or the drive to keep up with the Joneses.  Nor did I embrace the compare and compete formula of excess that became our national mantra. 

My humble roots have always been my anchors as an executive, living in such diverse places as Europe and South Africa, working in South America and across the United States.  I witnessed our geographic profile changing first hand with a foot in the past and one in the future. 

People of the right and left, liberal and conservative are finally coming down to earth after a sixty-year hiatus.  It may not be registering too strongly, but there is a growing sense we have been duped, not by invasions of Huns, Romans, Nazis and Soviets, as in the case of the people of the Balkans, but by our passivity and self-conscious abdication of responsibility to manage change.  We looked to others to do it for us.

It is starting to permeate our consciousness that rhetoric is not reality and that excess is a terminal disease.  The Tea Party is an expression of frustration.  It is not the answer but should be understood not to be the problem.  It is a clumsy attempt to leave our social lethargy behind, and should not be faulted for that.

THE QUANDARY OF THE UNEMPLOYED AND THE 99-WEEKERS

Since unemployment won’t end anytime soon, there has to be more thoughtful approaches as to how to get 90 to 95 percent of those currently on the unemployment roles to do some kind of work for the benefits accrued of up to $250 per week for 99-weeks.  I suspect that this would be better for the country and for the 99-weekers as well.  They could be: 

(1) Babysitters for working mothers.

(2) Janitors for schools, churches, office complexes, factories, and warehouses.

(3) Night watchmen and security guards for public and private buildings.

(4) Dishwashers and clean-up people for restaurants and school cafeterias.

(5) Maids for hospitals, schools, churches, motels, hotels, and homes of invalids.

(6) Gardeners and lawn maintenance workers for schools, churches, and public properties.

(7) Reading of books at schools, libraries, and public offices.

(8) Companions for invalids by reading and listening and socializing with them.

(9) Picking up trash along streets and roads, and interstate roadways.

(10)Driving people from place to place.

99-weekers have to pay taxes on their earnings.  There might be some formula devised to reduce these taxes as an incentive to do these jobs.  This is not a definitive list of possibilities, but a beginning.  True, worker compensation is something that workers pay into, but unlikely to the tune of $18,000 or more for most. 

People of your stature, with a direct line to power, could look at our problems more compellingly, in my view, if you would take into account how drastically we have changed in terms of demographic, geographic and personality profiles.  The American mind of the times has little to do with the FDR model, or even the Reagan model come to think of it.

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