Do You Want People To Be Successful Through Work & Talent?
What Do We Have To Do To Make Today’s America Actually Work That Way?
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
Do you want a society where talent and hard work make the difference between financial success and failure?
Do you want a society where talented people who are willing to work hard have the opportunity to earn a better life?
Isn’t that the American Dream, that everyone has the opportunity to be successful through talent and hard work?
A High School Education Is No Longer Enough
For most of the country’s history a basic high-school education was enough. If you could read, write and do simple math you could do most jobs. Sure, a doctor or a mechanical engineer required more, but they were a very small percentage of the population. Even lawyers didn’t need to go to a special school. They often just apprenticed in the office of a lawyer who was willing to train them.
Those days are long gone.
Because a high-school education was enough to earn a good living, in the old days the community supplied everyone with a free high-school education, not out of some idea of being nice to people but because it was in the country’s best interest to have citizens who could work and contribute and support themselves.
But those good-paying, high-school-education jobs are pretty much gone. Now there are mostly only bad-paying high-school-educated jobs.
Today, you cannot even apply for most good jobs without a college degree. Just go on-line and check the requirements for jobs that are paying $60,000/year and up. Almost of all of them require a college degree in order to even apply for the job.
How Do We Train Children To Be Able To Hold A Good Job?
First, we need tools that will identify people’s talents so that we can discover what kind of work they’re suited for.
Some people are good at math, but couldn’t build a decent dog house if their life depended on it. Others could take apart and then reassemble a V-8 engine but couldn’t write computer code no matter how hard they studied.
Let’s say we design really terrific tests and use sophisticated AI software to determine a young person’s intelligence and talents. These tests tell us that Sally has a talent for music, Bill can be a great carpenter, Molly would make a fine surgeon, and so on.
Of course, Sally, Bill, Molly and the rest of the kids aren’t going to become musicians, carpenters, surgeons or anything else beyond unskilled laborers unless they get the training needed to perform those jobs.
That means we’re going to have to find some way they can get that training — schools, tutors, AI teachers, apprenticeship programs or whatever mechanism will give these talented kids the training they will need in order to do the jobs that they have the basic intelligence and talent to perform.
Providing Just Training Is Not Enough
But simply providing training alone isn’t enough.
Maybe we could train Bill to be a carpenter in a year or two, from age eighteen to twenty. Molly is going to take four years of high school, four years of college, four years of medical school, so Molly is going to be at least twenty-six or twenty-seven years old before she can even begin her medical residency.
That means that someone is going to have to house, clothe, feed, etc. Sally, Bill and Molly for the first twenty to twenty-seven years of their lives.
You may say that their parents should do that but for many parents that’s just not possible. At least half the families in America don’t have the money or the access to childcare to do that.
For those who think people should be able to work their way through college, take a look at the numbers at the end of this column.*
Remember, you said you wanted a society where everybody had the opportunity to succeed or fail according to their talents and their willingness to work, not that people could succeed only if their parents could afford to house and train them for a good job.
So long as Sally, Bill and Molly have the requisite talent and intelligence to do the skilled job and are willing to work hard, then in the society that you said that you wanted they need to have access to the training required in order for them to be able to do that job.
What If Parents Don’t Have The Money To Educate Their Children?
The parents’ poverty should be irrelevant to children having the opportunity to earn a good life through talent and hard work because you said you wanted an America where everyone who was willing to work hard could have a decent life. That’s what you said.
Once they’ve completed their training, of course, they’re on their own, but until then they can’t succeed merely through talent and hard work alone because all the talent and all the hard work in the world won’t be enough for them to be able to perform a skilled job without the years of support and training that are required to work in that profession.
You certainly don’t want a world where the talented children of rich people have a chance at a good life and the talented children of everyone else have no chance of a good life, do you?
So, how are we going to make that American Dream work?
How Many Parents Don’t Have The Money To Train Their Children?
In 2010 there were about 30.6 million people in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 24. The number is probably 34 to 35 million today.
We know that approximately 40% of the U.S. households have less than $400 in total savings. It’s a pretty safe bet that this 40% cannot afford to house, feed, clothe, support and care for their kids through ages twenty to twenty-six, leastwise pay for tuition, books, transportation, and on-campus food and housing, medical care, etc.
40% X 34 million = at least about 14 million kids whose parents cannot afford to train them for the jobs they are smart enough and talented enough to be able to be good at.
What About Scholarships?
While some colleges may give a very qualified applicant free tuition, colleges are not giving every qualified applicant free tuition, free books, free room and board, free clothes, free medical care, etc. etc. etc.
Borrow The Money?
The student loan debt is already over $1.5 Trillion dollars and rising, and it hasn’t made a dent in educating America’s children. Much of that money has disappeared into the coffers of crooked “for profit” businesses that leave their students both in debt and also without the training needed to get a job.
Will Businesses Train America’s Children?
American business has no interest in spending any of its money to train its workers. It expects the taxpayers to train their employees in government schools.
Can’t You Get Free Training In The Army?
The military accepts only about 180,000 people per year, so, the military is not going to train these 14 million children of the parents who cannot afford to support and train them.
So, if you want a world where everybody who has talent and is willing to work hard has a chance to earn a good life, then somehow the government is going to have to feed, clothe, and house at least 40% of the children in the United States while they’re being trained to perform those good jobs, because their parents cannot afford to do it.
Sorry, but that’s the American-Dream society you said you wanted.
Life Is Not A Race Where Everyone Has A Fair Chance To Win
Lots of people think that life is like a race where everybody stands at the starting line, a gun is fired, they take off, and the strongest, toughest, smartest, and most fit people get to the finish line first.
But life today is not like that at all.
Life Is Like A Maze Where The Best Equipped Contestants Win
Imagine a wilderness on one side of a range of mountains. A big system of caves leads through the mountains to the land of milk and honey on the other side, but
- Some caves are dead ends and some lead to bottomless pits.
- Some caves require great physical skill and dexterity to get through.
- Some can only be traversed by very clever people who knew the secret passages
- Some require months or years to navigate and anyone who wants to use them has to carry huge supplies of food and water if they want to survive to reach the other side.
Of course, there’s equipment that makes getting through the caves easier:
- Powerful flashlights,
- Night-vision goggles,
- Radar that pierces the rock walls,
- Blankets,
- Concentrated food,
- Air mattresses,
- Gloves,
- Climbing gear, etc.
- Maps and guides to help you find your way to the other side.
Half the people who enter the caves have only the shirt on their back, a pair of jeans and a well-worn pair of sneakers. Most of them have no chance of surviving the trip.
But the people who were born to moderately wealthy families are warmly dressed, have knapsacks full of food, gloves, flashlights and the like.
These are the people who have a good chance of getting through.
The even richer people have maps, radar devices, personal guides, pack animals with a full load of food, camping equipment, extra clothes, climbing gear, and everything else that money can buy to equip someone to get through the caves.
Sure, there are a few poor people who are super smart, super tough, have tremendous night vision, an unerring sense of direction — the equivalent of a Navy SEAL — who can enter the caves with just the clothes on their back and make it through to the other side. But these people are rare.
By and large, the people who make it to the land of milk and honey are not the smartest, the most decent, or the most hard working. They are the ones whose families were rich enough to equip them for success.
Most of the ones who fail, who fall down the shafts, starve in the dead ends, or wander lost forever are not the dumbest or the laziest but rather the ones whose families didn’t have the money to purchase supplies, tools, maps and who don’t have super eyesight, super hearing, or a super sense of direction to make it through with only the shirt on their back.
Sure, the top ten percent maybe succeeded because of their amazing abilities and determination and bottom ten percent failed because of their abysmal abilities and determination, but the success or failure of the 80% in the middle was almost entirely dependent on how well their families could afford to train and equip them for the journey.
Training, Not Hard Work, Determines Success & Wealth Determines Training
In our technological economy, training is the overwhelming difference for most people between financial success and failure and training is dependent on the wealth of your family.
Financial success in American society is overwhelmingly a function of family wealth rather than talent or hard work.
If you want a society where financial success for most children requires being born into a financially successful family, congratulations, you’ve got it in the USA right now.
If you want a society where financial success for most children requires only talent and hard work, then things will need to drastically change.
Minimum-wage jobs for the millions of Americans whose families cannot provide professional training yields a generation doomed to quicksand poverty that most of them will never be able to escape.
–David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
To see a searchable list of all David Grace’s columns in chronological order, CLICK HERE
To see a list of David Grace’s columns sorted by topic/subject matter, CLICK HERE.
*The Numbers: A college degree will take four to six years, typically from age eighteen to age twenty-four.
Where are you going to live over that period? Who is going to feed you? Who is going to buy your books, your tuition, your clothes, your toothpaste, your phone, your car, insurance and gas, your medical care, your utilities, etc.?
Since you’re not qualified for any job that pays more than about $10/hour, over the summer you can take home maybe $2,800, less gas, bus fare, lunches, etc. That’s at least $400, leaving you maybe $2,400 to live on for the next nine months.
Gas, food, clothes, phone, and incidentals alone will cost you over $1,000/month not counting rent. Add $500/month for dorm rent, that’s $1,500/month for nine months and $1,500/month tuition at a state college ($13,500/school year) and we’re up to $3,000/month plus another $1,000 for books and were up to about $28,000/school year or about $3,100/month for a nine month school year.
At $10/hour, working 16 hours per week during the school year, you might take home $450/month or a shortfall of $2,650/month X 9 months X four years = $95,400 you need to get a college degree that you don’t have.
Even with a total scholarship and no tuition, it will still cost you $1,600/month less $450 from your part-time job or a shortfall of $1,150/month X 9 months = $10,350/school year X 4 = $53,400.
Subtract your summer job earnings of $2,400 and you’re still $8,000 short per year times four years = at least $32,000 in the hole for just an undergraduate degree, free tuition, and working all the time.
And that’s for not an advanced degree in some field that would get you a really good job.
If you don’t have a full scholarship add in another $54,000 so you’re now $86,000 short, assuming that you finish college in four years instead of the now common five or six years it takes many students to get all the classes required for an undergraduate degree.
Bottom line, at least half of the children in the country cannot get a college degree which means that they cannot get anything much beyond a minimum wage job.
And the Republicans are dead set against setting the minimum wage at even $31,000 gross per year for full-time work ($15/hour). In most states the minimum wage is less than $10/hour. Your total annual gross income (not take-home pay) at $10/hour is $20,800/year.
Can you support your family on a gross pay of about $21,000/year?
You can’t even support yourself on that kind of money and you will certainly never be able to pay for the training you’ll need to get any job better than a minimum wage job.
This is not the American Dream. This is the opposite of the American Dream. This is quicksand poverty that most high-school graduates will never escape.
