Catching up: Globalization is a big deal and a big problem as recent elections in Europe and continuing consequences of previous ones, e.g., Trump and Brexit, amply demonstrate. Complaints about trade agreements loom large in U.S. media, but that's not the only story.
A recent issue of the Economist shows that the impact of globalization is local as well as global. Here is its take on the local conundrum:
Even as regional disparities widen, people are becoming less mobile.
The percentage of Americans who move across state lines each year has
fallen by half since the 1990s. The typical American is more footloose
than the average European, yet lives less than 30 kilometres from his
parents. Demographic shifts help explain this, including the rise in
two-earner households and the need to care for ageing family members.
But the bigger culprit is poor policies. Soaring housing costs in
prosperous cities keep newcomers out. In Europe a scarcity of social
housing leads people to hang on to cheap flats. In America the spread of
state-specific occupational licensing and government benefits punishes
those who move. The pension of a teacher who stays in the same state
could be twice as big as that of a teacher who moves mid-career.
Perversely,
policies to help the poor unintentionally exacerbate the plight of
left-behind places. Unemployment and health benefits enable the least
employable people to survive in struggling places when once they would
have had no choice but to move. Welfare makes capitalism less brutal for
individuals, but it perpetuates the problems where they live.
It seems to add up to a vicious circle. Is it?
Mobility of workers...I have mixed feelings about that. I feel that this vaunted mobility sometimes benefits the employers much more than the employees. Like a lot of people of our generation, my husband and I have lived through the turbulent job scenario of the '80s, 80's, and beyond. There were companies acquired by bigger companies, companies flipped to make money for stockholders and the big cheeses. Ownerships changed quickly, and it was hard to feel that you weren't just a chess piece on a big board. We have lived in 5 different towns in 2 states since we got married. Only twice were those moves something we wanted to do. You go where the work is. Then maybe get laid off or "riffed", or the company moves to a lower-cost location. It's very disruptive to families to pull up stakes again and again. Our state at one time had a tax-break and incentive program to get companies to locate here. Amazing how many companies milked that cow dry and then left. Thankfully for the past 22 years we have been able to stay in one place and life has been more stable.
ReplyDeleteI meant to type "80s, 90s, and beyond" above. Looks like I typed 80s twice.
DeleteIn the corporate world the essential problem is that there is a highly paid managerial, consultant class that is essential robbing corporations and employees to benefit the billionaire class.
DeleteWe should have hired Bernie, instead we hire a billionaire so that we could see each night what they are really like.
When are we going to have the revolution? Democracy is ending and being replaced by kings. Putin and Trump are kings.
Essentially this article is one of many that attempt to divert us from the real problems identified by Sanders and have us accept the liberal billionaire's vision of the world supported by Hilary.
DeleteThat vision says that it is all a complex technical problem that has to be tacked piece by piece. So we fiddle around with the details while the fortunes of the liberal billionaires continue to grow.
The basic difference between the liberal and the conservative billionaires is that the liberals try not to show their greed.
There is an advantage to moving if the market recognizes ones talents and occurs with a salary increase.
ReplyDeleteIn 1986 after a very successful six years as the Director of Planning and Evaluation of the largest community mental health center in Toledo I became Manager of Evaluation for the county mental health board which funded all the centers in Toledo. A potential increase in responsibility but only a small salary increase
My success was objective. We went in four years from a 2 million dollar budget to a 4 million dollar budget. What is more we also made up for the loss of one million in direct federal funding as that went to a block grant. Three million total.
How was that done? We were fortunate to have a state of the art information system (first on a main frame, then a mini computer). I told the staff we could make up the million dollars simply by giving better service. For example in the outpatient department there were many people who came in for only 1-3 sessions; national data indicated few receive any benefits. Make sure each client receives 6-9 sessions where national data indicated the most benefit was found.
However this could not have been done that without a CEO that created a wonderful “work hard, play hard” work culture. We had the best parties! Gini however was not CEO when I came. A very strong male hierarchy consisted of the CEO, followed by the Clinical Director followed by the Fiscal Director. At the bottom was Gini the “administrative assistant” who as an INTERN at the Mental Health Board had written the federal grant that got us almost 2 million dollar in funds and paid all our salaries!!!
When I came there the Black CEO of the substance abuse agency who chaired the minority advisory committee (he later became mayor of Toledo) at lunch expressed his appreciation that we were no longer sending them a “secretary” Of course I could not enlighten him of his blindness.
Two months after I arrived we had a retreat. I said we have a problem. Gini became Director of Planning. When the Financial Director resigned because of health, she became Director of Administration. When the Clinical Director was fired in a vain attempt by the CEO to save his neck, Gini became Director of Operations, then CEO when the board finally became responsible.
The whole transformation of this agency took place through losing the top three people, with only one new hire (a fiscal officer). The new clinical director was a promotion. I was utterly amazed as this unfolded. We deserved a case study by the Harvard Business School. There must be some lessons here!!!
The Mental Health Board in Toledo was another story. I did a good job of creating an agency evaluation system. The Board who had demanded it was very pleased. However the CEO never wanted it and was sure that I was too nerdy to have the political skills to carry it off.
ReplyDeleteI loved working with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Toledo had received a demonstration grant. Their academic researcher really appreciated me because I not only had all the skills of a university professor; I could get clinicians to cooperate in the research, a rare skill among academics. Why shouldn’t they, I had given them all the data they needed to save their jobs!
I saw the handwriting on the wall. The CEO hired a Human Resources Consultant who would be evaluating our positions and salary. I saw a lowly Manager of Information Systems with little access to the board in my future. It was time to move closer to my aging parents. On Friday as the HR expert finished his interview with me he marked about how relaxed as I was in comparison to everyone else,
I replied “In strict confidentially. On Monday at the staff meeting I will announce that I am becoming the #2 person at another country mental health board at a substantial increase in salary. I could not get the four weeks vacation I wanted because the board would not give it to the CEO. But he did give me annually an all expenses paid trip to the professional meeting of my choice. The market place has determined my position and my salary.”
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHere in Lake County we had a HR board member who wanted to contribute his expertise. So we had a big job evaluation survey. How would I determine my value to the board?
ReplyDeleteMy response. In the first three years I wrote grants that generated more money than the net present value of the my salary until the day I will likely retire. (Hint: I’m for free, I already earned my salary). At the annual meeting I attended I always presented papers that had been peer reviewed. Essentially all my planning, evaluation and policy innovations had been deemed worthy of the attention of my peers.
It is really difficulty for anyone to evaluate a professional like myself who essentially reinvented his job every few years. My two good CEOs knew that “letting Jack be Jack” was solving not only their present problems but also anticipating many that were not yet at the doorstep. My role was unlike an accountant who has many local peers.
Moreover in both the agency and board excellent management experiences we functioned as what Greenleaf in Servant Leadership calls a “primus inter pares” rather than hierarchical management.
At the Board the CEO would chart our future direction. I would chime in at appropriate points with local data, national trends. The RN would cite specific clinical experiences in our system and bring her wealth of experience elsewhere. The agencies were convinced we spent hours preparing; not one minute!
When the State five year plan was required, we divided it up, never talked about what we would write for our section, never consulted each other, never reviewed each other parts. An executive secretary check to see everything was there. The State was amazed as the integration of our plan, and how we must have spent hours in meetings.
In these management groups something magical happened. Maybe it also take place sometimes on the sports field. Maybe among musicians, especially jazz musicians. It is something special and very difficult to separate out the individual components
Snip: "But greater mobility also has a perverse side-effect. By draining moribund places of talented workers, it exacerbates their troubles. The local tax-base erodes as productive workers leave, even as welfare and pension obligations mount."
ReplyDeleteWe are seeing brain drain in Michigan as the manufacturing sector dries up. Detroit is hoping to lure in Amazon. (Yes, let's pay a filthy rich corporation to hire us in the firm of revenues reducing tax breaks.) The lack of skikled workwrs who want to stick around here is getting slimmer. How you support the elderly, a strong pubic school system, adequate police and EMS, and liveable cities is beyond me.
Governor Schneider's call to get more STEM workers up to speed to attract the tech sector may be a good idea. Never mind that a college education used to be more than just job training. Those days are gone.
A measure to interest highschool kids in skilled trades would have been great 20 or 30 years ago, before unions folded and stopped training apprentices. Now kids have to go to community college to learn this stuff. The unions trained people quickly and efficiently to get journeymen paying dues. Community colleges want to keep students in training as long as possible to keep enrollments up. And most kids in my college's voc-tech programs don't want another two years of school. They don't learn well in school. They learn best on the job.
Raber and I were looking at states where our retirement will stretch farthest. That state seems to be Mexico, which has become a haven for American retirees on limited incomes.
But pulling up stakes is difficult. Elderly mother, my health problems, lots of unknowns, and having no support system.
More than anything there is a growing sense that nothing can be done. Keep your head down, work your one and a half jobs, become too exhausted to make waves, and too demoralized to innovate.
Our corporate structures are killing us. Managers will tell you they have to outsource and off shore to compete because everyone else is doing it.
It's a big depressing mess.
Jack, You've managed to solve the "Ohio" globalization problem as an individual, or as an individual in a piece of the American pie dealing with health and human services.
ReplyDeleteWhatever you conclude about the article in the Economist, it's pointing to the larger, collective problem of the movement of intellectual, technical, productive, investment resources, arguing that the global problems mirror the local problems. Is it all oligarchs? Or is it intellectuals, managers, civil servants, politicians, pundits, etc. who piecemeal work at the issues, especially of inequality. In that respect, I don't see that Bernie Saunders has any better answers than the Clintonites. If you think so, what are they?
Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist, as am I. There exist democracies with various levels of government regulation and control for the benefit of their general populace and they seem to function rather well and provide for a peaceable society. For me, that means, according to the existence theorem, there must be answers out there and only a Bernie direction will find them.
ReplyDeleteStanley, the countries you're talking about probably include places like Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands. These countries tend to be smaller (relative to the size of the USA), relatively homogenous, and with different traditions. That doesn't mean we can't learn from them. Just that it would be hard to translate their economic systems to here.
DeleteI read an interesting article in the National Geographic while waiting at the dentist's office the other day (well, there has to be an upside to waiting to find out you need a root canal). The author of the article was Dan Buettner, who has just published a book titled "The Blue Zones of Happiness". According to Buettner, examples of the happiest countries are Denmark, Costa Rica, and Singapore. What do they have in common? Their people feel safe, comparatively healthy, free of most of life’s biggest worries, and they live in an environment where most people can still make a living. I haven't read the book yet. But maybe there are some take-away lessons for our increasingly dysfunctional country.
Homogeneous populations and a mostly singular cultural-religious history helps explain the social democracy of places like Sweden, Denmark, etc, although they are all fraying a bit at the edges over recent immigration and asylum seekers.
DeleteFor the U.S., part of the problem of social democratic solutions to economic disparity lies in our size and regional variation in history, culture, religion, etc. In many ways the South is still fighting the civil war, if only in opposing and loathing the machinations of Northern liberals. The West Coast seems ready for a more "socialist" future, but would we be surprised that even there the "inland" ranchers and farmers march to a different drummer than Jerry Brown?
I took the gist of The Economist article (and lead editorial) to be that there has to be more attention to the fine-grained economic trade-offs in global investment. Our current secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, seems more interested in the well-being of Russian oligarchs than longshoreman, stevedores, and the U.S. merchant marine. That is part politics, but mostly economics in its greediest form. Would stringent regulations rein this in...not if the current leaks from Jersey, the Cayman Islands, etc., accurately reflect the choices of the world's richest...including the Queen of England and Apple!! Why doesn't Apple build factories in Michigan and Upstate New York? Because they are run by greedy jerks (a technical term!).
Homogeneity and social cohesion is no doubt a help in establishing a social democracy but I don't buy that it is necessary. Exacerbation of racism and inter-religious friction no doubt plays into the hands of the oligarchs and megacorporations. Who put the "di" in "diabolical"? But a more peaceable, civil society should be able to achieve it. I don't think the chaos we presently have is an accident. I think it serves the purposes of small, economic elites. Just as a divided society and exploitative capitalism are symbiotic, so are a civil society and democratic socialism. Maybe I'm a Pollyanna, but the latter symbiosis should be a goal and our only hope for survival.
ReplyDeleteYou are not a pollyanna!! I only add here that the "small economic elites" have contributed mightily to the chaos, divisiveness, etc.; see Jane Mayer, "Dark Money." That elite has a lot of fingers in the Trump pie right now, making fixing the system even more difficult. That doesn't mean we shouldn't, but we need smarter voters and more courageous politicians.
Delete