A 4-pt. New Year's Resolution

Over X-mas an American friend from my Berlin days phoned, and in the course of our conversation informed me he had seen some stats that showed Americans’ IQs are 4 points lower than Germans, and he believes electing Donald Trump is proof positive.

            What can I say? Especially in the wake of the new tax bill passed just before Xmas. We know business has only one guiding principle—the bottom line. So who’s surprised he gave himself and real estate son-in-law big tax breaks? 

             Most things conspire against the difficult chore of cultivating critical intelligence.

             Three or 4 years ago I got a flat screen TV and Netflix, which I love.  When I left Denver in 1985-6, I got rid of my TV because I had begun to believe that sitcoms were making me stupid and advertising keeping me from thinking straight. Haven’t had TV since, but now that I have Netflix, I am beginning to wonder if it isn’t subtler.

            Nearly every evening, especially these long days when you can’t get outside and plant or paint or mow, I watch. Netflix is full of high quality documentaries—Get Me Roger Stone, The Civil War (Ken Burns), Walking with Destiny, and lots of history. The fiction is almost as good. Godless, a Western is tightly scripted, stars Michelle Dockery, and seems admirably realistic, at least in terms of the clothing, set and landscape. Loads of international films.

While it doesn’t feel as mindless as sitcoms, it does keep me from reading books. I keep up with the magazines I order, but I must wonder if I am not undermining myself.  Good place for a New Year’s Resolution, huh?

Let's Hear It for the Experts!

They had this “expert” on the radio the other day named Ilana Gershon. She's written a book called Down & Out in the New Economy: How People Find (Or Don’t Find) Work Today. She went on at great length about the “Neoliberals” and “Quitting Economy.”
That’s Gershon’s term for the work world, where the minute you land a job, you are already looking for another because you can pretty well count on being downsized or fired, so you need to be constantly on the prowl, networking, marketing, etc.
That certainly describes how workers must function in this economy. Ms. Gershon laid blame on the doorstep of the “Neolibs.” Oh, and she’s a college prof at Indiana U.
The real reason businesses can get, or more precisely refuse to give workers what they need is they have surfeit of them. In fact, 2 billion additional people on the planet, a lot of whom can get on a plane and go anywhere. Come here if they want.
According to the media, we are almost at full employment and salaries should be going up. Wonder of wonders, they never budge. Jobs just get more demanding, less secure and scarcer.

Any critical eye can see it is the world birthrate, immigration and technology (robots and computers doing more work) that configure the work world and blaming anybody (Who are Neolibs, anyway?) else is not very smart for a college prof.