If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?
Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York's.
Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.
Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That's less than half of the state's 1.48 million government employees.
Don't expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren't willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.
Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.
But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn't pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.
The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we've gotten.
Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.
President Obama says we have to retool our economy to "win the future." The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.
Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
PLAYBACK: Everyone a Teacher—How Technology Can Turn the Tables (and Desks) in the Classroom
4.1.11 | Unblocking social media in the classroom; affective learning is effective; kids as “makers” of their own education—and villages; gaming theories take hold at UPenn; the Quest is on in Chicago ...
“Standing in the Back, Watching the Screens”: In a recent post on the Connected Principals blog, Jonathan Martin, head of St. Gregory Prep School in Tucson, Ariz., writes about the possibilities and perils of leading a one-to-one laptop school in which there’s no attempt to block or even discourage the use of social networking and gaming. Martin is willing to endure questioning from teachers and parents because he believes the way students learn has radically changed: We aren’t going to stop being a 1:1 school, nor am I, as principal, going to wave a magic wand and prohibit lecturing (I will keep working hard to encourage moving away from lecturing). I do try to assure teachers that they manage their classrooms, and if they wish, they can sometimes direct students to close their laptops and take notes on paper during lectures. It is sad to me, though, that when we do so, we will eliminate the incredible power for our students of “parallel processing” in their learning.
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In blocking and filtering, we are sharply limiting the positive value of social networking (for the value of this, see Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From or Lisa Nielsen’s many posts), and we are deciding that gaming has no place in learning (see Jane McGonigal’s TED talk). We are also saying, when deciding to ban “distractions,” that every minute a student is at school they are under our dictates for how they spend their time, and that we have determined there is no value for them, even in their break times, to socially network or game; this is a hard proposition for this principal to endorse.
Martin’s thoughts from the educational frontlines reflect a growing consensus that digital learning necessitates a change in the power dynamic of a school and of individual classrooms.
Don’t Worry (About Test Scores), Be Happy: Part of what’s behind giving students more of a say in the classroom is the belief that happier students are better learners. Ben Williamson writes at DMLcentral about how “‘affective’ learning is ‘effective’ learning”—and how new technologies can be the sweet spot connecting a student’s well-being with their intellectual growth: Through participation in diverse digital cultures and networked publics, young people are now increasingly immersed in virtual worlds and social networks that are saturated with feeling, excitement, enthusiasm and enjoyment. These participatory, networked experiences are more emotionally charged, or affective. As a consequence, it’s now familiar for digital media advocates to recommend that the education system take the affective lives of youth seriously and work to make productive connections with the taught curriculum.
“Makers” of Their Own Education: Along the same lines, Susan Engel argues in the New York Times that it’s time to “Let Kids Rule the School”—getting her inspiration from students at a western Massachusetts high school who ran their own school within a school. They named it the Independent Project. The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.
And “Makers” of Their Own Villages: One way to create a sense of ownership is to connect students more intimately to the products of their learning. We have discussed “maker culture” before—and its natural affiliation with digital learning—and Julie Scelfo, also in The New York Times, has found powerful “maker” examples in woodworking programsthat are emerging in elementary and middle schools across the country. While some parents “see woodworking as a way of counteracting the passiveness of logging on and tuning out,” the fear of many other parents and educators toward children handling knives and other potentially dangerous tools mirrors, in many ways, the fear toward those same children having the maturity to handle social networking and other digital tools.
Gever Tully, founder of the Tinkering School in Montara, California, defends children embracing the risks of woodworking because it can “help them become competent people who ‘treat failures as feedback, which they incorporate in the ongoing, evolving solution to the problem.’” Sound familiar? See below. Katie Salen, who co-founded Quest to Learn (and who has a great piece in The Atlantic, by the way, about how game design supports curiosity and creativity), and Elizabeth Purvis, executive director of the Chicago International Charter School that is running Chicago Quest, told Joel Hood of the Chicago Tribune how the new school will stay true to the “big, important ideas” about the power of a gaming-based classroom: Those “big, important ideas” include a unique grading system that does away with traditional A, B and C and, instead, has students competing, in video game speak, to earn levels of expertise such as “novice,” “apprentice,” “senior” and “master.” Students learn to help each other improve.
Gaming is central to the school’s makeup, instructors say, because it provides the ideal platform for creativity, imagination and critique. It also creates an arena for learning where students expect to sometimes fall short, Salen said.
“One of things about gaming is that resilience is sometimes more important than ability, and that you can have kids with high ability who aren’t that resilient and won’t try and try and try again, and you may have kids with lower ability but their resilience is high and they may master the game,” Purvis said. “What they’re really teaching these kids are 21st century collaboration, problem solving and critical thinking.”
Hearing these cutting-edge digital educators use almost identical language as the “old-fashioned” woodworking educators makes us realize that it’s not the technology that will be revolutionary but the willingness to put learning in the bodies and minds of the learners themselves.
