Average Isn't Good Enough

Pew Research called this one of their most striking findings of 2014.

The graphic really does put things in perspective.  But we shouldn't be surprised.  Three years ago, Tom Friedman wrote in the New York Times that "the age of average is over."  As Friedman writes:

"Today, employers have access to cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation.  The only way for the individual to succeed is to find their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment.”

The unemployment rates listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Americans over 25 years old make the Pew findings even starker: those with less than a high school degree are unemployed at a rate of 13.4%; those with a high school degree and no college, 8.3%; those with some college or associate degree, 7.7 %; those with bachelor’s degree, 4.5%, Master’s degree, 3.5%, and a doctorate, 2.5%.  The thing is, we are now competing for jobs not just with other people in our respective cities, but with people in Thailand, Norway, Australia, Russia, South Africa, the globe.

Of course, the earnings gap that Pew refers to is just one of the problems.  There have been abundant studies tying poor education to crime rates, family dysfunction, and a host of other societal ills. This is why education - for everyone - must be a top national priority, as important to us as defense spending.  How are kids going to have something "unique" to contribute if we as a nation are content to offer them, at best, an average education?

Average isn't good enough. If we believe in American exceptionalism and wish to preserve it, we must be concerned about the education of all children, not just our own.

The ER Shouldn't be About Convenience

I've been seeing more of these bill boards advertising wait times (or the lack thereof) at hospital emergency rooms.  I worry that these signs are portraying the ER as a place for one to access care immediately, and that's not what it's supposed to be.  An ER is just that - a place for emergency care.  For care that is urgent or necessary but not an emergency, the ER is an inappropriate place to get that care from both a cost and results perspective, not to mention the delays it might cause for people who truly have an emergency.  And yet use of the ER  has continued to increase, to approximately 134 million annual visits.

Hospitals may want to re-think the use of these signs.  The last thing we want to do is encourage even more use of the ER as a place to receive basic or primary care.  Our culture of convenience has already created lots of bad habits.  If we're concerned about resources and outcomes, we should avoid adding the emergency department to our addiction for expedience.

How Much is it Worth to You?

I got into an interesting Twitter exchange yesterday with Mark Reardon of KMOX.  He was upset that the new Manager for the Ferguson Commission was being paid $138,915.  Set aside whether one thinks that salary is appropriate for this particular job.  The issue I tried to raise with Mark is the knee-jerk reaction that if a non-profit person is paid well, it is a waste of resources (see also my post on this blog, “In Search of Sustainability”).  I don’t see anyone reacting that way when a corporate executive gets a large compensation package (much larger than you’re ever likely to see at any non-profit).  But when I said that to Mark, he scoffed.

 

Why?  If a corporate CEO is paid $10 million and the company delivers gains to shareholders, no one complains; in fact, the CEO is very likely to receive an increase in compensation.  So why do we so often react negatively if a non-profit professional is paid $100,000 to help solve an intractable problem?  That makes no sense to me.

No one would think of asking the CEO of a major U.S. company to accept $60,518 per year (the median salary of a non-profit ED in the U.S.) to run her organization.  Well, how much should we pay people who are tackling racism?  Or poverty?  Or homelessness?

The exact number isn’t important to me: the devaluation of non-profit professionals is. Surely the alleviation of poverty is at least as important as the release of the newest gadget. If so, that means holding non-profit professionals in the same esteem as their corporate counterparts and, like the for-profit sector at its best, compensating them well when they show results. At the end of the day, a person should not have to be put in the position of choosing between dedicating her talents to creating social good and having the resources to provide for her family.

Our Land of Many Languages

It's almost time for the Super Bowl again, and neither of my home teams - the Bucs from Tampa where I was born, and the Rams from St. Louis which has become my home - will be playing in the game.  But the thought made me remember a speech I gave shortly after the 2014 Super Bowl on behalf of the University of Missouri - St. Louis for their ceremony honoring high school juniors who excelled in the study of foreign languages.

In my remarks, I made reference to the Coke commercial during the Super Bowl that featured people singing America the Beautiful in multiple languages.  There was quite a backlash after it aired, lots of people were really upset that an American song was being sung in a language other than English.  To a certain extent, that was not surprising.  There has always been intense pressure in our country to assimilate, and language is an especially useful tool for that to occur.  To a certain degree, assimilation is a good thing.  For a national identity to form, for a country to hold together, most of the people in the country have to generally agree on core values and principals, about how you work together to get things done.  But we are being short sighted when that pressure extends to extinguishing the speaking of other languages.  In fact, we are ignoring our own history.  As early as 1664, when the colony of New Netherland was acquired by the British, eighteen different languages were spoken on Manhattan Island.  That doesn’t even take into account the Native American tongues which numbered more than 500 in North America at the time.  In fact, some linguists believe that the United States has been the home of more bilinguals than any other nation in world history.  This is one of the reasons that our Constitution does not speak about an official language.  The researcher D.F. Marshall wrote that, “The Founding Fathers of our country did not choose to have an official language precisely because they felt language to be a matter of individual choice.”

This attitude largely held sway in the U.S. until the time of the First World War when fear about all things German and, by extension, foreign influence led to many state rules about using only English.  And while we have resisted any national policy about an official language, that change in attitude has had an effect. In the most recent numbers I could find, less that 20% of the U.S. population is bilingual.  Compare that to 53% of Europeans who speak at least two languages.  That’s sad.  Speaking another language allows you to connect with a wider range of people and better understand a culture.

It's also good for our country. Donna Kimmel, the senior vice president of global human resources for Sensata Technologies, the world’s number one supplier of sensors and controls, says, “The United States is not well prepared for a 21st–century world in which economic competitiveness is central to our security and well-being.”  To reverse that, she says, “We need people with a global mindset, and a global mindset comes from stepping into a new area and learning a new language.” George Voinovich, the former Senator from Ohio, stated that, “Without foreign language skills and cultural knowledge, businesses face greater difficulties in exporting to overseas markets and competing against foreign-owned firms.”  Given that almost a third of the U.S. economy is connected to international trade, you can see how important it is for our country that we have more multi-language speakers.

On top of all of this, there is increasing evidence of non-linguistic benefits as well.  Studies are now showing that being bilingual makes you smarter by having a profound effect on your brain and improving cognitive skills not related to language.  As pointed out by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in the New York Times, the collective evidence from a number of studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind, like when you remember directions for how to get from one place to another.

The bottom line is that the last thing we should be doing is telling people just to speak English. Our country has always been a land of many languages and we should encourage our children to continue that tradition, adding their our own voices to those that have come before, using the languages they learn to add richness to their lives and build a better future for themselves.