patience

Good things come to those who wait.  Slow cooked meat comes out the most tender.  World class athletes are born of muscle memory.  PhDs are crafted over decades.  In order to reach our best selves we must be willing to fight against the urge to take cash in our short-term gains in spite of the damage it does to the long term.  Just ask Wall Street.

Our brave new world has promised the middle class long-term growth but unfortunately the people could wait no longer.  New technology, automation and offshoring have wiped out many millions of middle class jobs that the country has relied on for decades. Factories are increasingly automated and software is removing the need for many service-based gigs.  But the promise of every new technology is that the outdated jobs it eradicates will be replaced by entirely new jobs it will create; jobs we cannot even think of today.  The problem is that takes time.

The Republican Party’s promise to America was that it would restore a greatness of days past.  That greatness is one of almost automatic prosperity, from a time when a nine-to-five factory job could support a family of five and a college education wasn’t entirely needed.  Those days are gone.  Those jobs are gone.  Technology and globalization have already wiped them away and there is no going back.  Fighting back against those waves will only make things worse.  We require the patience to see this thing through, to see what our brave new economy will look like and the jobs our new technologies will require.  Just as short-sighted investors fail to invest in the future, our decision to fight back against global progress could have a seriously negative impact on the future of our economy’s growth.