Solve America’s Employment Crisis With a Netflix Prize

An entire generation’s prosperity vanishing, food stamp use exploding. Welcome to the jobless future.

This month’s jobs numbers drive home the point. The unemployment rate fell at the fastest rate for years — great news, right? Wrong. The lion’s share of the gains came from (wait for it) “temporary help services.” See what just happened? We subtracted thousands of real jobs — and replaced them with low-value, no-future McJobs instead. Want fries with that so-called recovery?

In the States, journalists have reported that this uptick in temp jobs is a leading indicator of “real” jobs to come, a conclusion also promoted by the staffing industry. But i suspect you won’t find an economist who will fully concur. That’s because the actual evidence is weak at best for a “stepping stone effect.” In this case, it’s more than likely just a seasonal holiday effect — the rise is too big and too sudden to be meaningful, sans a spike in demand.

And in fact, the numbers we’ve looked at at the Lab suggest America’s employment problem is bigger and badder than yesterday’s financial crash: it’s a trend that’s been gathering strength for decades.

Here’s why America has a jobs crisis: We failed to seed tomorrow’s economy yesterday. A better health care, transportation, energy, media, education, auto, banking — etc — industry?

Venture investors failed to fund them, entrepreneurs failed to create them, Wall Street failed to discipline incumbents towards them, academia failed to point out the need for them, and economists simply assumed we lived in the best of all possible worlds. That was the point of my Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution — written over a year ago.

America needs a new Manhattan Project. Its goal? To put to rest a zombieconomy: one that’s failing to create tomorrow’s jobs because it’s failing to create authentic, thick value in the first place.

The problem is that we just spent trillions bailing out banks — and there’s now a pretty tight budget constraint on funding the Manhattan Project 2.0. So how could we do it?

Here’s what I’d do: run a series of national

innovation
awesomeness tournaments, in each of the industries above. The prize? Let’s take a page from Netflix and offer a million bucks each. The challenge? To radically reimagine each industry for the 21st century. Then, I’d seed the top ten ideas in each category with $10 million each, syndicating further investments with the private sector — and let ’em rip. Total pricetag to the people? About $150-250 million — a drop in the bucket compared to the bailouts. Total returns? They promise to be exactly what we need today: disruptive, radical, and world-changing.

Who’d judge my national awesomeness tournaments? Economists and venture guys (the good ones) would play a role. But more important would be open voting, so everyone’s voice could be heard, and info efficiently aggregated.

President Barack Obama has just spent millions hiring mega-consultants to cook up a national innovation strategy. That’s so 20th century, it hurts.

What America needs today is a national awesomeness strategy instead. And there’s no better way than an open tournament for those fed up with the status quo to unleash the future on an economy trapped in a creaking, rusting, industrial era.

That’s it for now — fire away in the comments with your thoughts.

Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He is ranked one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. Follow him on twitter @umairh.

Solve America’s Employment Crisis With a Netflix Prize

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