The NYT Is Incoherent

The editors of the New York Times warn that the skills of American workers are looking worse and worse when compared with the countries with whom we’re in competition:

Researchers have been warning for more than a decade that the United States was losing ground to its economic competitors abroad and would eventually fall behind them unless it provided more of its citizens with the high-level math, science and literacy skills necessary for the new economy.

Let me suggest a simple model that explains this:

  1. Don’t create enough jobs for skilled workers in the United States.
  2. Do import large numbers of unskilled or semi-skilled wokers into the United States.

I’d certainly like to see the Times’s prescription for solving the problem. They should take into account that

  1. About a third of American young people are neither working nor attending school.
  2. About half of young people in America’s big cities graduate from high school on time.
  3. About an eighth of the people in America are immigrants, most of whom came here as adults without notable skills.

I’ve been searching for a good word that means the opposite of synergy, i.e. a situation in which the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The best I’ve come up with is “incoherent”.

IIRC the Times is in favor of instant legalization of the present illegal immigrant population and they think we should do something about U. S. workers “falling behind” our international competitors. Whatever merit those positions have individually, they’re incompatible. The Times is incoherent.

The only way I can see to square the circle is to redefine who our competitors are.

8 comments… add one
  • Jimbino Link

    re: “president illegal immigrant population,” you mean “present….”

    And a good word would be either “dysergy” or “anergy.”

  • Thanks. Fixed.

    And I’ve used “dysergy” occasionally here in that context. Indeed, if you search for “dysergy” on Google, this blog is the seventh entry that comes up.

  • ... Link

    Don’t create enough jobs for skilled workers in the United States.

    Don’t forget that The Powers That Be don’t like Americans getting those kinds of jobs anyway, even if they have the training. That’s why Zuckerberg, to name one of many, wants to greatly increase the number of H1-B visas awarded in places like India and China. Anything and everything to suppress wages at all levels.

  • jan Link

    We are working against ourselves, in almost all areas.

    In education, we insulate and then embrace the union’s obsolete grasp on academics, excoriating any private sector’s attempts at innovation or upgrades. School choice options are also considered anathema in trying to get poor children into better educational environments. It’s dinosaur thinking, all the way around, in order to keep the same old, same old in place.

    In economics, we choose policies, especially one’s created under the Obama-enlarged EPA’s dominion, that are job-killers, shrinking the economy rather than expanding it.

    Taxation — the only siren used for increasing revenue on a certain segment of society, in order to pay for social programs enjoyed by the other half not paying any taxes. It’s all part of heightening class divisiveness.

    Work ethic is diminished by government literally hawking it’s dependency programs, creating more generational welfare recipients. It’s easier, nowadays, to be supported by the government than it is to navigate the red tape in attempts of becoming an entrepreneur. Maybe that’s why there are 9 million less people in the work force.

    Ignoring mounting debt deficits; accepting and adapting to millennial apathy; supporting obsessive politically correct behavior which subdues any honest but off-putting comments in conversations; turning a blind’s eye to unabated entertainment violence/rudeness, while calling for more gun control; paring back school children’s physical education programs, bubble-packing their bodies, while giving no outlet for their restless, youthful energy –this is just a sample of the cultural turnings that constitute our daily lives. Everything we do is now geared toward safe mediocrity, creating ‘equality’ at the expense of doing away with excellence, becoming a pleasure-oriented, frivolous consumer-spending, abstract and distracted secular public.

    Out of fashion are creeds dealing with work ethic, accountability, fiscal responsibility, morality, family, religious doctrine, deferring gratification for the greater good goals, or having real objectives when pursuing higher education. We are on the trajectory to becoming a soft, unmotivated, corrupted people, and thus are seeing our stature in the world declining on all levels — education, economical prosperity/productivity, and even ethically — sliding down to #10 in the world’s rankings on economic freedom.

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