Lin Marklin
EDT 6460
Due March 18, 2006
lin.m.marklin@wmich.edu

Assignment VI – Understanding “Compassionate Flatism” (100 points)

My Rank Ordering of Friedman’s Original Ideas

1. Parenting

2. Leadership

3. Muscle Building

4. Wage insurance

5. Social Activism

My Revision to and Rank Ordering of Friedman’s Ideas

1. Parenting
2. Education – in a category by itself but adapted to include wage insurance
3. Leadership – adjusted to include social activism as a subcategory
4. Muscle Building

Explanations of Revisions and Rank Ordering

Parenting

This is a number one focus because good parenting is the key to overcoming the sense of entitlement possessed by most in the Millennial generation and many at the younger edge of Generation X. I agree with Friedman when he says that “the sense of entitlement, the sense that delayed gratification is a punishment worse than a spanking, the sense that our kids have to be swaddled in cotton wool so that nothing bad or disappointing or stressful ever happens to them at school is, quite simply, a growing cancer on American society. And if we don't start to reverse it, our kids are going to be in for a huge and socially disruptive shock from the flat world.” It seems that over the past few decades more and more of the responsibilities of parenting have been pushed onto the school systems, and this will never work.

Parents, especially middle class parents, need to encourage their children and to model a work ethic that instills a drive to succeed in their children. I do not care what our children pursue vocationally, but I do care that many young adults are not really trying to succeed professionally. All parents “need to know in what world their kids are growing up and what it will take for them to thrive.” Parents need to give kids the tools to succeed instead of making life easy for the. “Helping individuals adapt to a flat world. . . is also the job of parents.” Most families in American have either two working parents or are headed by a single parent who works. As a result, it seems that at times our children are parenting themselves and each other. This needs to change.

Friedman argues convincingly regarding the need for parents to actively help their children learn to thrive within the new global playing field. “The flattening of the world is moving ahead a pace . . . nothing is going to stop it. But what can happen is a decline in our standard of living, if more Americans are not empowered and educated to participate in a world where all the knowledge centers are being connected.” These words do not need to strike fear in the hearts of parents. Instead they need to inspire parents to do a better job of parenting. “We have within our society all the ingredients for American individuals to thrive in this world, but if we squander those ingredients, we will stagnate.”

Education – adapted to include wage insurance

Education needs to be a category of its own. Education is currently in crisis right now, and this is especially true of higher education. Friedman states “that government has another critical role to play -- in education. . . make tertiary education, if not compulsory, then government-subsidized for at least two years, whether it is at a state university, a community college, or a technical school. Currently the cost of higher education is preventing some students from even considering college. This cost is obscene. I am not asking for a cut in the salaries of professors, but I am asking for government to allocate monies to institutions of higher education so those institutions can reduce tuition costs. I have heard statistics that in the 1980’s the state contribution for higher education was 78 cents for every dollar spent while today it is 23 cents for every dollar spent. This discrepancy needs to be rectified.

Higher education must be made more affordable because as Freidman says, “tertiary education is more critical the flatter the world gets, because technology will be churning old jobs, and spawning new, more complex ones, much faster than during the transition from the agricultural economy to the industrial one.” The G.I Bill after WWII made education available to an entire class of individuals who might never have gone to college. The result was a much higher percentage of college educated Americans who could then meet the scientific and technology challenges of the Cold War and the space race challenges

Investments in higher education benefit all aspects of the American economy. A college education “Produces more people with the skills to claim higher-value-added work in the new niches. And two, it shrinks the pool of people able to do lower-skilled work [and]…helps to stabilize their wages. Government spending on training and education after higher school is an investment in our future, and this is an investment we as a county must make. This shift in the focus of our spending is imperative, and it is for this reason that education deserves its own category.

Wage insurance that Friedman originally put in the category of cushioning with good fat is part of my category of wage insurance. The program described by Friedman would encourage retraining. Retraining can reduce dependency and inhibit a familial cycle of dependency. The idea of wage insurance the way Freidman describes it will provide a cushion for worker whose jobs have been outsourced AND who are willing to be retrained. The retraining portion is key, and in order for retraining to occur, government needs to seriously subsidize education.

Leadership

Leadership is a very close third in this list, and originally, I had it listed before education, but in the end I ranked education second. With reagard to leadership, Americans needs visionaries to get us fired up. Freidman argues “we have to dig into ourselves. Getting our society up to speed for a flat world is going to be extremely painstaking. We are going to have to start doing a lot of things differently.” Friedman’s also states that we need leadership that inspires a total American buy-in to investing in the development of new technologies similar to what President Kennedy accomplished in getting America fired up for the space race. Bush’s program to build a research base on the moon is lame when compared to Kennedy’s plan.

I agree with Friedman when he says that America needs “a president who can summon the nation to get smarter and study harder in science, math, and engineering in order to reach the new frontiers of knowledge that the flat world is rapidly opening up and pushing out.” Bush is not that president. Bush is perceived as being a bumbling non-academic. He is not qualified to leader the call for a smarter American. President Clinton had the required intellect and the charisma of Kennedy. Perhaps Hillary will win the presidency and Bill as First Gentleman can team with her to develop and sell a “comprehensive, energetic, and focused a response.”

We need elected officials who understand the challenges that a flat world poses to Americans and who are able to develop a comprehensive vision of action that every-day Americans can buy into. The dilemma is that many national level politicians do not have a clue about the flat world because most of them are trained as lawyers and not as scientists. It is not realistic or even desirable to “require all politicians to hold engineering degrees, but it would be helpful if they had a basic understanding of the forces that are flattening the world, were able to educate constituents about them and galvanize a response.”

Social Activism needs to be a part of leadership and not a category onto itself because corporate self-enlightenment is not reliable. An increase in the spirit of corporate social activism sounds great, but is no a fail-safe because ultimately businesses depend on their bottom line. It is not realistic to depend on Friedman idea the global corporations will fair standards for environment and labor because of enlightened self-interest (i.e. angry customers will stop buying their product.) This reliance on corporate altruistic behavior cannot replace government regulation.

Muscle Building

Of all the items discussed in the category of muscle building, immigration is the most important. America can best adapt to the flat world by focusing encouraging the immigration of highly educated people. “If we can cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world, it will always end up a net plus for America.”

The immigration problem in our country needs to be comprehensively addressed. Once the problem of low-skilled immigrants is addressed, it will be politically possible to focus on program that attract and retain high-skilled immigrants. We need a national policy that encourages foreign born scholars to become American citizens. ”Most of the Indian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Iranian, Arab, and Israeli engineers, physicists, and scientists who come to work or study in the United States make great citizens. They are family-oriented, educated, and hardworking, and most would jump at the chance to become an American.” The use of highly motivated and highly skilled immigrants is a core component of America’s history, and these immigrants have played a key role in America’s rise to superpower status. I agree with Freidman when he proposes “an immigration policy that gives a five-year work visa to any foreign student who completes a Ph.D. at an accredited American university in any subject. I don't care if it is Greek mythology or mathematics.” Modern American society was built by motivated immigrants, and we can reverse the current education gap by importing foreign intelligentsia, much like what happened in the mid 1990’s

Also mentioned under muscle building is the important of enabling lifetime employability current citizens, an idea that encompasses portable health care and pension benefits, Lifetime employability requires . . . government and companies providing the tools to make [individual] more lifetime employable." In the new flat world, there will no longer be lifetime employment. Employees will be “responsible for managing his or her own career, risks, and economic security, and the job of government and business is to help workers build the necessary muscles to do that.” Worker need the security of portable medical insurance and retirement plans to “be willing and able to jump into the new industries and new job niches spawned by the flat world and to move from dying companies to thriving companies.” Cobra coverage has partially addressed this problem, and the emergence of 401k and 403b retirement plans have partially addressed these challenges of the 21^st century work place. But more need to be done. Universal access to medical insurance and portable retirement plans are important ideas for keeping America strong and competitive in the world economy.

Resources

Friedman, T. L. (2005) THE WORLD IS FLAT: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.