Who are you jealous of ?

I am jealous of Guy Kawasaki.  I write the same stuff he writes, but his books sell 500,000 copies. I am also jealous of the man that recently won $200 million in the lottery. But I am most jealous of Paul Krugman. Not because he is a Nobel-Prize winning Op-ed columnist, an economist by trade, and he wrote a novel The Conscience of a Liberal, a book diametrically opposite The Conscience of a Conservative, circa 1964 by Barry Goldwater. I am certainly not jealous because Krugman graduated from MIT and Yale. I am jealous because he gets paid to write editorials like the one I read this morning in the Kansas City Star as I sat at Panera Bread, as I often do on Saturday mornings in Leawood, Kansas; particularly on a rainy muggy August morning in the heartland, and it was just such a morning today.

Back to Krugman. Let me sum up 4 columns of 10-point-times-roman font and several thousand Krugman words. Society has failed again because "we" have put the poor people too far away from good jobs. He cites Detroit as a current example and forecasts Atlanta as the next urban pillar to fall. According to Krugman, the disadvantaged people live in the city and the jobs are in the suburbs inaccessible to the poor. Public transportation does not help. Krugman is paid to state the obvious and and to lay the blame on society. Krugman deftly separates himself from his role in a societal government and equally apart from his own individual societal role. You would think a MIT/Yale graduate would have the decency to offer some solutions. He does not. It is a society that he is not a part of that in fact is the blame for this reckless placement of the disadvantaged geographically  dislocated from the good jobs that would elevate the disadvantaged. I am jealous because he gets paid for these pedantic observations, which by the way are not even initially made by him, but reported by other sources. It was a multi-million dollar Fed study, no doubt.

I drove down to the center of Kansas City, Missouri last week. I came from the suburbs where all the good jobs are. I also noticed that the disadvantaged live in the cities, a long road trip away from the good jobs.  However, I do not have the chutzpa to conclude, as Krugman does in his editorial, that the disadvantaged are economically-elevated-challenged solely because of location. The digital world has trumped the simplistic geography barrier explanation. Internet work does not care where you live, albeit customer service from India. Why isn't the biggest customer service center in the world in Detroit? The labor would be inexpensive. And there is plenty of empty office space. Why not? Because.

Krugman gets paid to complain, but offer no solutions. Perhaps that is the fundamental nature of the conscience he wrote about. On second thought, I am not jealous of Krugman. However, I am still jealous of Kawasaki. Guy is the man.

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