Got Cooperation?

It’s very difficult to write the facts in this environment of hyper-critical political sensitivity.   They are quickly dismissed as a ploy to aggrandize or condemn another’s preferred party or candidate.  And it’s no wonder that this is true.  The economy is bad.  Times are tough.  And it feels good to blame our circumstances on someone.  Of course, that someone is the president and his administration.  From here it’s a short step to insisting that we replace them with another equally ineffective group.  

One of the main economic issues that consume lots of white space in newspapers and time on TV and radio is unemployment.  We so desperately want to hang this problem on a politician.  The Dems hang it on eight years of mishandled economic policies of the Bush administration.  The Repub’s lay it at the feet of Obama and his team who seem so out of touch with American’s of late.    

But for some reason I haven’t seen much in the media about how this problem is structural until recently.  From David Brooks, NY Times columnist, “Narayana Kocherlakota of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank calculates that if we had a normal match between the skills workers possess and the skills employers require, then the unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent, not 9.6 percent.”

Unemployment is a structural problem, as are many of our economic woes.  And many of them are due to the lack of any kind of coordinated national plan.  So although we have an excellent educational system, enormous financial power, tremendous industrial infrastructure, we don’t have a plan or the political cooperation to coordinate them for our mutual benefit. 

While we have the worst unemployment since the great depression, we have skilled jobs going unfilled.  We have vacancies in critical jobs because we haven’t coordinated the output of the educational system with the input needs of industry.  This is what a national plan could do for us.  But our economy is not based on cooperation; we love  competition.  And this has served us very well for over 200 years.  Maybe it’s time to take another look.  Because during our first 200 years we were not faced with the global competition that we now face, for instance the Chinese.  They send freighters filled with their goods to us and we send the freighters back empty.  Why?  Are they more productive than us?  No!  In fact, we can produce a ton of steel with 15 man hours while they need 150 for the same ton.  How then, do they compete so effectively?

That answer is another whole topic including controlling what goods can get into China and what can’t.  Unlike America, China doesn’t value fair trade practices.

The Japanese taught us this lesson when they took several of our industries hostage.  They didn’t do it by competing among themselves.  They coordinated their labor force skills with the needs of their industries.  And we all know how that story turned out.

We must coordinate our efforts or continue to fall behind other countries.  Unfortunately, certain elements of our national discourse has reduced this complex problem to emotional claims like, “that’s socialism”.  I respond, “that’s simplistic”.  We must stand together or fall on our individual faces.

Robert DeFilippis