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The largest factor in high systemic unemployment is a failure in our schools and workforce to recognize [that] we have entered into a “free agent” era of labor. Everyone is now a free agent. The days [when] people worked for one company have been gone for a long time. But the days where people could assume [that] if they worked hard and the company they worked for was successful, [this] made them “safe,” is now over. They are over because job killers like me are lurking everywhere … Until our children are taught to be individuals, until our colleges spend more time on creative application, and until we provide training and mentoring for before-gainfully-employed professionals, high systemic unemployment is never going away. In the meantime, the fully employed herd, without creative unique value contribution skills, will continue to be prey to serial job killers like me.

PART III

THE WAR ON MATH AND PHYSICS

EIGHT

“This Is Our Due”

If America had simply underestimated the impact of globalization and the IT revolution and failed to respond to them by improving our system of education, the future would be complicated enough. But we made comparable mistakes with our other two major challenges—the deficit and the intersection of energy and climate. Just when we needed to be husbanding our financial resources and spending every dollar of government revenue in the smartest way possible to advance and upgrade our traditional formula for prosperity, we did the opposite. Between 2000 and 2010 we added more to our national debt in a shorter period of time than during any previous decade in American history. And just when the flattening of the world not only created two billion more competitors but also two billion more consumers, just when some of those new consumers were getting the chance to live in American-size homes, drive American-size cars, and eat American-size Big Macs, just when all the rising energy demand from all these new consumers was affecting the climate and food prices and creating the need for cheap, clean, renewable energy, and just when China recognized all this and began investing heavily in wind, solar, battery, and nuclear power, America dithered, delayed, and underinvested in energy and in the wider foundations of its economic growth.

What makes this all the more troubling is that, unlike the challenges of globalization and IT—which many of us didn’t see or fully comprehend—our energy, climate, and deficit challenges were staring us in the face. In the past, we not only understood both problems; we took significant and often politically difficult steps to address them. This time around, however, we did worse than merely ignore these challenges. In the last two decades, a significant segment of Americans denied that they even existed.

To put it bluntly, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, America declared war on both math and physics.

Ron Suskind’s book The Price of Loyalty recounts the efforts of Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush’s first secretary of the Treasury, to block tax cuts he felt the country simply could not afford. According to Suskind, at one point in late 2002 O’Neill tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits—which were expected to exceed $500 billion that fiscal year alone—posed a threat to the economy’s long-term health. Cheney cut him off. “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said. Cheney went on: “We won the midterms [the congressional elections]. This is our due.” A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary, an old friend, to find another job.

Meanwhile, Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma and currently the ranking minority member and former chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, has called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

In that same vein, Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, went on Fox News Sunday (July 11, 2010) and declared—with no