Developing human+ skills in students so they can thrive in workplace

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

“The world will need more agile and resilient thinkers with a serious handle on various technologies and digital literacies.”

Michelle Weise is senior vice president for workforce strategies and chief innovation officer at Strada Education Network. Weise is a higher education expert who specializes in innovation and connections between higher education and the workforce. She built and led Sandbox ColLABorative at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and the higher education practice of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. With Christensen, she co-authored Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution, a book that focuses on how to align online competency-based education with changing labor market needs.

In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Weise about her insights on connecting postsecondary education to the world of work.

Harney: The relationship between education and employability seems widely understood now. What’s truly new in this area?

Weise: What’s different today is that with all the trending conversations about the future of work, the new narrative is that the most valuable workers now and in the future will be those who can combine technical knowledge with uniquely human skills. Over the last few decades, students have moved in large numbers to career-oriented majors, such as business, health and engineering—clearly hearing that the surest path to a meaningful, financially stable career is also the most straightforward one. Those pursuing liberal arts degrees, on the other hand, are on the decline. Policymakers have been particularly down on the outcomes of liberal arts, questioning the value of these majors as relevant to the challenges ahead.

But it’s not either/or; it’s both/and. Human skills alone are not enough and neither are technical skills on their own. This runs somewhat counter to the rallying cries in the 2000s, warning of a dearth of STEM majors to meet the demands of the emerging tech-enabled knowledge economy. But not all of the jobs will require STEM majors or data science wizards or people who fully grasp the technicalities of artificial intelligence. There are differing levels of depth and shallowness of that technical expertise needed alongside human skills that are in high demand.

With that nuance comes the need for real-time labor market data. Fortunately, with partners like Emsi, we can now extract the skills from job postings from businesses (demand-side data) and social profiles and resumes from people (supply-side data), and begin to look underneath traditional occupational classification schemes to observe how specific knowledge and skills cluster with one another. By doing this, we can more clearly diagnose the realities of work, education and skills requirements, and how skills develop and morph across regions and industries. This is essential because it gives learning providers insights that are more current and certainly more accurate, so that they may develop and refine curriculum and advise learners for a rapidly changing workplace.

Harney: Strada’s work regarding “On-ramps to Good Jobs” explicitly references “working class Americans”? Who are they and what are some of the learn-earn-learn strategies with the best traction?

Weise: We use the term “working class” to refer to people who represent the lowest quartile of adults in terms of educational attainment, earnings, and income (26%). We estimate that there are approximately 44 million working-class adults who are of working age (25- to 64-years-old) earning less than $35,000 annually and with less than $70,000 of family income.

What we call on-ramps to good jobs are programs designed, tailored and targeted for these learners with significant barriers to educational and economic success. Some of the most interesting models we found leveraged a “try-before-you-buy” outsourced apprenticeship model. Unlike in traditional apprenticeship models, the employer of record is the on-ramp, and the hiring employer acts as a client to the on-ramp. Apprentices are paid by the on-ramp but work on projects for client firms that are testing out that particular apprentice as a future job candidate. These models are great ways of building steady revenue streams that are sustainable, so that on-ramps reduce dependence on philanthropic or government dollars.

LaunchCode, a St. Louis-based tech bootcamp, hires and manages apprentices from its own program and, in turn, charges businesses $35 an hour for services. If, at program’s end, the employer hires an apprentice, the employer does not have to pay a placement fee, as LaunchCode’s overhead costs have been covered by the hourly service charge paid by employers during the training and pre-hire apprenticeship period.

As another example, Techtonic, a software development company based in Denver, has implemented an outsourced apprenticeship, now certified by the U.S. Department of Labor. Candidates are screened and then put through 12 weeks of training, akin to a coding bootcamp. After learners finish their training, Techtonic “hires” the apprentices, pays them entry-level wages, and pairs them with senior developers to work on projects for its clients. Not only do apprentices get paid for work, but they also simultaneously develop and hone the skills they will need for long-term career success. At the same time, Techtonic’s client firms have a seamless, low-stakes way of evaluating a candidate’s work before committing to full-time employment.

Harney: You also reference “good/decent jobs” … what do these entail?

Weise: We’re talking about jobs that have strong starting salaries that can move a person out of low-wage work to be able to thrive in the labor market by making at least $35k per year as an individual, and a lot more than that in many cases. This is critical for the bottom quartile of working-age adults in terms of educational attainment, earnings and income. We now have 44 million Americans who are jobless or lacking the skills, credentials and networks they need to earn enough income to support themselves and their families. We need better solutions for our most vulnerable citizens.

So when we talk about a good job, we’re not just talking about a well-paying, dead-end job; we’re looking at jobs that have mobility built into them. We want to focus on jobs with promise, or the ability to advance and move up.

Harney: What is the role of non-degree credentials in our understanding of education and employability?

Weise: We know that when people pursue postsecondary education, their main motivation is around work and career outcomes. If they can get there without a degree, is that enough for some? And what about folks who already have degrees who want to advance with just a little bit more training? More college or more graduate school will not be the answer. Flexibility, convenience, relevance … these may be attributes that are much more alluring than the package of a degree.

The business of skills-building is mostly occurring within the confines of federal financial aid models and the credit hour, but there’s an even wider range of opportunities to dream up innovative funding models and partnerships with employers. I’m eager to see more solutions that tie in with the training and development \or learning and development sides of a business rather than through the human resources side of tuition-reimbursement benefits. Where are the employers innovating new forms of on-the-job training?

This, by the way, is a huge opportunity for competency-based education (CBE) providers to serve, but everyone’s busy creating new CBE degreeprograms. What makes CBE disruptive, which is what Clayton Christensen and I pointed to in Hire Education, is that when learning is broken down into competencies—not by courses or subject matter—online competency-based providers can easily arrange modules of learning and package them into different, scalable programs for very different industries. For newer fields such as data science, logistics or design thinking that do not necessarily exist at traditional institutions, online competency-based education providers can leverage modularization and advanced technologies and build tailored programs on demand that match the needs of the labor market.

Harney: Can an employability focus go too far in terms of turning education into a purely vocational endeavor? As an English major and expert in literature and arts, what are your concerns about how steps such as gainful employment guidelines could discourage students from going into such fields and teacher prep, for example?

Weise: That was actually one of the motivations for clarifying the outcomes of liberal arts grads in the labor market. Current views on the liberal arts are often polarizing and oversimplified, and so we wrote “Robot-Ready: Human+ Skills for the Future of Work.” This paper was designed to bring more nuance and rigor to the conversation. Liberal arts graduates are neither doomed to underemployment, nor are they prepared to do anything they want. The liberal arts can give us the agile thinkers of tomorrow, but to live up to their potential, they must evolve. The liberal arts are teaching high-demand skills that can help people transfer from domain to domain, but they do not provide students with enough insight into the pathways available and the practical grounding to acquire before they graduate. In this analysis, we show precisely the kinds of hybrid skills needed in the top 10 pathways that liberal arts grads tend to pursue.

As a quick example, if we have learners considering journalism, they need to know that the roles available now resemble those in IT fields. Not only must journalists report, write or develop stories, but they must also demonstrate metrics-based interpretive skills, fluency in analytics capabilities like search engine optimization (SEO), JavaScript, CSS and HTML, and experience using Google Analytics to better understand who is accessing their content.

A liberal arts education can, in fact, enable learners to learn for a lifetime, but it’s not some magical phenomenon. It takes work, effort and awareness to identify the skills that enable learners to make themselves more marketable and break down barriers to entry.

Harney: What will future workers need to work effectively alongside artificial intelligence?

Weise: The literature on the future of work points us to the more human side of work. The research underscores the growing need for human skills such as flexibility, mental agility, ethics, resilience, systems thinking, communication and critical thinking. The idea is that with the rapid developments in machine learning, robotics and computing, humans will have to relinquish certain activities to computers because there’s simply no way to compete. But things like emotional intelligence or creativity will become increasingly critical for coordinating with computers and robots and ensuring that we are indispensable.

The question then becomes: What are we doing in a deliberate way within our learning experiences—at schools, colleges, companies, government—to cultivate these uniquely human skills? I think we can be doing a whole lot more in terms of building robot-ready learners of the future through project-based learning. It’s nothing new; It occurs in pockets but is not nearly widespread enough. Ultimately, it gets us those nimble thinkers of the future.

Real-world human problem-solving is transdisciplinary by nature, tapping into varied skills and knowledge—and yet, our postsecondary system remains stubbornly stovepiped. Students must learn—and be taught—to connect one domain of knowledge to another through what is known as “far transfer.”

But again, human skills alone are not enough: It’s human+. The world will need more agile and resilient thinkers with a serious handle on various technologies and digital literacies. Those workers will need both human and technical skills. With stronger problem-based models, it’ll be easier for education providers to stay ahead of the curve and build in new and emerging skill sets in data analytics, blockchain, web development or digital marketing that students will need in order to be successful in the job market. The integration of more project-based learning into the classroom would bring more clarity to how human+ skills translate into real-world problem solving and workplace dexterity.

David Warsh: The centrality of Hamilton

President Trump has appointed four of the five serving governors to the seven-member Board of the Federal Reserve System.  Last week he bruited his plans to make another attempt to nominate two more, Judy Shelton and Christopher Waller.   (Four previous proposals have gone nowhere this year:: Herman Cain and Steven Moore, and, before that, Marvin Goodfriend and Nellie Liang. So I spent the better part of the Fourth of July perusing the stack of books on the history of the Fed that have appeared since the financial crisis.

I started out with Alexander Hamilton on Finance, Credit, and Debt (Columbia, 2018), a compilation of 18 compositions by America’s first secretary of the Treasury on the subject of finance.  It was arranged by Richard Sylla, of New York University, and David Cowen, president of the Museum of American Finance

At least until recently, Hamilton was best known as the author of many of The Federalist Papers, a leader of the movement for the Constitution. As George Washington’s Treasury Secretary, he was also architect of the U.S. financial system, the authors note in their introduction. It’s hard to believe that Hamilton’s writings on finance haven’t previously been collected, but as the editors point out in their introduction, it was only in recent decades that economists and economic historians have come to understand in their own terms the centrality of finance to growth and power.

As a voracious reader of history (while serving as a young officer in the Continental Army, for four years as Washington’s chief staff aide), Hamilton understood how institutions of public and private credit had enabled the Dutch Republic to win its independence from Spain, and go on to became the richest nation in Europe; how Britain after 1688 had copied and improved upon the Dutch system. The government bank, national currency, private banks and securities markets the British created fueled rapid economic growth and financed its frequent wars with France. Hamilton argued that the newly independent United States should follow its example.

Sylla is among America’s leading economic historians. Introductions to each document make clear and compelling reading; abridgements are welcome and, no doubt, judicious.  Still, eighteenth-century arguments require careful reading in the twenty-first. That led me to The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Harvard Belknap, 2012, by Thomas McCraw).  Another distinguished historian, McCraw begins,

Of the six major “founders” of the United States, Alexander was the only immigrant. He was also much the youngest of the six: fifty-one years younger than Benjamin Franklin, twenty-five years younger than George Washington, twenty-two years younger than John Adams, fourteen years younger than Thomas Jefferson, six years younger than James Madison. Hamilton alone died violently, in his famous duel with Aaron Burr.

Young, well, yes. And hot-blooded? The circumstances of Hamilton’s youth couldn’t have been more different from those of the other founders, all of whom lived far longer than he did. But his immigrant pedigree?  He was born in 1757, on  Nevis, a tiny Caribbean island near St. Kitts and St. Croix in the Danish Virgin Islands, to a headstrong mother and an aristocratic Scottish father, who abandoned the family when Alex was eight. The next year his mother died of yellow fever. After an astonishing series of further misfortunes, Hamilton was taken in by the family of a young friend (who may have been Hamilton’s half-brother) and went to work for a local merchant house of New York-based traders.  Hamilton learned bookkeeping, inventory control, short-term finance, and exchange-rate mechanics. He dealt with traders from ports throughout Western Europe.  He emigrated to New York when he was fifteen.

McCraw had just finished the first leg of a new line of inquiry when he died, at 72, in 2012.  His study of the work of Hamilton and Albert Gallatin, who succeeded him as Treasury Secretary under Jefferson and Madison, took the story through the War of 1812.  What might have been a second book, following the American financial revolution into the 20th Century, would not be written.  But Founders and Finance is a capstone work.  McCraw’s  first book, TVA and the Power Fight: 1933-1939, appeared in 1971. His second Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adam, Louis D. Brandeis, and Alfred E. Kahn (Harvard Belknap, 1984), won a Pulitzer Prize.  His third. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Belknap Harvard,2007), broadened his view.  It is remarkable that McCraw finished either one of the last two: a mysterious heart condition kept him flat on his back and away from the archives for most of his last 10 years.   Of all the books about Hamilton’s contributions, including Ron Chernow’s massive biography, on which the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical is based, Founders and Finance is the one to read.   After 364 pages, McCraw concludes:

So the dream of an integrated, diversified, and booming economy – the aspiration of Hamilton, Gallatin and many other immigrants – eventually came true. Robert Morris, who had grown up in England, Hamilton in St. Croix, Gallatin in Geneva, Haym Solomon in Poland, Alexander James Dallas in Jamaica, Stephen Girard in France, John Jacob Astor and David Parish in Germany – all emigrated from their homelands with open minds, fresh eyes, and a flair for finance.  All, in both the public and private sectors, took the profound personal step of uprooting themselves because they believed they might achieve a better future in North America.  And that is what they did, both for themselves and for the United States.

Finally, as dusk approached, I picked up Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian (Norton, 2019), a curiously off-the-mark biography of the great nineteenth-century financial journalist, famous chiefly as the third editor of The Economist, author of The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market  by James Grant, founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, an eminent practitioner of the same craft in the present day. It was Bagehot’s advice – in a banking panic, lend freely at penalty rates to solvent institutions, until fear goes away – that central bankers and finance ministers followed in halting a global panic during a desperate five weeks in the autumn of 2008. In his memoir, The Courage to Act, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke cited Bagehot more often than any living economist, Grant notes.

Yet Grant begins the book by confessing his doubts about the wisdom of the very dictum for which Bagehot (pronounce it Badge-it) is remembered, “his embrace of the dubious notion, so corrosive to financial prudence, that the central bank has a social obligation to the citizens who present themselves as borrowers and lenders, investors and speculators. No other class of person enjoy special access to the government’s money machinery,” Grant says.  He resurrects Bagehot’s great foe in the arguments of the 1860s and 1870s, Thomas Hankey, a former governor of the Bank of England, to argue against central bank intervention in banking panics.

This makes for some strange moments in Grant’s account, as when Britain experiences no bank run in 1873, after the Bank of England adopted the lending rule Bagehot spelled out in Lombard Street, which appeared the same year.  Instead the Panic of 1873, which began in Vienna with the default of Egypt’s Suez Canal bonds, quickly spread to North America and the rest of Europe, and, as Grant puts it, “disarranged commerce and finance on both sides of the Atlantic long after the first shock waves subsided” – 20 hard years known at the time  in the U.S. as the Great Depression and in Britain as the Long Depression.

The recurring U.S. panics of the Gilded Age, culminating in the Panic of 1907, led Congress to create the Federal Reserve System.  The Fed opened for business in 1915 – the central government bank and banking system regulator that Hamilton had envisioned one hundred and twenty-five years before. Events since then are a story for another day.

Of the most recent pair of putative nominees, Waller, director of research of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, would ordinarily be a perfectly presentable candidate, except that his views are more or less a carbon copy of those of his boss, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, who already is a rotating member of the all-important policy-making Federal Open Market Committee.  And Shelton’s views, especially her enthusiasm for a gold standard, are fairly controversial.  There is, of course, no telling what the current Republican-led Senate might do.   But given the president’s fierce assault on the authority and independence of the Fed, I won’t be surprised of those  vacancies are still around next year.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran. He’s based in Somerville.

Spooky region

Stephen King’s house, in Bangor, Maine

“I think one of the reasons Stephen King's stories work so well is that he places his stories in spooky old New England, where a lot of American folk legends came from. ‘‘

— Ted Naifeh, cartoon artist and writer

'Good-natured impression'

Pin oak

“In New England, the pin oak thrives, its leaves tipping to a thorny point in a good-natured impression of its evergreen neighbor, the holly bush. ‘‘

— Hope Jahren, geochemist

A month of questions

Beatrix Potter's illustration of Babbity Bumble in “The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse” (1910).

Answer July—
Where is the Bee—
Where is the Blush—
Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July—
Where is the Seed—
Where is the Bud—
Where is the May—
Answer Thee—Me—"

”Answer July,’’ by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), who hardly ever left Amherst, Mass.

Am I blue?

Work by Bhen Alan in the Providence Art Club’s National Open Juried Exhibition through July 19.

How to do urban renewal

Hartford’s Constitution Plaza, an urban-renewal project that drove out many residents in what had been a stable neighborhood

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Tom Condon wrote a nice piece for The Connecticut Mirror on how to do and not do “urban renewal’’ with a focus, of course, on the Nutmeg State. A few particularly important things: Don’t tear up and/or divide city neighborhoods with huge limited-access highways, and try to avoid replacing structurally sound and attractive old buildings with sterile glass and steel structures.

When I lived near New Haven in the early and mid ’60s I remember how arrogant “urban renewal’’ tore apart that city. Without the presence of very rich Yale University as a moderating force, the well-meaning renewers, especially then Mayor Richard Lee and city development director Edward Logue, would have done even more damage to downtown New Haven. The repair work has been underway now for a generation, and the place looks much better.

Mr. Condon’s cites a new book by former New York City planner and Yale Prof. Alexander Garvin called In The Heart of the City. As explanation for the turnaround in some cities in recent years, he cites crime reduction, the creation of Business Improvement Districts to clean and promote downtowns (Providence has one) and the rise of the Internet, which has let companies sharply reduce the space they need for storage of documents. This has freed up a lot of space in buildings – space that can be converted to housing, this increasing population density downtown, which has provided more customers for local businesses and reduced crime (more eyes on the street), in a kind of virtuous circle.

To read Mr. Condon’s article, please hit this link.

Jim Hightower: Congress loves socialized medicine -- for itself

Good health care offered within.

Via OtherWords.org

For $3.5 trillion a year, shouldn’t we Americans have a world-class health care system? Yet while we spend the most of any advanced nation in the world to get care — more than $10,000 a year per person — we get the worst results.

No surprise, then, that Medicare for All is now backed by 85 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of independents, and (get this) 52 percent of Republicans!

So — why isn’t Congress responding to this overwhelming public demand for universal coverage?

I suspect that one big reason for Washington’s big yawn over the people’s plea for sweeping reform is that our lawmakers don’t personally feel the financial pain and emotional distress that are inflicted on millions of regular Americans by a system built on private greed.

After all, their health needs are met by a double-dose of the socialistic care that they so furiously deny to our families.

First, they’re given big taxpayer subsidies to cover the cost of their insurance, with you and me paying about 72 percent of the price. But second, there’s a secretive medical center right in the U.S. Capitol building that provides a full-blown system of — shhhhh — health-care socialism to our governing elites.

Called the Office of the Attending Physician (or OAP), it provides a complete range of free medical service for lawmakers. No appointment needed and no waiting — they walk in and doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, and other professionals tend to them right away.

No need to show an insurance card, and they never get a bill. But they do get what a former OAP staffer calls “the best health care on the planet.” Thus, members feel no urgency to restructure a system that’s working beautifully — for them.

So, to get good care for all of us, we might start by taking away the pampered care that lawmakers have quietly awarded to themselves.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.

Patty Wright: Newly blue Maine expands access to abortion

The Maine State House, designed by Charles Bulfinch, and built 1829–1832. Bullfinch also designed the famous Massachusetts State House, with its iconic gold dome.

Via Kaiser Health News

While abortion bans in Republican-led states dominated headlines in recent weeks, a handful of other states have expanded abortion access. Maine joined those ranks in June with two new laws ― one requires all insurance and Medicaid to cover the procedure and the other allows physician assistants and nurses with advanced training to perform it.

With these laws, Maine joins New York, Illinois, Rhode Island and Vermont as states that are trying to shore up the right to abortion in advance of an expected U.S. Supreme Court challenge. What sets Maine apart is how recently Democrats have taken power in the state.

“Elections matter,” said Nicole Clegg of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. Since the 2018 elections, Maine has its largest contingent of female lawmakers, with 71 women serving in both chambers. “We saw an overwhelming majority of elected officials who support reproductive rights and access to reproductive health care.”

The dramatic political change also saw Maine elect its first female governor, Janet Mills, a Democrat who took over from Paul LePage, a Tea Party stalwart who served two terms. LePage had blocked Medicaid expansion in the state even after voters approved it in a referendum.

Clegg and other supporters of abortion rights hailed the new abortion legislation: “It will be the single most important event since Roe versus Wadein the state of Maine.”

Taken together, the intent of the two laws is to make it easier for women to afford and to find abortion care in the largely rural state.

Nurse practitioners like Julie Jenkins, who works in a small coastal town, said that increasing the number of abortion providers will make it easier for patients who now have to travel long distances in Maine to have a doctor perform the procedure.

“Five hours to get to a provider and back ― that’s not unheard of,” Jenkins said.

Physician assistants and nurses with advanced training will be able to perform a surgical form of the procedure known as an aspiration abortion. These clinicians already are allowed to use the same technique in other circumstances, such as when a woman has a miscarriage.

Maine’s other new law, set to be implemented early next year, requires all insurance plans ― including Medicaid ― to cover abortions. Kate Brogan of Maine Family Planning said it’s a workaround for a U.S. law known as the Hyde Amendment that prohibits federal funding for abortions except to save the life of the woman, or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape.

“[Hyde] is a policy decision that we think coerces women into continuing pregnancies that they don’t want to continue,” Brogan said. “Because if you continue your pregnancy, Medicaid will cover it. But if you want to end your pregnancy, you have to come up with the money [to pay for an abortion].”

State dollars will now fund abortions under Maine’s Medicaid, which is funded by both state and federal tax dollars.

Though the bill passed in the Democratic-controlled legislature, it faced staunch opposition from Republicans during floor debates including Sen. Lisa Keim.

“Maine people should not be forced to have their hard-earned tax dollars [used] to take the life of a living pre-born child,” said Keim.

Instead, Keim argued, abortions for low-income women should be funded by supporters who wish to donate money; otherwise, the religious convictions of abortion opponents are at risk. “Our decision today cannot be to strip the religious liberty of Maine people through taxation,” Keim said during the debate.

Rep. Beth O’Connor, a Republican who says she personally opposes abortion but believes women should have a choice, said she had safety concerns about letting clinicians who are not doctors provide abortions.

“I think this is very risky, and I think it puts the woman’s health at risk,” O’Connor said.

In contrast, advanced practice clinicians say the legislation, which will take effect in September, said this law merely allows them to operate to the full scope of their expertise and expands access to important health care. The measure has the backing of physician groups like the Maine Medical Association.

Just as red-state laws restricting abortion are being challenged, so are Maine’s new laws. Days after Maine’s law on Medicaid abortion passed, organizations that oppose abortion rights announced they’re mounting an effort to put the issue on the ballot for a people’s veto.

This story is part of a partnership that includes Maine Public Radio, NPR and Kaiser Health News. Patty Wright is a reporter at Maine Public Radio.

Llewellyn King: An immigration fix that can be done now

I was once interested in buying a historic mansion in Virginia. It was a classic, but it needed a lot of work. It was being sold by a bank and, for a whole afternoon, my wife and I dreamed of owning it.

It was on the market because the previous owner, who had bought it to restore it, had gone broke. His mistake was that he had tried to do the whole job at once: the wiring, the plumbing, the plastering, the floors. Too much.

Had he done what other restorers would have done in similar situations, gone about restoration piece by piece, he would be the proprietor of a remarkable antebellum home today.

Some big jobs need to be done one thing at a time.

Immigration reform may be such a big job; so big it demands to be done in pieces, fixing what is fixable in the short term while the great issues -- who, from where and how many -- wait for another day and a calmer political climate.

To me, the most fixable is the plight of those who are already here: the 11 million illegal residents, predominantly from Central America.

They are here. They are people who succumbed to the basic human desire to better themselves and provide more for their families. They are illegal but they are not evil. They broke the law to find a better, safer life — the same motivation that brought people from Europe to these shores for five centuries.

Laws are made by people; human need and human aspiration are primal. We, American citizens (except those whose ancestors were transported in slavery), are the product of the same aspiration that has brought most illegal immigrants to live among us: to work hard, to raise families and to live in peace. Statistically, they are slightly more law-abiding than those who would have them gone by deportation. They are a vital new population of artisans -- skilled manual workers.

The Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group (ITIG) and its tireless founder, Mark Jason, a former IRS inspector and Reagan Republican, attracted my attention six years ago because it had a ready answer for those who are illegal but otherwise blameless.

Jason wants illegal immigrants to be given a 10-year, renewable work permit with a special tax provision: There would be a 5 percent tax levied on employers and a 5 percent tax paid by the worker – what Jason calls “five plus five.” The billions of dollars raised by the program would be earmarked for the neighborhoods where the illegals are concentrated to alleviate the burdens they impose on education, health care, policing and other social services.

Notably, his Malibu, Calif.-based group’s program has no amnesty in the usual sense; no path to citizenship, not even an entitlement to lifetime abode.

Jason has poured his personal fortune into a lobbying effort on behalf of the ITIG program, including congressional briefings and information sessions.

To me, the program would solve an immediate problem: It would end the massive deportations — so fundamentally un-American -- which have gone on through four administrations. It would allow families to come out from behind the curtain of fear -- fear in the knowledge that tonight might be their last night of hope, of a united a family and of a livable wage. In the morning (the favored time for arrests), the state could come down on hope and love with the dreaded knock on the door; paradise lost.

The Jason work-permit program is one room in the immigration edifice that could be renovated now, and with benefit rather than cost. The deportations cost in every way: They cost in lives shattered, ICE teams, deportation centers, court hearings, talented labor lost, and finally transportation to places now alien to most of those headed there as deportees – hapless and more or less stateless. There is a fix at hand.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

TD Garden to be closed for most of summer for makeover

From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)

“The TD Garden {the most important arena in New England} has announced that it will be closing for most of the summer of 2019 to undergo a makeover. The arena will be closed for nine weeks as the finishing touches on $100 million worth of upgrades are implemented before the next hockey and basketball seasons.

While the arena is closed, giant cranes will be brought in to rearrange about 16,500 seats in the arena’s bowl. The project will also see expanded concourses and club areas, as well as about 400 new seats hanging over existing stands from the ninth floor and the replacement of all loge and balcony seating. When complete, around 50,000 square feet of space will have been added. The project will begin in July following the conclusion of the Boston Celtics’ season.

Amy Latimer, President of TD Garden, commented, “We knew we had two teams that were going to be in the playoffs. We said we might as well not plan on any construction in June, anyway.” Speaking about how some events had to find alternative venues, Latimer said, “People were great. Everyone understands these are massive projects.”

The Council congratulates TD Garden for making these impressive upgrades and for enhancing the fan experience at the arena.’’

Unfashionable antiques

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

My clan has some elderly furniture and other old stuff. There’s a maple grandfather clock made for a great-great-something grandfather of mine called Rufus Noyes in the 18th Century, my father’s desk, with numerous hiding places for documents, from the same period, some uncomfortable old chairs from Victorian times, some old bureaus and end tables, some musty religious and other books from the 1600’s, my murdered great uncle William Dale White’s limited edition of the complete works of Alphonse Daudet and other odds and ends, including a nice portrait of a Whitcomb lady ancestor of mine done in about 1830 and looking a bit like the poet Emily Dickinson, and a pretty good painting of Minot’s Light, with three-masted schooner, off Cohasset, Mass., where I lived as a boy. None of it has much value, except emotionally. There’s a family story with each of these things.

Indeed, the value, especially of the furniture, could be falling as I type, if a rather sad Yankee magazine article on the antiques business is on mark. It’s titled “The Death of Brown Furniture,’’ and basically asserts that Millennials, being more interested in “experiences’’ than in “things,’’ aren’t interested in really old stuff, although many apparently like such “Mid-Century Modern’’ furniture as Danish modern.

The veteran antiques dealer and frequent Antiques Roadshow guest Ron Bourgeault, who is quoted in the article, is probably correct: Society’s and especially younger folks’ waning interest in, and knowledge of, history explains at least some of the falling price of antiques. That’s too bad. If we don’t know where we’ve been, it’s harder to know where we’re going. I don’t have all that much interest in the precise genealogy of my New England/Minnesota/New York/English/Scottish/French ancestors but I love to learn the stories associated with these old artifacts, some of which contain some useful lessons.

I remember with a pang my mother throwing out Victorian and Edwardian furniture back in the late ‘50s, perhaps after a few drinks. A lot of it was ugly, but, again, each piece had story with it, happy or sad.

Oh yes, I forgot the old banjo clock with the picture of the Boston Massacre on it and the collections of the works of Sir Walter Scott , Robert Lewis Stevenson and James Russell Lowell! All asthma-inducing.

Splat!

Emergence (mixed media on canvas), by Honour Mack, in the group show “FLUX II,’’ July 6 through Aug. 10, at the Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine.

Looking to help Mass. 'Hilltowns'

The arts center in Becket, Mass., one of the “Hilltowns’’

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

An article by Catherine Tumber in the usually interesting Commonwealth (as in Mass.) Magazine looks at the challenges facing western Massachusetts’s “Hilltowns,’’ which are just east of the Berkshires. Some of the issues raised recall those facing rural and exurban towns in hilly interior western Rhode Island and interior eastern Connecticut. The heavily forested and rocky area includes towns with many poor people, in part because some of these towns – really more like villages -- had mills that have long since closed, and the region’s farms tend to be hardscrabble. Vacationers and rich weekend and summer folks favor the Berkshires themselves.

So Hilltown leaders are banking on such things as tourism, arts, history and, sigh, marijuana cultivation to reenergize their economies and draw more visitors. One thing that many Hilltowners don’t want is cheap-goods store chains such as Dollar General, whose arrival often kills beloved local stores.

As in Rhode Island and Connecticut, counties are generally pretty insignificant in Massachusetts. I wonder if giving some counties more power would give areas with little political clout, such as the Hilltowns, more political pull at state houses.

To read the Commonwealth article, please hit this link.

Llewellyn King: America still the land of dreams

The head of the 2017 Bristol, R.I., Fourth of July Parade. The parade is said to be the nation’s oldest, with the first one in 1785.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Light the candles, tune the instruments, warm up the vocal cords, a very special day is upon us. It is time to celebrate a birth, a unique birth, and a birth that in many ways has lit human hope, kindled human aspiration and fired up a few revolutions.

Happy birthday, America!

I do not know any other country that has a birthday. Others have days that celebrate their independence, their casting off a colonial state or the expulsion of a tyrannical power, but no other country has a birthday. Celebrate that, too.

As I was born a Brit, I have no idea how I would have greeted the events of 1776. Would I, like Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish orator and member of Parliament, have seen the emerging difference between the rugged, inventive, self-motivated farmers in the American colonies and the then subservient masses in Britain? Or would I, like Lord North, prime minister of Great Britain, and his monarch George III, have regarded the colonists as traitors?

The farmers, these landed gentlemen, were not only creating a new country destined for world leadership, but they also were forming what would come to be the universal middle class, where accomplishment would triumph birth.

Slowly in the United States, the idea grew that people who worked with their hands could belong to the middle class, aspire to having their children go to college and move up; to improve on their parents’ station in life. While this did not reach fruition until the last century, the seeds were sown in the 18th century. It was an American evolution.

When I was a boy in faraway Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), we worshipped all things American, although we were also devotedly British. My father, who worked with his hands, had read that American artisans could enjoy a middle-class life. Awesome. A local publisher, Bernard Woolf, told me that the United States led the world because, for example, you could study ice cream making in college. I do not know where he got that idea, maybe from something he had read about Howard Johnson’s and its 28 flavors of ice cream.

As teenagers we fantasized about owning American products, including cars complete with fins and automatic drive. In fact, when the first automatics — which were American, of course — showed up, the dealership in Salisbury (now Harare) was mobbed by people anxious to see this marvel.

We believed in the virtues of the dwindling British Empire (we were a living, breathing example of it), but also in American know-how, and that there was no human challenge that America could not meet. That was slightly dented when the United States failed (correctly) to back Britain and France in the Suez Crisis of 1956, and again when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik the following year.

None of that really mattered. The United States remained, as Ronald Reagan was to say later, “a city on a hill” for us.

When I moved to Britain itself, I heard the first criticisms of the United States — heard for the first time that it was a harsh, cruel place. That was the socialist line that affected many Labor Party followers. But no one suggested that the United States was anything other than a land of opportunity.

I will bet that if you stood anywhere in the world and said, “I have a bunch of green cards here for the first takers,” you would be sacked like a quarterback on a bad day.

America is still the place to be if you want to cast off the bonds of limitation which abound around the world, whether they are social, economic or religious. This is the land of opportunity; opportunity to pursue all manner of dreams and to buck the conventional.

Week after week, in my work as a columnist and broadcaster, I criticize something about the United States, from the death penalty to the health care system, to economic unfairness. So much so that you might not know I dearly love the place.

Happy Fourth of July, America. Happy birthday, Land of Dreams.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

New Balance to open 'Factory of the Future' next year in Methuen

From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)

“New Balance Athletics, Inc, is moving forward with plans to build its sixth factory in New England. This factory will be the company’s first new manufacturing plant in two decades.

“New Balance is set to open what it calls its ‘Factory of the Future’ in Methuen, Mass., in 2020. This project is supported by the Economic Assistance Coordinating Council of Massachusetts, which has just approved $900,000 in state tax credits. The $33 million project will create 60 new jobs in the 80,000-square-foot facility, focusing on testing advanced manufacturing techniques, 3-D printing, and research and development.’’

New approach needed for global fisheries management

— NOAA photo

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
The tiniest plants and creatures in the ocean fuel entire food webs, including the fish that much of the world’s population depends on for food and work.

In a paper recently published in Science Advances, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries researcher Jason Link and colleague Reg Watson from the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies suggest that scientists and resource managers need to focus on whole ecosystems rather than solely on individual populations.

Population-by-population fishery management is more common, but a new worldwide approach could help avoid overfishing and the insecurity that it brings to fishing economies, according to the paper.

“In simple terms, to successfully manage fisheries in an ecosystem, the rate of removal for all fishes combined must be equal to or less than the rate of renewal for all those fish,” said Link, the senior scientist for ecosystem management at NOAA Fisheries and a former fisheries scientist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, in Woods Hole, Mass.

The authors suggest using large-scale ecosystem indices as a way to determine when ecosystem overfishing is occurring. They proposed three indices, each based on widely available catch and satellite data, to link fisheries landings to primary production and energy transfer up the marine food chain.

Specific thresholds developed for each index make it possible, they said, to determine if ecosystem overfishing is occurring. By their definition, ecosystem overfishing occurs when the total catch of all fish is declining, the total catch rate or fishing effort required to get that catch is also declining, and the total landings relative to the production in that ecosystem exceed suitable limits.

“Detecting overfishing at an ecosystem level will help to avoid many of the impacts we have seen when managing fished species on a population-by-population basis, and holds promise for detecting major shifts in ecosystem and fisheries productivity much more quickly,” Link said.

In the North Sea, for example, declines in these indices suggested that total declines in fish catch indicative of ecosystem overfishing was occurring about 5-10 years earlier than what was pieced together by looking at sequential collapses in individual populations of cod, herring, and other species. Undue loss of value and shifting the catches in that ecosystem to one dominated by smaller fishes and invertebrates could have been avoided, according to the authors.

The first index used in the study is the total catch in an area, or how much fish a given patch of ocean can produce. The second is the ratio of total catches to total primary productivity, or how much fish can come from the plants at the base of the food web. The third index is the ratio of total catch to chlorophyll, another measure for marine plant life, in an ecosystem.

Proposed thresholds for each index are based on the known limits of the productivity of any given part of the ocean. Using these limits, the authors said local or regional context should be considered when deciding what management actions to take to address ecosystem overfishing. Having international standards would make those decisions much easier and emphasize sustainable fisheries.

“We know that climate change is shifting many fish populations toward the poles, yet the fishing fleets and associated industries are not shifting with them,” Link said. “That already has had serious economic and cultural impacts.”

The authors note that they are able to follow these shifts over time and see how they can exacerbate or even contribute to ecosystem overfishing.

Fisheries are an important part of the global economy. In addition to trade and jobs, fish provide the primary source of protein to more than 35 percent of the world’s population, and 50 percent of the people in the least developed countries, according to the authors. Regions where the greatest amount of ecosystem overfishing occurs are also where impacts can be the greatest.

The researchers looked at 64 large marine ecosystems around the world and found those in the tropics, especially in Southeast Asia, have the highest proportion of ecosystem overfishing. Temperate regions also have a high level of ecosystem overfishing, with limited capability to absorb shifting fishing pressure from the tropics as species move toward the poles.

David Warsh: The young and the restless in presidential politics

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

It has long seemed to me that the United States began to lose its way in 1992, when Bill Clinton defeated George. H. W. Bush for the presidency. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The Soviet Union had disbanded. The Cold War had ended. Bush was highly popular in the wake of the First Gulf War.

Leading Democrats – such as Gov. Mario Cuomo, Jesse Jackson and Sen. Al Gore — declined to run. (Gore’s son had been gravely injured in an auto accident.) Instead, Gov. Bill Clinton, former Gov. Jerry Brown, Senators Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey and Tom Harkin all joined the chase.

Bush reappointed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Fed, but later charged that Greenspan reneged on a promise to ease monetary policy slightly, to compensate for the tax increase that Bush had requested to pay for the war and the mild recession (July 1990-March ’91) that had resulted. The recovery in the year before the election was unusually tepid.

Populist commentator Pat Buchanan ran against Bush from the right in Republican primaries. Though he won no states, he polled more votes than expected, especially in New Hampshire. As Buchanan faded, an emboldened H. Ross Perot entered the campaign as an independent candidate, exited, and re-entered. He won 19 percent of the popular vote in the end but failed to gain a single electoral vote.

Clinton won the election. After 12 years as vice president and president, Bush was all-too-familiar; Clinton was fresh. Bush had been the youngest Navy pilot in World War II. Clinton was a Baby Boomer who skipped Vietnam. Bush lacked energy; Clinton was a dynamo.

America enjoyed a few years of exhilaration in the Nineties: the introduction of the Internet; a dot.com mania; and, thanks to eight years of brisk growth, a balanced federal budget, after 20 years of surging deficits,. Looking back, though, Clinton was ill prepared by his years as Arkansas governor to make foreign policy. Two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford had made him overconfident as well.

Unilateral humanitarian interventions followed in the Balkan civil wars that flared after the Soviet Union collapsed. NATO expansions were undertaken that the Bush administration, expecting a second term, had promised would not occur. Russia protested, but was powerless to prevent any of it. Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin and grew increasingly resentful.

Without the discipline imposed by of the Cold War, domestic politics turned rambunctious as well. Clinton empowered his wife to seek to overhaul U.S. health insurance. Congressman Newt Gingrich replied with his “Contract with America,” gained 54 House seats and 9 Senate seats in the 1994 mid-term elections. Republican enmity toward Clinton, which had begun to overspill the bounds of decency soon after the inauguration, reached flood levels with the impeachment and failed conviction proceedings of Clinton’s second term.

The next two presidencies, 16 years, amounted to more of the same. NATO expansion continued, reaching the borders of Russia. Relations with China remained amicable throughout. George W. Bush started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama pursued regime change in Libya (successfully) and Syria (unsuccessfully). The third presidential go-round, which started out in 2015 as a presumed Bush-Clinton rematch (Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton) is what eventually got us to Trump.

Now Americans may be about to do it again – to prefer youth and personal ambition to consensus. The situation today is a little like 1992 in reverse. An over-abundance of Democratic Party candidates are eager to take on Donald Trump (or, in the event that he prefers not to run, Vice President Mike Pence). California Sen.

Kamala Harris damaged former Vice President Joe Biden in the debate last week. She projected youth and vigor. Biden was cautious; he had to contend with his record over 44 years of swiftly changing national politics. That Harris used the murky issue of federal court-ordered busing to attack Biden struck me as especially low. Nevertheless, Harris emerged as a candidate capable of taking on Trump. Her next challenge will be to finesse the health-care issue that handcuffed her in the debate.

She is also the candidate to watch out for, as Clinton was the candidate to watch out for in 1992. Clinton’s character didn’t come into focus until 1995, when First in His Class, David Maraniss’s brilliant biography, appeared. Harris will presumably receive a series of earlier screenings. Her appeal to her base, women and African Americans, is obvious. It remains to be seen whether she can persuade swing constituencies near the center of American political life,

Leaping far ahead, my guess is that only a better-than-expected showing by Biden or South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the California primary on Super Tuesday, March 3 (if they survive that long), will force Harris to wait. Bill Clinton would have been a much better president if he had first been elected in 1996. Mitt Romney might have defeated Hillary Clinton if he had waited until 2016.

But the young and/or the restless have dominated the top of the food chain for the last 28 years. True, it was John F. Kennedy who first jumped the queue, an element of collective memory that Clinton employed to enhance his license. With the exception of Barack Obama, they haven’t been good for the country.

David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time columnist on business, politics and media, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.

'Posthumously Blooming'

“Why Art? ‘‘(oil on linen), by Joanne Tarlin, in her show “Posthumously Blooming,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, July 3-July 28.

The gallery says:

“Joanne Tarlin celebrates her father's life and works in her exhibition "Posthumously Blooming". He was a novelist, among other pursuits, living among poets, painters, musicians and intellectuals; the book was not published and was secreted away until after his death. Entitled The Artist's Life, the book has inspired his daughter's work towards the romantic, moody and atmospheric. Flowers and dissolving text excerpts wind in and out of the surface and reflect the artist's connection with mortality.’’

Treeless air

Lafayette Street in Salem, Mass., in 1910: an example of the '‘high-tunnelled effects'‘ of American elms over streets and a scene once common in New England — until Dutch elm disease killed most of these lovely plants in the mid-20th Century.

“Here where the elm trees were

is only empty air.

Where once they stood

How blunt the buildings are!

Where the trees were,
sky itself has fled

far overhead.’’

From “Elegy,’’ by Constance Carrier (1908-1991), a Connecticut poet and teacher