The US reminds me of the Roman Catholic Church and Microsoft

The diminishing relevance of the Roman Catholic church, can be attributed to a few causes, which can be summarized as such: When in the middle of a changing society, the insistance of the leadership on maintaing the status quo, leads to displeasure and the departure of the flock.

George W Bush, BinLadin and the Great Recession of 2008 changed the US. Deregulation of commerce, tax cuts, and funny accounting for the Iraq and Afganistan wars put the US economy in a bind. Then came Obama, and since 2008 he has been working diligently at fixing the economy, and so far he seems to be failing. This can be attributed to and I summarize, Obama is one of the few presidents that get it. He understands the plight of the American dream, and he wants to level the playing field so that more people can Dream big. But for those who never had a reason to dream BIG, they perceive life is just great, and that Obama is a dream killer. Unfortunately for America, Obama is going against other politicians who went grew up with their parents having already achieved the Dream. These politicians are Garders of the American Dream.

When one is a dreamer, she will fight against many odds to achieve it. Of course, depending on which theory one accepts, dreams can be figments of the imagination, or a glimpse into the subconscious. I believe that the American dream is both. People from many parts of the world congregate in the US and make imaginary things possible. Guarders of the dream, try to keep real things real. Society needs both dreamers and guarders. Dreamers create value and economic prosperity for their investors. Dreamers take problems and challenges, and create profits and solutions. Guarders put up road blocks, build walls, stage wars because of fear of new problems. Dreamers fail many times by not paying attention to the opinion that its a jungle out there. Guarders always fail by not realizing that life cannot exist in a vacuum. In a society that has a balance of dreamers and guarders, there is growth. However, only when the balance shifts to mostly guarders, does failure become imminent.

Regrettably, the US is becoming a society of mostly Guarders. Investors put their cash in ten year bonds at two percent interest, and purchase gold. And prosperous business pay the banks to keep cash. How is this different from stashing cash under ones mattress?

The catholic church failed to innovate when more people were able to read and interpret the bible. Microsoft failed to innovate when more people were using the internet. Thirty six percent of people between the age of 16 and 67 do not contribute to the labor force. These are a lot of idle dreamers, the devil can surely find work for about 110 522 358 hands. Additionally we need to pay attention to these 2241200 temporary dreamers and hope that they don't stop believing.

Many societies fail when the dominant forces listen not to the voices of the majority, and now in the US, we need the majority to dream big.

Government should be fired.

In a democracy, people elect officials to manage the social and economic well-being of the nation. In corporate and business institutions, economists and sociologists are hired to fill such positions, but, generally people elect political scientists, lawyers and rich people to look after their social and economic needs.

Sometimes I listen to punditry and laugh.

Schools, data mining and statistics

Many policy makers, school administrators and sometimes the general public attribute the problem of America's poor and increasingly failing education on the lack of financial resources and most of the time poor teachers. I believe they're only ten percent correct. 

As an analyst I am charged with deriving all of the possible reasons for an observed behavior, and then crunch the data down to a few variables that can be used to predict behavior.  One of the problems that I usually encounter with modern analytics software, is that most of them were designed for crunching numbers. In studying social phenomena, I believe that we should be crunching words, or at least we should work on software that can help us crunch words.

If we deconstruct the word education, the following key concepts are at play: learning, knowledge, imparting, acquiring, and evaluation.  Simplistically speaking, educators have to optimize the ability of teachers for imparting, and evaluation, while students have to optimize their ability for acquiring and learning the curriculum.  In the public discorse and the literature, we have extensively studied  the "imparting" and "evaluating" aspects of education, and  often marginalized the "acquiring" and "learning" aspects.  Very often policy makers rangle over hiring better teachers, or building better schools, while paying little focus on creating environments for learning or improving the students ability to acquire knowledge.

Knowledge, which I will loosely define as understanding, perception and reasoning of concepts, is a skill that has to be taught. Knowledge, like any other skill has to be imparted in environments that are conducive for retention.  For example, if a person wants to become a home builder, they need to learn facts about the trade, apprentice, and gradually become professional.  In the same way if our students have to learn the schools curriculum, they have to learn the skills necessary for acquiring random and perceptively useless information.  Next students have to apprentice, that is do homework, and gradually become proficient in learning.

For the homebuilder in training the motivation is internal.  If you ask many elementary students why they attend school you could imagine answers like "To play with my friends," "Because my mom says I need to learn" and so on.  In many cases the motivation for attending school is external at best. The question then becomes, How can we change the students perceptions of education, and, who is responsible for making students want to learn?