You must know by now that I look for the tall tent poles and try to connect the dots. In any complicated situation there are normally a few items that are much more important than the others. I call these items the "tall tent poles". When it is all said and done these few items have more to do with how things end up than all the other items combined. This country and most of the world are in deep poo poo and no one seems to know the way out. Most of us know how we got here and it was by the actions of our government and "us". We purchased homes we could not afford and our government helped us. Don't think so, think again. Now what are some of these tall tent poles.
First, let me divide the human time line into the follow segments.
(1) Hunter Gatherers
(2) Current Economy
(3) Future Economy
This is that path we have been on for the past few thousand years and I expect that it will continue. How we deal with it will continue to be the big question. Next, let me divide human attributes into to the following segments and then compare them to the segment on the human time line.
(1) Intelligence
(2) Education
(3) Motivation
You could come up with more segments, but let's work with these. I think that most of us can agree with a uniform definition of the above segments, so I will get right on with my analysis. If our for fathers did not survive, we would not be here now discussing our future, so they had to do things "right". What allowed them to survive?
Hunter Gatherers---
They had to have intelligence or they could not have made it. Most animals were faster and stronger and could easily kill any human without any weapons. Humans were no match for most animals. I am going to score each of the above factors in terms of how much is needed for us humans to survive in that hunter gatherer world.
I am also going to match the score that they had with the score that they "needed".
* Intelligence, Had a score of 5 and needed a score of 5, so they match up and we made it.
* Education, Had a score of 3 and needed a score of 4, but we still made it.
* Motivation, Had a score of 8 and needed a score of 8, so we had a good match up and we made it.
Current Economy---
* Intelligence, Had a score of 5 and needed a score of 6. We came up short, but still made it.
* Education, Had a score of 5 and needed a score of 5. Here again, we did not have any extra, but we made it.
* Motivation, Had a score of 6 and needed a score of 5. We used to be tough and it was enough to get the job done so we survived.
Future Economy---
* Intelligence, Have a score of 5 and need a score of 8. Sorry, but we can't get a higher score except by taking not counting some of the lower scores, but how could you do that?
* Education, Have a score of 4 and need a score of 8. We are going down hill when we need to be going up.
* Motivation, Have a score of 4 and need a score of 9. This is the biggest one and we are worst on motivation and getting worse fast.
Look at the above scores and tell me if you agree? We can't do much about intelligence. The human IQ is 100 and I expect it to stay that way while our needs change over time. The only thing we can do is to get the maximum mileage out of the IQ that we have. We are spending the most of any country on education, but we ending up one of the worst educated. Our score is 4 when we need a score of 8 if we are going to make it. We already spend the money and spend the time in school, what we need to do is to start getting our monies worth and stop wasting the time of our kids. They only have so much of it. We spend 21% of our 80 year lives as either babies or in k-12 school. We would like to spend 15 years or 19% of our lives in retirement. That does not leave much time to work and pay the bills.
I have been having serious debates with my friends about the decline in basic motivation of our young people who will have to shoulder the load in the future. We all recognize the shift, but can not ascribe the major cause. My position is that real motivation is a function of both positive and negative factors. Things like hunger and punishment seem to have vanished as motivational factors in us new age humans. Those were among the most important in the past and they worked. Now we are experimenting with only positive motivation factors and the jury is still out on whether we have dug a hole that we will never get out of. I will try to return to this "factor" because it is about the only one of the "tall ten poles" that we have any control over as individuals and parents. Kind of a sad picture of the future isn't it?
