A Blueprint for Increasing the Number of Good Jobs in America

THE PROBLEM

Perhaps 50 to 100 million Americans can't or won't be able to sustainably make a living. The unemployment rate of 7.6% doesn't count the millions who are earning at or near minimum wage or who have given up trying to find work





Most of the fastest-growing jobs require high-level skills (like software developer) or often don't pay a living wage (janitorial, retail, in-home caregiving, etc.) And ever more full-time benefited, stable jobs are being replaced by part-time contract gigs, automation, or offshored workers.



The disappearance of full-time good jobs has been accelerating for decades, in part because of the growing gap between the cost of hiring an American full-time compared with getting the work done using the approaches listed in the previous paragraph. When an employer hires an American full-time, s/he must pay, for example, Social Security, family
leave (paid leave in CA), and growing worker-compensation and wrongful-termination claims. Such claims are likely to accelerate further as people get more desperate. And when ObamaCare kicks in, employers will be required to pay thousands of dollars per full-time employee every year. A likely result is that many employers will replace yet more full-time workers with part-timers.



The percentage of people unable to earn a stably sustainable living will likely increase further because, on average, the low-skilled poor have more children and because "comprehensive immigration reform" will  legalize 11 million people, many whose skills, education, and English language are insufficient to, ongoing, earn a living wage.



INADEQUATE SOLUTIONS

Education. The most politically palatable and, in theory, sensible solution is education. Alas, at least a half century of concerted, expensive efforts to close the achievement gap have been far from successful. Yes, school achievement has risen slightly among the poor but the abilities and skills required to consistently earn a middle-class income have increased far more. Low-skill agricultural and manufacturing jobs have declined while high-tech and knowledge work has burgeoned.



I believe our best shot at making education the magic pill we wish it would be is to create Dream Homework : a set of dream-team-taught online, interactive, lessons available online and used by teachers to replace the reviled standard homework. That way, every child, rich or poor, would be taught daily by some of our most transformational teachers. Thus the school day could be devoted mainly to providing the one-on-one support that only a live teacher can provide.



Job retraining. Job retraining is also an inadequate solution. That too has been tried for decades, with staggering costs and staggering lack of success.



Raising the minimum wage. Instinctively, it feels appropriate to raise the minimum wage to a level at which people can live
decently.
Unfortunately, many people don't add even minimum-wage value to
employers. For example, many people learn slowly, are
unreliable, alienate coworkers and customers, steal, and/or have serious physical or
mental disabilities. Many employers would pay to not hire such
people, so their net value to the employer is less than $0! So if the
minimum wage were raised to, for example, $15, many more low-skill workers would be unemployed. Employers would think about many employees, "This person doesn't
add enough value to my workplace to justify $15 an hour plus all those
benefits and risk of employee lawsuit." True, raising the minimum wage to
$15 would improve the lives of millions of Americans who are paid less than $15 an hour plus benefits but who are worth at least that. But a "living wage" would also
render unemployed millions of would-be workers who add less than $15 an
hour of value.



A SET OF APPROACHES MORE LIKELY TO HELP

No one approach will solve this problem.  Candidly, I'm not convinced that even implementing all of the following would make those 50-100 million people consistently well-employed. But these are my best shots at what would help.




K-16 entrepreneurship
education. New businesses create jobs, so teaching students the art and science of entrepreneurship should create jobs while abetting society. Of course, the school curriculum is already packed. So what could entrepreneurship education replace? Replacing one or two days a week of physical education with entrepreneurship education might offer the best tradeoff. 




Taxpayer-funded jobs.  I envision a WPA-like program, in which
taxpayers fund an Assistance Army that would, for example, build infrastructure, bring more tutors
to K-12 classrooms, provide better in-home support for shut-in seniors,  beautify riven inner cities, and fund visual and performing artists to enrich their community. 



Nanopayments. In his new book, Who Owns the Future? , Jaron Lanier argues that millions of bloggers, tweeters, digital photographers, Amazon review writers, YouTube video uploaders, etc. could make significant income by charging pennies per view, charged to a user's credit card. It's difficult to envision enough of the public being willing to pay even a penny for what they currently get for free, but the benefit of such a system would be so great that I believe it's worth a societal effort to try to make nanopayments the norm.


Get the
public to embrace patchwork careers. Of course, full-time, stable jobs offer advantages: Many people like having a routine, a regular place to go to work, a job they can grow comfortable in, coworkers that become friends, whom they pass the years with. Alas, such stability may be impossible for many of those 50 to 100 million people and perhaps for many others. 



Many people so dislike the idea of earning their living from multiple part-time, low-pay, often temporary jobs that they'd rather be unemployed. Other people are daunted at having to look for multiple jobs, perhaps frequently. Those are legitimate concerns but patchwork careers do have advantages, for example, variety, flexible schedule, and more learning opportunities. Perhaps a campaign of public-service announcements, a la the anti-smoking and anti-drug-abuse initiatives, might convince more people to pursue a patchwork career.



Get the
public to learn to live on less. As said earlier, I fear that all of the above will only partially address the problem. Thus, I believe the public needs to realize that The American Way--trying to spend your way to happiness--may be not only unrealistic but unwise if not a downright fool's game. Beyond the basics, most people find contentment through rewarding work, relationships, and creative outlets, not an expensive hobby like golf or buying that 20th pair of shoes. 



Dear reader, I welcome your ideas and your reactions to mine.



I plan to send a revised version of this to Jaron Lanier in advance of his appearance on my radio program, . where we will, on-the-air, brainstorm a plan for increasing the number of good jobs in America.