American Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

this competition. If we want to restore the American Dream, we need tax policies, regulatory policies and spending policies that make America the best place in the world to invest, and the easiest place in the world to create new businesses and new jobs through innovation. Instead, big government gives us tax policies, regulatory policies and spending policies that are making America a more expensive and burdensome place to invest and innovate.
    Another culprit economists increasingly point to for the changing economy is technology. For most of the years after World War II—including when I was growing up—new technologies
added
to the productivity of American workers, helping us produce more and faster. But today’s advances in artificial intelligence and robotics aren’t always helping American workers. In many cases they’re
replacing
them. I don’t buy into the dystopian scenarios of self-aware robots enslaving mankind, but you don’t have to be a sci-fi conspiracy theorist to acknowledge that plenty of good, well-paying jobs are being taken over by machines. All you have to do is go through the self-checkout line at the supermarket, or ask UPS workers nervously eyeing Amazon’s plans to replace them with delivery drones.
    Just like globalization, technology is here to stay, and our challenge is to find the opportunities it presents and to take advantage of them. These technological breakthroughs aren’t all bad news for the middle class. Even as machines take over more functions in our modern economy, we will still need humans to build them, fix them and work alongside them.
    The key to using new technology to our advantage is having educational and vocational training systems that produce workers capable of working with it. In his book
Average Is Over
, economist Tyler Cowen sees a future in which high earners are those who “get” computers and information technology. Low earners, he argues, will be those who don’t—the less technologically adept who will be forced to work in jobs attending to the needs and wants of the high earners.
    Cowen concedes that you won’t have to be a future Steve Jobs or even a computer programmer to be among the high earners, just someone prepared to work with technology to solve real-world problems or fill real-world needs. He points to the fact, for example, that Facebook founder and zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg was a psychology major, not a computer science major. Zuckerberg didn’t know how computers work, but he understood how they could be used to fill a human need.
    Cowen’s vision of the future is very interesting but ultimately, I think, pessimistic. He puts the split between the high-earning winners and the low-earning losers in the coming high-tech economy at 15 to 85. There’s no question that technology is changing and will continue to change American jobs. But I am certain we can do better than a future in which only 15 percent of us adapt to working with that technology.
    Here, again, big government is making it harder for Americans to acquire the skills they need to benefit from the opportunities created by technology. Our current system of education, from kindergarten through graduate school, was designed in the middle of the twentieth century. That is, it was designed for an era in which we had plenty of low-skill jobs that paid middle-class incomes, a time when higher education was an option, and our higher education students were primarily recent high school graduates.
    In the twenty-first century, there is a rapidly shrinking pool of middle-income jobs for low-skill workers. Education is no longer an option—it is a necessity—but our system is failing to prepare Americans for the jobs of the new economy. A recent international study showed the United States falling dangerously far behind other countries—such as Japan, Sweden and Chile—when it comes to promoting the skills needed to