Editor's Blog
Middle-schooLers in Eugene, Ore., performed at an Ellis Island immigration simulation last year (Chris Pietsch/The Register-Guard/AP)
The making of Americans
All Americans are immigrants. Some arrived ages before there were visas and borders or even countries; most came after. Some arrived against their will; most arrived hungry for what lay ahead. As recounted in thousands of immigrant stories, the first days in the New World could be glorious, dizzying, and upsetting. Opportunity was abundant and freedom exhilarating. But language, laws, and customs could be puzzling. Natives could be brusque. Work could be tedious and dangerous.
When the speed and excess got to be too much, there was always a sanctuary of fellow immigrants, where faith, food, and conversation were familiar. From the outside, Little Italy, Chinatown, and every other ethnic neighborhood could seem strange, even threatening. In the early 20th century, Anglo-Americans worried that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe weren’t fitting in. They were creating separate cultures and threatening the status quo. This was not just paranoia. Anarchists and labor activists, many rooted in immigrant communities, challenged the power structure. Criminal groups operated out of ethnic communities. IQ tests appeared to show a gap between native- and foreign-born.
But earlier immigrants had also kept to themselves (Germans in Pennsylvania, Swedes in Minnesota), challenged the power structure (1776 for example), suffered their share of criminality (the Bowery Boys of the 1840s, the outlaws of the West), and were considered less intelligent, motivated, and hygienic than those who arrived before them.
All the while, however, the assimilation engine was running. Music, manners, and food were sampled – gingerly at first, then creatively. Tacos with Vietnamese hot sauce? Why not? Accents altered, friendships kindled, rings were exchanged. It was not always smooth, but year by year families blended, neighborhoods integrated, new citizens voted, and the nation evolved.
As Congress considers legislation that could grant citizenship to millions of people, the question hanging in the air is whether the assimilation engine still works. Scholars such as the late Samuel Huntington of Harvard University and commentators such as Pat Buchanan have warned that the influx of Latin Americans risks dividing the country into two societies. Census data and social-science research – measuring everything from educational achievement to homeownership to intermarriage – say otherwise.
As Stephanie Hanes’s report shows (click here), the process of assimilation is far from straightforward, especially among first-generation immigrants. Most flourish, some don’t – just like the native born.
“So why is it that some residents in some states with large new immigrant populations believe that integration is not occurring?” asked a 2010 report by the Center for American Progress. “One reason is that new arrivals increased over a short period while assimilation, by definition, can only be observed over time.”
If all Americans are immigrants, we all have an immigrant story. My father’s parents, for instance, arrived from Italy in the early 20th century; my mother’s family was from Germany in the mid-19th century. Along the way, the name got changed. There is no “Y” in the Italian alphabet. So Yemma is an American name – as is Smith, Garcia, Yee, Shapiro, Shaloub, Nguyen, Patel, Obama, and every other name in the American phone book.
If I may speak for them: It isn’t always easy becoming an American, but it’s always good to be one.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Chris Bull of Circle A Cycles in Providence, R.I., builds a made-to-order bicycle. (Alfredo Sosa/Staff)
It's the 'Bicycle Spring'
Primitive tribes that could barely feed themselves put enormous effort into grandeur – monuments, fortifications, catapults – the bigger the better to impress allies and intimidate enemies. Modern nations build aircraft carriers and skyscrapers for the same reason. Humans have a thing about scale. It’s hard to ignore a cathedral, superhighway, jumbo jet, or Cadillac Escalade.
So let’s talk about the opposite. This week’s cover story is about an almost two-century-old contraption that isn’t at all formidable. A bike is thin and frail and awkward looking, even with a Tour de France athlete aboard. It is quintessentially human in scale. It holds one person (two if you are romantic, though I’ve seen four or more riders in developing countries) and converts muscle into locomotion more efficiently than any other vehicle.
For a while in the late 19th century, bikes were the wonders of the age. Pre-automobile Henry Ford rode one. Pre-airplane Wright brothers built them. But for most of the 20th century two-wheelers retreated before the onslaught of increasingly impressive quadricycles. Bikes carved out a niche as kid’s toy, college necessity, and weekend amusement. Cars ruled.
During the mid-1970s, I experimented for a week with the bicycle-only life in Dallas. It was fun but also harrowing, sweaty, and lonely. I was the freak on the streets. Pickup trucks and muscle cars were the norm and didn’t mind letting me know it. By Week 2, sheet-metal armor seemed like a wise move.
That was then. Now riding to and from work has slipped over the line from colorful and a bit odd to normal and, in some workplaces, expected. Vulnerable lone cyclists have grown into solid ranks of riders. What’s behind that? Fresh air, exercise, and, most important, zero emissions. Bikes are greener than a Prius or Tesla. The International Bicycle Fund calculates that an average person on a bicycle can travel three miles on the caloric energy of one egg. A person walking the same distance requires three eggs. A fully loaded bus burns the equivalent of two dozen eggs per person. A train ... well, we’re talking lots of eggs.
As Ron Scherer and a team of Monitor correspondents show (click here) urban planners increasingly see bikes as an integral part of a transportation system. Cities are not just building bike lanes but facilitating bike sharing. The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London has a fascinating interactive map showing bike sharing worldwide (click here -- and a comprehensive map can be found here). While the sheer numbers of urban rental bikes are still only in the hundreds of thousands, there are bike-sharing programs from Taipei, Taiwan, to Fort Worth, Texas.
This is the Bicycle Spring. That is both plaudit and caution. As in other people-power movements, bicyclists have been so long oppressed by cars that they have a well-earned chip on their shoulder. They’ve had to endure lane swervers, door openers, hostile drivers. Every rider dreads potholes, slick roads, and unleashed dogs. Is it any wonder that some cyclists have gone militant? So here’s the caution: Use the newfound strength-in-numbers wisely. A stoplight applies to bikes, too. Weaving in and out of traffic isn’t fair or wise. Sidewalks and crosswalks are for pedestrians, who have their own issues with oppression.
We’ll get the hang of this. Bikes are no longer marginal enjoyments. They are in the mainstream and staying there.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com. This article has been updated to include a link to a more comprehensive map of bicycle sharing programs worldwide.
Marchers call for the release of jailed US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning outside Fort Meade, MD. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Feeling for freedom's limits
People across the world stand in front of tanks, brave tear gas and rubber bullets, and sacrifice their lives for freedom. Freedom is among humanity’s deepest aspirations, a concept understood in every heart and revered in every society.
But what exactly is the measure of freedom?
In early 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt declared that a secure world rested on four essential human freedoms. Two were already enshrined in the US Constitution and familiar to generations of Americans: freedom of expression and worship. The other two were novel, even radical at the time. One was freedom from want, which Roosevelt described as the right of everyone to “a healthy peaceful life.” The other was freedom from fear, meaning that “no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.”
FDR’s four freedoms are echoed in the preamble of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Four of Norman Rockwell’s most beloved paintings – the working-class guy standing to speak at a public meeting, worshipers’ heads bowed in prayer, a family gathered for Thanksgiving dinner, and parents tucking in their children while the dad holds a newspaper with the words “bombings” and “horror” in the headline – illustrate those four freedoms.
The struggle for freedom to and freedom from has propelled history for the past 72 years. It is behind virtually every news event. You can see it in the successive fights against fascism and communism. You can see it in the campaign for equal rights for African-Americans, women, and dozens of groups once excluded from full participation in self-government and the pursuit of happiness. You can see it in this week’s issue of the Monitor Weekly.
The quest for freedom from want has spurred worldwide progress against hunger, poverty, and disease. It explains, for instance, the massive mobilization against AIDS in Africa and other parts of the world as described by Jina Moore in a Monitor cover story. With the disease increasingly under control thanks to a sustained public health effort, Jina shows, the mothers, fathers, and children once crippled by HIV are increasingly free from fear. The newspapers they clutch no longer headline the horror of the disease.
Freedom from aggression, meanwhile, is at the heart of new questions about the US National Security Agency surveillance program. Terrorism is a very real public concern. But does national security require that every phone call and Internet click be saved? A Republican and a Democratic president – and a succession of members of Congress and a majority of the public as measured by current opinion polls – think so. But the revelation of the scope of the NSA’s data mining has touched off a national debate.
Absolute freedom is an ideal. But in the relative world of humanity, freedom’s extent and limits are always being reexamined and adjusted. Should all speech, including obscenity and hate speech, be free? Is there a point at which religious worship imposes on other people’s freedoms? Can a social safety net be maintained without fostering dependence or bankrupting the treasury? And where’s the line between security and liberty?
Asking and answering those questions is what we do in a free society. And after we decide, we’ll ask and answer again.
Members of a dance team presented by the Hindu Student Association prepared for Competition at a Bellaire, Texas, high school. (Eric Kayne/Special to the Christian Science Monitor )
Public schools, private beliefs
P
erception and reality are from different planets. Depending on the commentators you listen to or the news sources you read, for instance, you might believe that religion has been hounded out of American public schools. Alternatively, you might think that the only way people talk about religious differences is with aggressiveness, defensiveness, and misunderstanding.
The reality may surprise you. In her cover story, Lee Lawrence documents the many ways that religion, faith, and prayer are present in the public school systems. In the half century since the Supreme Court banned school prayer, Americans have traveled a path from believing there should be virtually no religious expression in schools to a place where the study of religion is increasingly accepted as part of a student’s normal acquisition of knowledge – and where prayer, discussion of faith, and religious training are as much an option in extracurricular activities as are the science club, pep squad, and 4-H.
In class, students are exploring the varieties of religious experience, the history of religion, and the need to understand other faiths in a diverse society and global economy. Kids do not, however, pray together during class – although nothing has ever prevented an individual from praying on his or her own, as long as it is not required or encouraged by teachers.
Separation of church and state remains a pillar of American life, clearly articulated in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But while the state must not back any particular faith – or even faith itself – it also must not restrict expressions of faith. The First Amendment says Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and goes on to say there shall be no law “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
That two-part principle was fought for more than a century before the Constitution was written. In 1657, a group of non-Quakers in New Amsterdam stood up for the rights of Quakers at a time when the colony’s governor, Peter Stuyvesant, was trying to stamp out any religion other than the Dutch Reformed Church.
In what is known as the Flushing Remonstrance (Flushing is a neighborhood of what is now Queens), the colonists argued that just as Holland allowed religious freedom to “Jews, Turks, and Egyptians,” New Amsterdam should do so for “Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, or Quaker.”
The governor promptly jailed four of the signers and forced them to recant. More colonists stood up for freedom to worship; more arrests followed. By 1663, the Dutch West India Company had had enough, telling Stuyvesant to stand down because “The consciences of men at least ought ever to remain free and unshackled.”
The freedom that took root in New Amsterdam was that belief should not be imposed and believing should not be stifled. This is tricky, especially in the schools. Within a classroom, a teacher could cross the line and become a religious advocate. Peer pressure can try to force conformity. The way one looks and dresses, what one consumes, how observant a person is – these can easily cause misunderstanding, especially among the young.
Careful education about religion is important in a world where all types of believers and nonbelievers coexist. Freedom from imposed belief and freedom to believe dwell on the same planet – a planet where consciences must ever remain free and unshackled.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Hiking near Heart Lake at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters/File)
The greening of the West
West is just a point on the compass, there to the left as you face north. But throughout history, the west has been associated with freedom and fresh starts. Explorers, dreamers, iconoclasts, and opportunity seekers have always followed the sun. The west has tugged at the imagination since the earliest epochs of Indo-European migration.
The torch of civilization was relayed from Persia to Greece to Rome. Though it dimmed for a few hundred years, it again moved westward with the Renaissance and Reformation. Then it was on to the New World and the westward push of pioneers. In the decades ahead, the handover is likely to stretch across the Pacific toward the economic powerhouses of Asia.
The West that we look at in a Monitor cover story is the one embedded in the American mind, the one captured by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington, and Ansel Adams with their images of the almost impossibly beautiful Rockies, Tetons, and Pacific Northwest. Todd Wilkinson, who has written covers for us on the return of wolves and the rise of the green ranching in that region, now surveys its robust economy and its green ethos.
Once merely gorgeous, isolated, and quaint – primarily valued only for minerals, timber, and recreation – the Intermountain West is now attracting innovators, venture capitalists, and knowledge workers who love the idea of trout fishing, mountain biking, and blasting down black-diamond slopes when they aren’t teleconferencing with Shanghai and London.
Rugged individualists have made their way to the region for generations, real-life versions of the Jeremiah Johnson character Robert Redford played. Being self-sufficient and cut off from the outside world was not just the norm, it was the whole point. But connectivity has changed that. Now you can have the serenity of a clear blue mountain lake but still have access to the digital cloud and the global economy.
Like any quest for happiness, however, the growing popularity of the Intermountain West has its “yes, buts.” The British philosopher Jeremy Bentham termed the human quest for beauty and pleasure – and the desire to have more and more of it – the “felicific calculus.” If you like that view, how about having it every day? Enjoy trout fishing on vacation? Why not trout fish before you go to work?
The problem is that as more humans run their felicific calculations and decide to live in pleasant places, their presence changes the balance. An old-timer grumbled when you arrived 20 years ago. Now a thousand new arrivals are ruining paradise for you. This isn’t just a perspective problem. The New World after Columbus was conquered, exploited, and despoiled. Careless rushes for land, gold, and energy resources have left scars on wilderness throughout the world.
Will the Intermountain West be different? Maybe. As you’ll see in Todd’s report, the conservation/environmentalism ethic runs deep in the region. It cuts across the lines of politics, business, and even the traditional divide between old-timer and new arrival. Almost everyone is running the same calculation. Almost everyone wants economic and environmental balance.
The difference this time – the thing that may make the Intermountain West sustainable – is a powerful desire to keep alive the West of our imagination.
James Madison University graduate Nandi Alexander celebrated May 4 in Harrisonburg, Va. (Michael Reilly/Daily News-Record/AP)
Are MOOCs making education a monoculture?
A tree farm produces a monoculture you can count on. Its timber efficiently becomes the lumber that makes houses and furniture. A woodlot is a little more sketchy. It might begin as a forgotten weed patch, grow into a scrubby forest, and eventually host a mini-United Nations of species. Left alone, a woodlot can become an interestingly varied patch of earth, maybe even a natural treasure.
Conventionality or originality? Most of us choose both. We don’t want surprises when it comes to floor joists. We prefer our airline pilots not to let the muse guide them to Pittsburgh. But leave room for serendipity. Order keeps our world humming. The unthought-of tips the world’s equilibrium. It can be as disruptive as quantum physics, as fresh as Beethoven or The Beatles.
Education is forever balancing and rebalancing uniformity and creativity. Basic competence has to be mastered. But innovative thinking must be encouraged. Read the canon of great literature, but don’t be afraid to demolish conventional wisdom. Students and their parents seek out the best school and best teachers, hoping for the best education. But students can flourish at middling colleges and with average teachers if their reading is inspiring, their lab work intriguing, their thinking encouraged.
When you read Laura Pappano’s cover story on the huge stir being caused by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, pronounced “mooks”), you may at first think that there’s nothing new under the sun. Correspondence courses, after all, began in the 19th century. Over the decades, educational institutions have experimented with teaching via radio, television, closed-circuit video, and the Internet. And each new distance-learning technology has prompted predictions of the demise of ivy-clad campuses, the loss of mentoring by belovedly quirky profs, and the end of fond memories of college life. Fifteen years ago, a reporter from The Boston Globe marveled at how 1990s cutting-edge technology – “a two-way PictureTel compressed-video system linked by high-speed phone lines” – was connecting a classroom on Martha’s Vineyard with a university on the Massachusetts mainland. As one university official told him (well, actually, told me): “What is better in terms of quality – a dull, boring, standard lecture, or a penetrating lecture by a great teacher, backed up with all the best video props...?”
The PictureTel wonderment didn’t disrupt the college paradigm back then. Will MOOCs? Perhaps. The technology and pedagogy of online ed is constantly improving. And the pressing need to control costs seems destined to drive online education forward. That worries some people. This spring, philosophy professors at San Jose State University in California sent a protest letter to political philosophy superstar Michael Sandel of Harvard University decrying the MOOCing of his course of social justice. Among other things, they warned, “the thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary – something out of a dystopian novel.”
A balance needs to be struck between the franchising of high-quality education and the more intimate, locally grown experience that occurs when teachers and students reason together in a classroom. It seems inevitable that the MOOC monoculture will spread. But let’s make sure we preserve the woodlot. Amazing, unthought-of ideas could be growing in it.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
A family walks along the rocks on West Beach in Deception Pass State Park in Oak Harbor, Wash. (Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times/AP)
Vacation: nothing better
History doesn’t move in straight lines. It zigzags. Here’s where it seems to be zagging: toward a rethink of the hard-charging, high-tech, always-on culture that has imposed itself on the modern world. Let’s call it the Not Wired and Proud of It direction.
Exhibit A: Our cover story by Dan Wood on the growing embrace of “do nothing” vacations, meaning vacations that don’t feature kite-surfing through the Bering Sea or learning Mandarin in a two-week cram session or – and this is the most likely possibility – continuing to be a productive careerist via e-mail, cellphone, and teleconference even as the kids frolic in the nearby surf. These are vacations that are about vacating the workplace, freeing the mind, quieting the body, and enjoying the moment.
Exhibit B: A recent New York Times report on how even Twitter mavens and Pinterest honchos have discovered the pleasures of paper, pencils, face-to-face conversation, and the wonderful world that exists beyond the range of cell signals. They shut off their transponders at dinner and concentrate on the people sitting across from them instead of LOLing at text messages from other time zones.
Exhibit C: TheAtlantic.com’s report that “chick lit” about young women pursuing urbanist careers and rom-com antics – think “Friends” and “Sex and the City” (neither of which, honestly, I have ever watched) – have been eclipsed by novels about young women abandoning the bright lights and fast track for simpler lives, smaller towns, and more homespun fellas. Even daydreams, this seems to show, can be downsized.
That’s three examples, so this must be a trend – or at least a mild protest against the hyperconnected, hyperproductive, and just plain hyped-up world of hot new things – from consumer electronics to media sensations, political scandals to summer blockbusters. Time to slow down, many people seem to be thinking. Time to unhook from the Internet, catch our collective breath, grab a cane pole, gather wool (though not from specially bred
llamas at an Andean dude ranch).
The not-wired movement may be nothing more than a rear-guard action against the blitzkrieg of busyness. Oh, there are true believers in it, among them the “neo-Luddites,” who run the spectrum from those raising gentle questions about a life out of balance (Wendell Berry: “There comes ... a longing never to travel again except on foot”) to those who want to throw a spanner into the entire techno-industrial machinery (Theodore Kaczynski).
But we’re talking here about mainstream folks, working Joes and Janes who just want time to concentrate on the here and now, think a little deeper, appreciate the wrinkles etched in a beloved face, and smell the newly mowed grass – even if they get right back into the game when time off is over.
This is not an argument for being unadventurous. The world is fascinating and should be explored. Museums are treasure houses. Visiting Prague, Paris, Kyoto, or the water slide in the next county can be excellent activities. Woodland trails are portals into other dimensions. I’m just saying that it might be better to scratch “sky diving” off the to-do list and pencil in ... nothing.
Ten thousand poems tell us to do this. Every naturalist urges it. And we all know it in our souls. First we have to put down our hand-held devices and stop doing something. Then we can do nothing – which may be more than we’ve done all year.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Pedestrians walk along a seawater canal in Songdo park in Incheon, South Korea. (Ann Hermes/Staff)
South Korea's amazing rise
Scratch the confident surface of any capital city, classroom, or business and you’ll hear the same question: How can we be more innovative? It’s a question chewed over in design studios, research labs, brainstorming sessions, and countless management books.
Innovation is the secret sauce everybody wants to bottle, the DNA of groundbreaking patents and products. It will drive the next generation of hybrid engines, solar cells, robots, and pop tunes. Innovation creates jobs, boosts trade, grows GDP.
People and cultures that believe they have an innovation deficit are not above trying to steal – or at least copy. “Fast follower” is the common term for countries adept at seeing good ideas and going them one better (and usually one cheaper). Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even the United States built up their initial industrial strength by copycatting. The US wouldn’t have been the 19th-century textile superpower that it was if not for processes and machinery pirated from Britain.
China – the colossal fast-follower of modern times – knows that if it is going to be anything other than a low-cost producer it needs to wean itself off of copying, counterfeiting, and cheating. It needs to be genuinely innovative. But how? Innovation involves an unlikely combination of careful research, preparation, productivity, and the freedom to dream up and share ideas. None of those assets works in isolation. Cool new ideas are useless if they can’t be turned into profitable products and services.
A Monitor cover story takes you on a journey into a remarkable culture that is by most estimates the first or second most innovative on the planet. South Korea isn’t a longtime, Scandinavian-type trendsetter. It doesn’t get the awe-struck adjectives of China. It was long in the shadow of the other Asian “tiger economies” – Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. But almost out of nowhere, after a devastating war and with an outrageously threatening nemesis to its north, South Korea has become a worldbeating economy.
South Korea has created a uniquely vibrant, innovative culture. The Boston Consulting Group places South Korea at
No. 1 in the world in innovation, followed by the US, among larger economies. Why? The BCC points to a combination of idea generation, structure, leadership, skilled workers, and a supportive government. South Korea has something else going for it, too.
Scott Duke Harris’s report zeroes in on the national resolve that South Koreans developed after decades of brutal colonization, a war that laid waste to their peninsula, years of extreme poverty, military dictatorship, the near ruin of the 1990s Asian financial crisis, and constant threats of annihilation issued by the idiosyncratic regime to the north. South Koreans have not just survived but thrived. Companies like Samsung and Hyundai have progressed from selling cheap, me-too products to being leaders in their fields. South Koreans are confident. Democracy is entrenched. K-Pop culture is hot.
Like West Germany, South Korea has used sacrifice and adversity to its advantage. German-style reunification may be hard to imagine right now for the Koreas, but it is inevitable, if only because the North can’t keep up the charade forever. The more the South prospers, the more apparent that becomes.
So what is South Korea’s secret sauce? Creative cultures emerge from competent ones that postpone today’s pleasure for tomorrow’s gains. Innovation grows on that fertile ground.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Employees at 2U, a distributor of online courses, enjoy the togetherness of office work in New York. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff)
PJs or pinstripes? The tradeoffs of tele-work
Who would have thought that well into the second decade of the 21st century water-cooler seminars and hallway chitchat would be held up as the unique value proposition of an office? But thanks to Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and other managers who have newfound qualms about telecommuting, the serendipitous conversations and informal collaborations that take place in an office – sometimes also called slacking and breeze-shooting – are being touted as the secret sauce of business.
There is something to that. Silicon Valley in California; Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass.; and other tech incubation districts are famous for their pizza parties, foosball tables, and networking mixers. Proximity is the point. But at the same time, technology and demographics are driving telecommuting. Which trend will win?
In a Monitor cover story, Eilene Zimmerman digs into that question, paying close attention to the trade-offs: human contact versus isolation, teamwork versus concentration, the distraction of co-workers versus the distraction of the fridge. Whichever camp you are in – happily productive in your pj’s 24/7 or success-dressed and hopping from conference room to brainstorming session Monday through Friday – you know there are pros and cons. Working side by side is good for some people and some projects; concentration and quiet are good for others. And there are plenty of jobs where showing up will always be necessary. Remote plumbing, policing, and nursing will never really cut it.
Let’s imagine what work might look like a decade from now. First, set aside technological what ifs and meet the workers. As Eilene notes, Generations X and Y have a distinctly different view of the daily commute, the structured workday, and the value of water-cooler socializing than their predecessors. For them, the personal and professional blend. The office, while attractive in some regards, is not a place to rely on for job security or social gratification. In short, digital natives are predisposed to telecommuting.
By 2023, this new breed of workers will anchor the workforce, and telecommuting technology will have advanced by 10 years, bringing ever closer the possibility of seamless “telepresence” from wherever people are. Human contact will still be important, however, and smart managers will make sure that occurs. But fighting traffic and clocking in every day looks like an idea whose time is passing.
If telecommuting is still novel, even controversial, in today’s workplace, it will be normal in tomorrow’s. The real challenge is how to manage it.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Traders at work on the floor of the New york Stock exchange last month. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff )
To invest or not to invest? The eternal question
The stock market is telling us something. But we’re all getting different messages. If you are a baby boomer, you lived through the dot-com crash of 2000 and financial panic of 2008. Retirement is not far away. If the stock market is calling to you, it probably sounds a little like Count Dracula’s treacherous invitation: “Enter freely – and of your own will.”
Maybe you should enter. Maybe you should run.
If you are a member of the Millennial Generation, on the other hand, the stock market may be saying something completely different to you. You never lost money in it. There seem to be good bargains. Maybe you’ll make some money. Maybe you’ll lose some money. With time on your side, you can afford to experiment. (“Hey, Count, what’s for dinner?”)
I was there once myself. Enchanted with the new Apple Mac-intosh in 1984, I bought the first shares I ever owned: 50 of Apple at $30. Pretty smart, right? It’s now around $440. Of course, I didn’t think it would ever go that high. In fact, a few months after I bought in I had qualms and sold out – at $20. My excellent adventure in investing wasn’t profitable, but it was a life lesson. It taught me the value of buying a quality stock – or better, a balanced mutual fund via a 401(k) – and holding it. I’ve faithfully followed the price of AAPL on the NASDAQ ever since, even though I’ve never bought another share directly.
No matter how the market has been performing, your past performance is a pretty good indication of your future behavior. You can see that pattern on display in a Monitor cover story. We’re a long way from “irrational exuberance.” Even “cautious optimism” is too bubbly a term. The best phrase for current investor psychology is probably: “As opposed to what?”
Interest rates are so low that there’s little incentive to be in fixed income. Gold and other precious metals – hedges against financial catastrophe – have been sagging as the economy slowly improves. Home prices are rising, but other than in unique markets like New York and San Francisco the era of house flipping is unlikely to return soon. Which leaves equities.
Older investors are edging back in, though in many cases they can’t shake the fears they felt five years ago (see Jonathan Harsch’s article). Younger investors are willing to experiment, to put money into the market and see what happens (see Schuyler Velasco’s article). This is not unusual.
Laurent Belsie, who has been writing about financial markets since the 1980s, recalls how in 1981, during what was then the greatest recession since 1929, market pundits worried that the stock market would never recover and that the financial system itself might be broken. And yet a year later the greatest bull market in history began. His life lesson: “If I were Larry David’s evil twin, I’d say the message of the market is ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm and Curb Your Gloom.’ ”
And so, after the latest worst financial crisis since 1929, despite economic shakiness, and amid 10,000 caveats, the stock market may in fact have a message for all of us: We’re getting back to normal. Which doesn’t mean predictable, universally profitable, or even especially stable. The market will go up and down. Some stocks will appreciate, others will tank. But five years after the bottom fell out, we can stop wondering if the system itself is broken. We can resume seeing the stock market as a place to make some money, lose some money, and learn a few life lessons.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
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