Standing Corrected: Education 2nd Avoiding Economic Collapse 1rst
In yesterday's post my argument was that Education was the single most important policy concern we face for the long-term health of the country. In a way I stand corrected because getting the Housing crisis under control, preventing a systemic collapse of the credit markets and then getting the economy re-grounded for the long-term is more important. Enormously so. There are so many moving parts to this that it'll take me a bit to sort them out and it probably won't be dead-on in the first couple of passes and will need some evolution. If you've been reading along with this blog you'll have noticed that we've elevated the Economy to a central place in our concerns for some time now.
The card that was inadvertently palmed was my constant seperation of policy issues into three big buckects: Domestic, Economic and International. Education is the most important domestic policy issue but the next President is going to face two driving concerns that swamp everything else. If they're "fixed" then we'll be in a good position to address all the other conerns. If they metastasize into major crisis they could each break us. One is the Economy and the other is the ME and both share a common characteristic - failure to find a stable and workable resolution could lead to major worldwide economic disruptions. And by major I mean collapse though that's NOT the probability it is the worst case downside risk. But managing crisis is what President's do, isn't it ? You can see our prior analysis and summaries of the ME and the Economy in their respective archives btw.
Let me present a quick and dirty summary of my views on strategic economic policy with an extract from an e-mail with an economist friend who seemed to think they were pretty sensible:
Hey Mike - we're pretty much on the same page. If it 'twer mine to control I'd set up three large-scale gov't programs. A real estate repair and recovery effort though you dodged the key question of resources and skills. A significant infrastructure investment effort and a massive national energy development effort on the scale of a "concerted national effort". All of which would have major macro-consequences. In addition the first would get us out of the RE mess. The 2nd would provide huge intermediate jumpstarts while also setting up a major l.t. investment that would improve productivity. The 3rd in addition to those benefits would provide a jumpstart to several goals. Reduced foreign oil dependencies, improved national security AND, the biggest, the creation of the next big thing for creating new industries, technologies and jobs.
Consider those three strategic policies as both blueprints and checklists. Blueprints as to what we need to do. And checklists to assess each of the candidates against. Anything that a) doesn't address those three or b) substitutes ideological wrong-headedness or popular posturing for serious, workable and pragmatic proposals is an indictment. Policies come in two flavors. First they are either Urgent or not. Second they are either Important or not (yes that's the Covey matrix). Education is critically Important but not Urgent. The Economy and the ME are both Important and Urgent. The trick is to work on things that are Important before they become crisis - unfortunately we've let the Economy slide for decades and have been self-interested, short-sighted and self-damaging on the ME for longer.
So to focus on the Economic crisis it helps to understand it a bit.