If you went to college and took any kind of economics course, you were introduced to the bell curve. That simplistic little shape that makes up a monument in Philadelphia also is a staple of mathematicians who try to explain this nations economy.
It starts out simple enough. In the beginning, a company is new and its products or services are innovations because unique sells as well as price and function. "You too can call the space shuttle from your living room" gets a lot of attention. The more people want this new fangled phone thingy, the more units get sold. Assuming of course that phone thingy is a good idea and actually works. At this point, the left side of the bell, sales go up as does revenue, as do profits, as do jobs. Time passes and competition develops. This forces prices down making the thingy more affordable, meaning the market for the thingy gets bigger. At the top of the bell curve, everything is rosey.
Then a new product happens, replacing the thingy and we have the right side of the bell. Everything declines as consumers move on the to the "gizzy". This thing can take a picture of the Mars probe nearing the planet and lets you vote on a name for the first Martian. It does not yet have a universal language feature so we can tell him what we named him. Sales of the thingy decline as it is replaced by the gizzy.
On economy is a huge number of bell curves taken together. All kinds of products, all kinds of companies, some trying to remake themselves while others just disappear. The bell curve also works for skill sets. Individual skills are replaced as technology advances, workers are replaced by those who have newer skills applicable to new technologies. Jobs change in character or go away entirely.
Employment statistics are the result of bell curves super-imposed on each other. Some companies are growing while others are dying. Some are adding employees while others are laying off. Always, the supply of new jobs must compensate for those lost (terminated).
The foundation of innovation and productivity is education. It is no co-incidence that the decline of Americas economic fortunes has coincided with the decline of its education system relative to other countries. In the fifties and sixties America was well ahead of other nations in productivity. Our workers could handle more complicated tasks using more advance equipment. The larger wage cost per hour was more than offset by the number of units our workers could produce in that hour. Today, other nations have caught up with our level of education lowering their labor cost per hour and taking jobs away from us.
This is part of a recipe for a nation in decline. Other factors are hurting us but the way we teach and what we teach is a big part. Who should focus on changing that is the key to the solution. Stay tuned for that one.
