Happy Wednesday from … Newport, Rhode Island! I just rolled into town for the New England Alliance annual conference and am enjoying the view from the balcony attached to my room. I can neither confirm nor deny that I am writing from the Wharf Southern Kitchen and Whiskey Bar. Pay no attention to what your eyes tell you. (Man, I love my job. And technically, I am off-contract at this point, so no one actually get upset, please.)
The New England Alliance is a professional organization for long-term care administrators. I was invited by former podcast guest and friend of UNH and HMP, Tom Lavallee. I’m looking forward to the education and meeting more leaders in this community!
On another note, I finished reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being yesterday. I had shared an interview with him previously. He was a major force in popularizing hip-hop, amongst other things. If you are a person with creative passions, I highly recommend this book. But it should be read as a meditation - maybe sit down and spend 15 minutes a day with it. That’s mostly what I did. It’s almost written as a devotional, so trying to plow through 100 pages in a sitting won’t get you the effect you want. But 15 minutes a day is delicious and good for the soul.
Happy summer, to one and all! See you Sunday with a new essay. As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: WSJ, Immigrants’ Share of the U.S. Labor Force Grows to a New High
Why: All countries in the developed world, as well as China, are facing a population collapse. The worst countries are in Europe, Italy in particular,
but the US has this problem as well.
Native born citizens are just not having babies above the replacement rate. As a result, the tax base, especially for social programs like Medicare and Social Security are shrinking. What we need to support generous social welfare programs is a wide bottom and a skinny top to our population pyramid. You can see we don’t really have that any more. So the quickest way to fix this is to welcome immigrants. But most countries don’t do that well. That is one of the superpowers of the US - we have always been (relatively speaking) more welcoming of immigrants than almost any other country. And we are great at assimilating them. The good news is that we are still good at it, despite the rhetoric around immigration:
People born outside the U.S. made up 18.1% of the overall labor force, up from 17.4% the prior year and the highest level in data back to 1996, the Labor Department said in its annual report on foreign-born workers. The number of immigrants in the labor force—those working or actively looking for jobs—rose by 1.8 million, or 6.3%, to 29.8 million in 2022.
We could and should do better - especially if we want to keep our social programs.
(see other countries’ profiles at https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/#/country?COUNTRY_YEAR=2022&COUNTRY_YR_ANIM=2022&FIPS_SINGLE=**&dashPages=DASH )
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What: AP News, ‘Mississippi miracle’: Kids’ reading scores have soared in Deep South states
Why: I’ve shared before some research on early childhood education, especially the work by Havard economist Roland Fryer who studies the impacts of educational innovation on marginalized populations. One of the things Fryer has shown is that phonics is the single most effective technique for teaching reading, especially to low socioeconomic status (SES) students - i.e., kids who grow up in homes that typically don’t have a lot of books or adults who read recreationally. Yet most school districts have adopted all sorts of unproven techniques, such as whole-word reading. Whole-word reading does not work well for kids from poor households, but phonics works for everyone. And so the lowest performing states for reading education, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama adopted laws requiring phonics instruction. And the results have been astonishing. Mississippi went from second worst to second best. That ought to end any discussion about which way to teach reading. If you have a child in your life, or care about children generally, this is an important article. Bad educational systems early in life lead to bad adult outcomes.
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What: Evil HR Lady, The Surprising Source of Most of Your Problems
https://www.evilhrlady.org/2023/05/the-surprising-source-of-most-of-your-problems-3.html
Why: OMG - the brilliant wife and I say this (often her to me) all the time:
Do problems seem to plague you wherever you go? Are you always passed up for promotions? Have you struggled to get new jobs? Is your personal life filled with drama? Why on earth are you so plagued when other people seem to have much smoother lives?
I’ll give you a hint: The common element in your problems is you.
Fun, quick read.
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Watch
What: US Healthcare Systems
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7N8MpxkX1b3n27DfOUpvad2nwB4O5bY5
Why: I started teaching my summer course, US Healthcare Systems, this week. It is an online, asynchronous course, which means I record all of my lectures. I am posting them to YouTube. If you would like to follow along, the link above is to my YouTube playlist where I will be posting all of the videos. I would skip the syllabus review if you are not actually in the class, but the rest are pretty good, I think. I’m making the slide decks available as well (link in the description of each video).
I am also posting the audio version to the Health Leader Forge podcast. Obviously you will miss all the visual references, but if you want to just listen, that’s free, too! https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/1sEW3KAn4zb
Hey, it’s a $2,100 value (assuming you are in state - more if you are out of state), and you get it free for being an RWL reader!
There will be 14 episodes in all. Three are up so far.
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Listen
What: The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie, Stefan Sagmeister: An Artist Who Believes 'Now Is Better' (54 min)
Why: You probably haven’t heard of Sagmeister if you don’t follow the graphic design community. I’ve heard him talk several times and he is always fascinating. Here is a TED Talk with him suggesting we should take time off every seven years to do… something different. In this pod he talks about his latest project, which is to juxtapose 18th and 19th century paintings with modern innovations to show how much better off we are today than we were 100 or 200 years ago. It’s perpetually popular (like for thousands of years - the Ancient Greeks were doing it) to complain that the good days are behind us. But so clearly we are better off than we were even relatively recently. Anyone who works in healthcare knows how much better healthcare is than it was, well, yesterday. But I’d argue, pretty much everything is better. We just have to adjust socially to new technologies. Check out this romping conversation to get your optimism back if you are feeling a bit old.