The Four Tests

The Four Tests, What It Will Take To Keep America Strong And Good, by Daniel Baer, Simon & Schuster, Avid Reader Press 2023

Idealists are warriors at heart.  Daniel Baer

What's stopping the US from maintaining its old position as World Leader?  Have we really slipped that far?

"Let the data lead you," Dorian Shainin, Shewhart Award Winner 

Daniel Baer says we have, and we are continuing to suffer slips here and there when faced with massive economic and political challenges.  It may be impossible in the middle of global disruptions to clearly identify what counts and where we need to direct our attention, but the data, as Dorian Shainin hammered into us at Rath & Strong, is there, and the data tells the story.   And our commercial mass media, whatever it has become - a distraction, a megaphone, a bizarre entertainment system minus the data that counts - is not helping. 

          "The era of de facto American dominance has ended"

Let's take a look at Baer's view of our situation.  The US appears to be de-laminating internally - economic division highs and lows are big, class warfare? Racial or geographic divisions abound. The pandemic and big technology jumps hit the workforce and they are putting a strain on humans;   Baer calls this time a transition, and he clarifies the four areas we need to immediately address:

1.  Scale - As we see other global power builders rise can the US continue to grow, internally and through developing selective partnerships?

2.  Investment - For manufacturing people, the category of Investment is a departure from how we grew.  In what Baer frighteningly calls a "post-industrial economy" what is our next gig?  The author calls for us to figure out a functioning healthy economy built on people and areas we may have not even built yet.  

3.  Fairness - Baer asks if we have the ability to build fairness into our economy and our society, to the point where we find ourselves working together rather than against each other?

4.  Identity - The landscape shifts and Baer hopes that our new picture highlights a less divided, more inclusive landscape, one that presents a single united identity to observers.

Each one of these four challenges is enough to occupy economists, thinkers, and possibly politicians for too many years.  But Baer is optimistic - "I was moved to write the book because there are so many analyses that diagnose the challenges we face in ways that, I think, could understandably leave people feeling either pessimistic or cynical or both.  In a sense, the whole point of the book is the last line, which is that you can think that our odds are a million -to-one or 10 to one - it doesn't really matter what you think the odds are - but there's no morally defensible thing other than to try, there's no real choice about whether you keep trying."  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers,  patriciaemoody@gmail.com