Just how are our kids doing? That is the question that we all should be asking even if you are not a parent. Every generation has to eventually turn over the keys to the country to their children. It has been that way since the beginning of time. Up to this point, it has worked "good enough". It could have been better or it could have been worse, but it got the job done and each generation advanced the human race a little further. Just because it worked in the past is no reason to conclude that it will continue to advance the human race in the future. When one segment of the human race dies out, there is normally no one left to document exactly why they died out. There are a lot of reasons, but one of the most common is that those who the keys to the country were turned over too did not do their job. I think that we are looking at another case of a generation dropping the ball. I was startled to hear a 90 year old former soldier from WWII say that this generation of kids are a, "bunch of smart asses", and don't have what it takes to care for the values that his generation had worked so hard for. That one statement got me to thinking about the significance of what he said.
How are our kids doing? We all know that the future is measured in terms of economics or wealth. If we are poorer, we will have far fewer alternatives in the future. Many of the things that we have been able to do in the past will not be possible in the future if we are poorer. If we are poorer, we will not be able to help those among us or anyone else in the world. The reason that we have been able to do so many "good" things in the past was a direct result of our wealth. Wealth is not a gift or something that a population can be born into. Wealth is the results of individual earnings or the production of "value". This is not done in a vacuum. It has to be done in "public" against competition from the rest of the world. Now, we are getting to the point of this blog.
How well prepared are our kids to compete in the world and produce value and wealth as we had done in the past? There are "leading" indicators of what the future will hold. The most important of those is how much of the "currency" of the future do our kids have? What is that currency? It is the educational or intellectual wealth that resides inside the heads of our kids. On that basis, the kids of at least 30 other countries are better educated than our kids. The people who are running our economy today average about 50 or older. They were born back in the 1960's when the average SAT score for our kids was much higher than the our kids of today. What we are going to see when our kids take over is a country that is run by adults who rank below more than 30 countries around the world. The die is set already. The quality of our education is going down and before we can even think of it going up, we first have to stop going down. When do you think the decline of our kids will stop going down?
Let me give you and example of a leading indicator. Back in about 1974, the Scientific American magazine had an article about the number of new doctors in the USA who were born outside the USA. 1974 was the year that 50% of our new doctors were born outside the USA. No one noticed the change or that it was a "leading indicator". Most existing doctors were born here so if you went to a hospital, over 90% of doctors were born here. At the time, it was unusual to see a doctor born outside the USA, but not now. That was a leading indicator and if you had you eyes open, you could have predicted what was going to happen in the future. Want another example?
In that same article, there were charts on the percentage of Blacks born out of wedlock. At that time the ratio was 50%. Now it is about 90%, but the fact that it was up to 50% back in 1974 was a leading indicator of what was going to happen in the Black community here in the USA. In 1974, I could predict the decay in the Black community that we would be facing in the future. Don't think so?
At a time when we are getting poorer, why are we into this Obamacare thing? If we spend our wealth and credit rating on Obamacare, you can see what the future will look like. Federal government is the center for wasting our wealth. There is not one thing that our Federal government can do as efficiently as the private sector. That means the more we turn over too the Federal government, the more of our wealth will be wasted. We need to both, slow the waste while we improve our ability to create wealth. Education and responsible conduct is the way to compete in the future and that is where our kids come in. If you are honest about the quality of our kids, you also know that our future is not very bright. The two most important things that we need to do is to get our high school graduation rate upto at least 95% and our out of wedlock birth rate down to less than 5%. Our colleges have to start teaching those things that our kids will need to compete in the future rather than all the "fuzzy feel good" things that we provide student loans for,.
How are "your" kids doing?
