New Reality, New Blog

Over the past few weeks I have been having conversations, collecting articles, thinking thinking thinking about our current economic situation -- like everyone else. I thought I would write a blog post about it. Soon it became apparent that blog wouldn't be long enough. I couldn't even capture it in a longer article. So I have decided to launch a blog. A collection of my opinions, bits of research, and noodling on what's next for the U.S. workforce. My foundational bullet points:

1. Years of productivity and automation have resulted in a class of workers that have redundant or irrelevant skills. These workers will continue to struggle and may not find jobs, as the market adjusts to doing more with fewer people.
2. The U.S. workforce will have to adapt to a new work environment; an environment in which creativity, resourcefulness and innovation is valued over following directions and being timely.
3. The wealth gap and education gap will continue to grow. Americans, as a whole, will become poorer. The highly educated/highly talented will be presented with unprecedented opportunity. The uneducated will face fewer opportunities and shrinking wages.
4. Mediocrity and complacency have grown out of fashion; the era of making a comfortable living while performing low-level tasks is ending. Thriving in the (shrinking) middle class will require advanced education and skills. Factory workers, civil servants, teachers and middle managers will have less earning power, as corporate America devalues repetitive tasks and rewards innovation and creativity.
5. It is a waste of time to try to pinpoint who is to blame. The new state of the U.S. economy is the result of decades of advancement in technology and thinking. The U.S. industrial economy will continue to shrink as the industrial economies of emerging countries -- only now waking to the lures of capitalism -- grow. As these countries realize success in making and selling goods and services of their own, U.S. trade imbalance will grow. It is possible that, as the price of labor increases in other economies, manufacturing work will shift back to the U.S. It is a safer bet, however, to look to innovation as the next evolution of the U.S. economy.
6. We are experiencing a period of great confusion, anger and insecurity. The faster we realize that we are in the midst of change and stop blaming China, immigrants, old people, social media, atheists, youth culture, unions, poor work ethic, conservatives, over-paid CEOs, welfare states or (fill in the blank) for our circumstances, the better off we will be. Productivity gains (which, in the end, are a good thing) have landed us square in the midst of change. Not only have we moved from industrialization to the information age (which resulted in a strong service economy); strides in technology have led us to what I call the digital renaissance. This renaissance requires that we redefine concepts such as "jobs", "worker" or "employer". Moreover, this renaissance is rendering many jobs -- even knowledge worker and service jobs -- obsolete. While it's possible that we could have predicted this, it's not likely that we could have prevented it, nor would we want to.
7. The digital renaissance requires that the U.S. workforce rise to its' intellectual capacity. To survive as a superpower, the U.S. must hold on to its slim edge as thought-leader and innovation center to the world. The U.S. must become the idea-factory, the first-to-market entrepreneurs, the sought-after transformationalists that set and drive productivity standards.
8. The good news -- the very good news -- is that the digital renaissance levels the playing field. Information, data and communication resources are abundant, easily accessed and cheap. Generating ideas, executing on a small scale, acquiring the means to scale "production" (just in time) to meet demand is something that everyone can do, thanks to cloud computing, crowdsourcing, social networking and a dozen other 21st century inventions. Current barriers to meaningful participation in the U.S. economy -- access to capital and influence -- surrender, finally, to talent, education and persistence.