A book that makes you think
I recently read Michael Falk’s second book Get to Work… on OUR Future which is available on Amazon. This book is the sequel to his first book Let’s All Learn How to Fish… to Sustain Long-term Economic Growth, which is available for free at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. In his first book, Michael looked at the current entitlement systems in the US and the Western World in general and showed, how rising costs for social security, health care, and other social safety nets threaten economic growth and prosperity. Back then, he already made some interesting and thought-provoking suggestions on how to solve these issues.
Michael probably does not know this, but I was one of the reviewers who read the manuscript for his first book when he proposed it to the Research Foundation and me was hooked immediately thanks to his great writing style and his ideas, many of which seemed out of left field but made eminent sense, once you started to think about them more carefully. So you can imagine my eagerness to read his follow-up book, where he tackles the most pressing issues of our time from a breakdown of competition in business and rising polarization of our democratic systems to the increasing insecurity of our work environment due to the rise of the gig economy, automatization and other trends.
And in typical Michael style, he managed to again come up with a lucid analysis of the risks and opportunities of these trends and some great ideas about how to change our society and economy for the better. Now, I have to say, I don’t agree with all of Michael’s suggestions and I think some of them are too easy to circumvent if you would put them into practice but what Michael has done is to propose constructive solutions that should start a fruitful debate.
Take for instance his proposal for immigration reform in the US in the introductory chapter of his book:
Offers of citizenship (simple as 1-2-3)
1. Those with advanced degrees (master’s level or higher) from a U.S. college will receive an offer to become citizens upon graduation; the offer of citizenship will be valid for 12 months following graduation.
2. An advanced or streamlined path would be available for those with verifiable university degrees or accreditation, from outside the United States, that can help meet business/employment needs. These individuals would receive “fast-tracked” citizenship, within 24 months.
3. For all others, the ability to become a citizen would be required to be achieved within 36 months of their arrival to the United States. If not, then they would have to leave the country no later than month 37. All current, noncitizen immigrants as of dd/mm/yyyy date would receive temporary amnesty but would need to achieve citizenship within this 36-month time period, effective upon enactment of the new regulation.
Children from birth to age 18 would be covered under their parent’s citizenship status. No other relatives would be allowed to be linked in such a way. Young adults over the age of 18, or upon reaching age 18, would need to establish their own citizenship based on one of the 12-, 24-, or 36-month offers.
M. Falk, p. 8
This proposal seems radical at first and I think people on both sides of the immigration debate in the US will balk at this initially. But if you think about it, it actually is a great compromise between the need for highly qualified immigrants in Western countries and the need to limit immigration that might overwhelm the social safety net of that country. Thanks to the first rule, a country could attract the best and brightest students from all over the world with the promise of giving them not only an academic degree but citizenship of that country once they successfully finish their degree. The country could also attract many qualified professionals from around the world thanks to a fast track to citizenship in rule 2.
Finally, while the third rule would attract many immigrants with lower skills, it gives them three years to integrate into society or else they have to leave again. Furthermore, his rules prevent immigration from family members of immigrants unless they qualify for citizenship, thus reducing the rising problem of family migration. And for existing undocumented immigrants, it provides a clear path to citizenship.
Yes, it is a radical proposal, but I think it is worth introducing this idea into the political debate. Similarly, Michael proposes ways to make the social safety net more sustainable by introducing a universal basic income – an idea that is increasingly gaining traction in many countries in the West. The problem is that many conservatives think such a universal basic income would be too expensive and disincentivize people from work. But Michael makes an interesting set of proposals that tackle exactly these issues and I wish someone in Washington DC would take up this idea so that the Congressional Budget Office could run the numbers to calculate the effective costs of his proposal. We might be surprised how cheap a universal basic income can be.
And in the UK, France, Germany, Australia and all the other countries where immigration and its impact on society is at the heart of the political debate, it is worthwhile to think about these proposals and how they could be adopted in these countries.
Michael doesn’t have all the answers and as I mentioned, some of his answers are likely to fail in practice because they would lead to unintended consequences or efforts to undermine the spirit of these solutions. But all the other proposed solutions to improve our social safety net and foster economic growth suffer from the same shortcomings, in my view. What Michael’s ideas do is to provide food for thought for both sides of the argument and present a compromise that so often eludes solutions discussed in politics today.
At a time, when compromises seem to become impossible, his book makes many suggestions that could take us back to the good old times of centrist politics and undermine the influence of increasingly radicalized minorities on the left and the right of the political spectrum.
I sometimes say that a good book provides answers to important questions, while a great book makes you think. In my view, Michael’s book does both, it provides answers that make you think.