Regrets? I’ve Got a Few. But then again. . .
Michael Krasny just hosted my first radio interview, now available on-line courtesy of San Francisco’s KQED. Other than blanking on the name “Creative Commons,” I think it went okay (though perhaps I should wait to hear from others before making such an assessment).
Of course, I blew a softball for a good closing. A satellite radio listener from West Virginia opposed the notion of government programs for assistance, citing his own success at reorienting himself. I said that I hoped that all Americans were as capable as he, but that I doubted it. Bad response. I came off like an advocate for large government programs (even though I stressed that the government’s job was to ensure that such programs existed, rather than to provide them directly).
I should have taken the opportunity to rally folks around the free trade cause. CAFTA passed by only two votes. The forces of protectionism are strong because people are afraid. If we don’t do something to alleviate that fear, they will start to win—soon. Adjustment assistance is more than simply a societal obligation. It is a necessary strategic component in a free trade agenda. And above all, the design of effective adjustment assistance programs will force us to rethink our approaches to education, training, and employment.
That would have been the right closing.
Sigh. Next time . . .
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Comments:
Caught most of the show. I thought you did a good job presenting your ideas.
I think you fell a little short in advocating retraining as a way to help those left behind by changes. There is a plethora of government, etc. programs to retrain the unemployed. The most critical lack is a method or infrastructure to help people make a coherent choice of WHAT to train for.
Our current chaotic system makes it difficult for employers and job-seekers to meet. I’m not advocating for any such thing as central planning, but the current scheme for allocating skilled workers to employers needing those skills is enormously inefficient in time, money, and oportunity costs.
Absolutely right. The trick is to get the right program in place, not to have a program for the sake of having a program. It’s too easy to waste money on nonsensical “retraining” programs. The better bet is to harness the technology to combine matching, skill assessment, distance education, etc. People need to know what skills are needed and where.
The truth is that government assistance will likely be needed to get such a program running, but the private sector ought to be able to bear most of the burden.
The leading economy of the information age will be the one with the best educated, most mobile, most flexible workforce. The U.S. starts with tremendous advantages--but if we don’t use them, we’ll lose them.
I really enjoyed your appearance on Forum today, but I agree that you could’ve better countered the final caller’s suggestion that government retraining programs are not in our best interest.
Most of the people that subscribe to this idea, it seems, do so because they feel that their tax dollars are funding some freeloading, lazy class of people. What they don’t seem to be able to grasp is the idea that, if you retrain workers, tax revenue should increase because these newly trained workers will be earning—and spending—more.
If you don’t spend the tax dollars on retraining, you’ll likely end up spending it on welfare and medicaid programs. Either that or police and prisons.
I caught that part of the program too, and felt that the gentleman’s statement that the Marine Corps had paid for a third of his education counted to some degree as governmental assistance. Would that response not work simply because we believe the government has a greater responsibility to those in uniform?
Walter, Michael, and Sameer all make important points--points that I think I tied together better in writing than I did in my closing comment on the radio.
Modern society rests upon a combination of infrastructures. Roads, rails, airports, telecom lines, cables, etc. all let us move people, ideas, and bits around pretty quickly. The fundamental problem we face is that not everything moves at the same speed. Skills and jobs, in particular, take longer to relocate than do most other resources. But jobs and skills do move, and whatever mechanisms we have in place to facilitate that movement define our “human capital infrastructure.”
Many people would like to slow the flow of resources down to the speed of labor. Others, including my caller, believe that “natural market forces” will do the trick. But IMHO, infrastructure development usually needs a bit of a push and a certain amount of guidance before those natural forces can take over. (Can you say ARPANET? I thought you could).
Military personnel earn the assistance of the government; it’s part of the contract that we sign with them. But it remains government assistance nonetheless. (I remember choking when, in a debate with Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney described the part of his career in which his public sector reputation led him to become CEO of a defense contractor as requiring no government assistance.)
One way or another, “the public” ends up paying for infrastructure. It may pay explicitly to develop good infrastructures, it may accept inconvenience (e.g., digging up streets) to partner with the private sector, or it may pay in many implicit ways for failed infrastructure.
These possibilities frame our choices with respect to retraining. We can think about what we’re doing and launch public/private partnerships, or we can ignore it, let the chips fall where they may, and face the fallout. We already know what early fallout will bring: protectionism to lock-in dead end jobs. When that fails, things could really get ugly.
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