Tom Friedman: I Know A Guy

Oh hi blog!

Here I will refute Tom Friedman's latest Op-Ed, point by point, because he is an insufferable cosmically stupid man.

Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.

Tom Friedman: I know a guy. Sometimes when I'm in Washington (DC or the state - whichever!) mystery men come up to me and divulge information about what's going on that nobody else knows. That is why I, Tom Friedman, have an op-ed in the New York Times. Also, how about the construction of that second sentence, huh?

There’s something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.

The subprime mortgages had little to do with an ethical breakdown, and had a hell of a lot more to do with a bubble-fueled economy, that, as a result, is drive by periods of increasing volatility. Nobody was talking about ethics when the housing bubble was being inflated, Tom. I mean, I hope you're not seriously suggesting that it was some shadowy unscrupulous bankers that had a sudden realization that if they just started acting unethically then everybody would be rich. But I think you may be suggesting just that.

And then, what's the logical fallacy where you just take two events and you say, "here, these are two things that happened at the same time. They are related." I don't remember either, but it doesn't make any sense.

Also, by "open borders" what he really means to say is "labor is dirt cheap outside of the US and so is transportation costs. Let's move production there." Or you can go with the flowery bullshit of open borders; your choice. But that doesn't even answer the question of WHY people are able to compete for formerly American middle class jobs. Well, because you don't need to be terribly educated or specialized to do most jobs because of technology! It's true! Let's hope this realization doesn't come back to bite him in the... oh Tom, you're in for a rough one.

In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.

Well, that and shadow banking arms of legitimate financial corporations told us we could have that dream, too, to be fair. Otherwise, he's right with this paragraph. Still has nothing to do with education though.

A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.

This is what I like to call: Ignoring History's Minor Inconveniences (trademark forthcoming)

1960s: It all exploded with a credit crunch
1970s: It all exploded due to oil prices and stagflation
1980s: It all exploded due to Leveraged Buyouts and other corporate raiders
1990s: It all exploded with the Savings and Loan scandals
1990s: (twofer!) It all exploded when people realized pets.com was not actually worth 800 billion dollars
2000s: It all exploded due to a mortgage meltdown

AND

1960s-2000s: American education, by certain metrics in certain populations, is losing ground, comparatively.

Again I stress: the two sides of the "AND" have not a whit to do with each other. Our public schools have been in desperate need of revamps and overhauls and some less profoundly stupid ideas like tying public school funding to property taxes. You've read Jonathan Kozol, right? Good.

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

Wait, I thought he went to a talk by Rhee? When is Rhee going to make an appearance?

1. Worker's global competitiveness, due to needing less education, expertise, or specialization, all comes down to where production can be made most cheaply. This is often not in the US. Middle and bottom ranges, especially. Fine, everybody get's a masters degree in Freakonomics: it will still be cheaper to manufacture car parts in Mexico.

2. We borrowed and consumed on houses we thought were worth what banks said they were worth. Which, OK, we should have known better. But consumer debt and the instability of finance has driven the American economy now for 50 years. President Obama said credit is the lifeblood of the economy, completely unironically, and nobody batted an eye. In other words, this isn't anything new.

3. The fact that real income is tied into the inherent instability of the world of finance means that indeed we need more education. Not Friedman's techno-utopian bullshit idea, but an education on how to stop this disgusting world of finance.

This problem will be reversed only when the decline in worker competitiveness reverses — when we create enough new jobs and educated workers that are worth, say, $40-an-hour compared with the global alternatives. If we don’t, there’s no telling how “jobless” this recovery will be.

Every recovery since the 70s is jobless. The whole point of having the Fed intervene as the lender of last resort is to restabilize the economy, not make jobs. So again, Tom talks about two events that have little to do with each other. A simple flow chart:

Should we create new jobs? ------> Yes --------> OK let's figure out what to produce

Is this a jobless recovery? ------> Of course, what a stupid question, we were talking about how to make jobs just now, so kindly butt out.

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

Tom Friedman: still has friends. Still waiting to hear from Rhee, too.

1. Well this is exciting. People who go to work to do work get fired. People who figure out new ways to pad billable hours to get a bunch more money for the law firm: this is apparently Tom Friedman's bright future.

2. New service, new opportunities: these are what drove i-bankers to invent CDOs, CDSs, and other sorts of exotic derivative securities. What could possibly go wrong there?

3. Making a colonial India reference, I see. Tom isn't good with these kinds of things. These people are the new caste of society that people won't deal with.... why, wait, I take it back, that's the smartest thing Friedman has ever said! I can't wait to spit on a banker!

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.

At this point, I've given up on hearing from Rhee. It just wasn't meant to be.

Also, here is this hilariously stupid paragraph in a nutshell: Are you unemployed? Put on your creative thinking cap and become a person that can't be fired from the job you don't have! What do you mean there are no jobs? INNOVATE, SON! Also, thanks for the examples, Tom! This whole assortment of words boils down to: Reach for the stars! Do businessy sounding buzzwords! Creatovate!

I just made that word up! I'm UNTOUCHABLE! Elliot Ness motherfucker! Wait, no, the other kind?

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

The top half of the top half and the bottom half of the top half oh for God's sake Katz, some expert you are!

So maybe you're a person who is with me until now. And good. But we may part ways here, because I'm gonna go full-Marxist. The whole point of production is to minimize time and space (they are probably the same thing). You also want to flatten the level of education and expertise needed to do any given thing. So we are in a paradox now. We do what Katz wants and find ways to propel the capital machine, which will then further lead to the de-skilling of jobs. Then we'll come back and have this same talk again with an even bleaker outlook. That's how the system works, and the proposed solution seems to be saying to speed it up. It's mindboggling!

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

This... is the same paragraph as above, except with shoe salespeople. Whatever.

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Oh yeah, there's a long rich history of people waiting to be selected for the sweet life of an assembly-line worker. No wait there's a long rich history of labor unions with their collective power, getting a quality of life standard that affirmed the dignity of that labor and so assembly-line workers could be rightfully proud of what they did and have a good material life!

But at the end of the day, you just have to be ice cream. Also, with the vanilla thing, he has introduced a sexual connotation into this metaphor. A quick metaphor sidebar recap:

Untouchables: G-Men or anti-Brahmins?
Vanilla: your work flavor. Also possibly your sexual prowess
Ice cream: how to sell yourself to get a job

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

THERE NEVER WERE ANY GOOD OLD DAYS.