We live in a time of tumultuous change. We will be required to adapt. This will be costly in economic and human terms. One study by McKinsey predicts a third of exiting jobs will be performed by machines by 2030. Another from Oxford suggests the number could be as high as 47% by 2040. Climate change will require immense and costly responses to minimize dramatic changes affecting whole populations.
Communitarian actions will be required of government and nations, yet we appear to be trapped in an outmoded binary politics that boils down to a game of winner take all. Instead of acting in the common good, parties seek to redistribute wealth to benefit their partisans. Democrats want to dun business and the prosperous to aid the old, infirm and impoverished. Republicans want to shrink government by cutting aid to the recipients of its services and defanging its regulations in order to benefit the already well-off.
Neither of these kneejerk agendas speaks to the issues ahead. To adapt we must innovate, and to innovate we must invest in human capital, research and development, and infrastructure while protecting the casualties of the creative destruction ahead. The change from an agrarian to an industrial economy was so brutal that it eventually called forth the ameliorating response of the Progressive Era. The Great Depression with unprecedented 25% unemployment necessitated a more humane New Deal. The far larger changes promised by climate change and AI will create storms even harder to weather.
Presently, however, Nero tweets while multiple firestorms accelerate. One obvious need is investment in an education system that is adapted to 21st century needs. It isn’t happening, nether to prepare the young nor to help mid-career workers adapt to dislocation.
Recent Pew research shows the depth of the problem. Since the beginning of the Great Recession n 2008, how many states do you suppose have increased education spending? Three. The other 47 have stood still or cut back on the surest way to prepare for the future and recover middle class prosperity. In fact, in the last ten years, state spending on education has declined by $5.7 billion while enrollment has increased by 800,000.
Much of this is the legacy of the Great Recession’s vicious circle. Business weakness produces lost jobs and wages, which means smaller tax revenues which means less money to pay for schools and other social goods.
The Trump administration is now seeking to exacerbate the problem by slashing budgets for government departments that provide the grants that fund research in universities, NIH, CDC, Agriculture, Energy. Its tax plans also seek to eliminate funding for private colleges, aid for students and the like.
Once the country was unanimous in regarding education as a social good. Public schools for all, land grant colleges, state colleges, teachers’ colleges, private schools, the GI Bill all combined to fuel our rise in the last century. And the Cold War’s technical competition with our rivals made spending on math, science and engineering education a patriotic duty.
Today, when immense technological, economic and social challenges make an educated populace more vital than ever, we are flinching. Teachers with STEM skills can earn more in the private sector than as teachers. Rigor is out of fashion. Parents, legislators, prelates and pressure groups all want to exercise a veto on what can be taught.
Seventy-two percent of Democratic voters still believe colleges and universities have “a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.” But fifty-eight percent of Republican believe institutions of higher education have a negative effect. And since they are in charge of the presidency and both houses of Congress, 32 state legislatures and 33 governorships, they have the power to hold the brains of your children and grandchildren hostage.
While we bicker among ourselves, or become stalled by gridlock and backward looking defeatist thinking, our relentless competitors forge ahead. Now that even Syria has joined the Paris Climate Accord, we are alone in opposing it. China and the Europeans are investing heavily in alternative energy, a category we once would have been expected to dominate. We are in thrall to the fossil fuel cabal.
While we abandon an Asia trade deal, China is forging alliances and opening markets we have ignored, with investment in Africa, for instance. While we neglect our domestic infrastructure, they are building and buying port facilities around the world and pushing bullet trains from Asia to Europe to revive the old Silk Road as an artery of world trade. At home they have poured more concrete in the last two years than we did in the last century. Part of that is catch up, but a look at their airports or train lines reveals we are the ones who will now have to come from behind.
The administration has undermined our attempts to maintain technological leadership by its xenophobic desire to tighten borders against those it deems undesirable, its steps to make it harder to obtain visas, and cutbacks in grants and funding for research. As a result, many foreign nationals are thinking twice about doing advanced study in America. China is responding by sponsoring 50 joint ventures in science and technology around the world to train thousands and curry brainpower that once would have gravitated to our shores.
If the rule of life is “adapt or die,” we appear to have a death wish. If the test of a successful advanced society is innovation fueled by education, and protection from the vagaries of markets by regulations and the counterbalance of a social safety net, we are earning failing grades.