Interesting work. I’ll accept their conclusion without looking at the underlying data.

That said, conclusions are only as good as the data and methods used to produce them. If we looked our physical world and universe and neglected to include the influence of gravity we would reach conclusions that could be valid in that context yet not so if gravity is considered. It is important to understand this for any study, not just this one.

So, what’s the “gravity” missing from this study?

The erosion (or disappearance really) of the industrial base in the US (and other parts of the world).

The industrial base is where the people at the center of this study found employment, careers and the basis for a fulfilling family life. With that gone we have the reality rightly exposed by this study.

Yet, the solution isn’t more college degrees.

This virus has exposed a sad reality: That the industrial base in the west has been eroded down to the point where we can’t locally manufacture simple products like masks and gowns at scale. We can’t even manufacture the plastic vials, swabs, reagents and packaging for vital test kits at scale (just try to find somewhere where you can order a billion of these in the US or Europe).

That, as the world know now, is a formula for disaster. And that is where the solution to the problem exposed by this paper lies.

Put simply, the US and Europe need to invest heavily in taking back massive segments of the industrial base. This won’t be cheap, simple or fast, and yet I think everyone understands this must be done.

We don’t need more degrees, we need to recover a portion of the economy that has evaporated over the last fifty years.

The other missing elements in the study are: Europe and the rest of the world.

Europe is an obvious place to ask: Does the same demographic have the same problems?

The rest of the world is, in some way, the “placebo” for a study like this. The study says that non-US whites and other races in the US don’t seem to have this problem. The obvious question is: How do they do at their countries of origin?

The answers to these basic questions would help frame the results and perhaps reveal some of the issues in the US.

One of the questions I would ask is: What is the effect of the $15/hr minimum wage on this segment of society?

I visited a friend’s factory in Los Angeles yesterday. Massive place. Imagine a Home Depot full of every type of manufacturing equipment you can imagine.

We talked about why he can’t manufacture consumer goods in this factory. It came down to high minimum wage, high taxes and onerous regulatory burden. He could literally hire hundreds of people and make consumer goods at scale were it not for this framework that simple makes manufacturing of consumer goods at scale (include masks, gowns and test kits in that) in the US impossible.

I am not n necessarily talking about simple products here. Phones, computers, graphics cards, displays, computer mice, tablets, watches, printers, tv’s, microwave ovens, refrigerators, clothes washers, grass mowers, etc. I could go on forever. Walk into a Home Depot or Best Buy. We can’t make anything sold in those stores (except for some of the construction materials at Home Depot).

The problem isn’t the lack of college degrees. The problem isn’t even capitalism. The problem is a combination of failed international and domestic policies that allowed for the loss of a massive portion of the industrial base that employed tens of millions of people for decades.

We can fix this.