Notes toward A Blog Post on Chrystia Freeland’s Interview of GE CEO Jeff Immelt
UPDATE NOTE: The following isn’t complete. Many of my notes from the latter part of today’s interview can be found on Twitter, hashtagged #Immelt. At the moment, I both (1) don’t have easy access to them and (2) have other things that need to be done. Feel free to look there, and/or mention anything you want discussed here.)
The fake “news” of the day will be Immelt’s disparaging of America and Americans.
The semi-real news of the day will be that Immelt threw President Obama under the bus four or five times before finally saying that he “respects the President and respects the Presidency.” While this is progress from Jack Welch thinking that Buying George W. Bush the office meant that his firm would be exempted from cleaning up the PCBs GE dropped into the Hudson River (it did result in a nine-year delay and the likelihood that taxpayers, not GE, will foot the large majority of the bill), it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the man who gave us the Unforced Error of Simpson-Bowles.
Jeff Immelt, unlike Henry Aaron, believes that Simpson-Bowles is what we need for “growth.”
Jeff Immelt admits that, while the Board of Directors has some input, CEO pay is all about “getting what you believe you deserve.”
Jeff Immelt declares that if unemployment gets back down to 6%, no one will care about his being paid $21.5 million last year (about 40% of which appears to be an increase in his pension benefits; other GE pension contributors haven’t been so fortunate) to continue running GE into the ground to a standstill.
Jeff Immelt says that the US is 25th in math and 26th in science. (He’s wrong on the latter; we’re 17th.) He then spewed some horseshit about the “crisis” of Germans believing that it’s easier to find skilled workers in Mexico than it is in the United States.
Why do I call this horseshit? Well, let’s look at the two countries compared by Immeltian standards (link is PDF):
There are two three possibly-reasonable explanations. Either (1) there are a lot of Stupid Germans or (2) the places where Germans trying to hire are Significant Laggard or “Business Friendly, School Crappy” States.
Oops, or (3) the Germans pwnd Jeff Immelt, who then didn’t check the data.
And that’s without noting that, if you adjust for demographic issues such as poverty or consider racial inequalities, the U.S. is right at the top, no matter what Jeff Immelt says.
Otherwise, mostly, Jeff Immelt lies through his teeth, and Chrystia Freeland—who was tougher on George Soros last year—lets him get away with saying it.
It is left as an exercise whether this is because her boss openly declaring this was going to be a powder-puff interview (“I’m a big fan” of a man who has lost 60% of shareholder value for his investors over the past ten years) or because she decided to let Immelt hang himself. (I know which way I’m betting.)
Ken
I am in heartfelt sympathy with the point of your post.
However “adjusting for race and poverty” is exactly what we DON’T want to do for “educational outcomes.”
poverty is an indicator that the education system (and that means the whole society) is not doing what it could be doing. and by now “race” should not be a reason for low scores.
I’m sympathetic with “should,” but face the reality of “does” and “is.” (Note that the countries with higher overall rates in the PISA study are also those with a more vigorous socail safety net, less income inequality, and education funding that is not so dependent on local support. That we can proxy those factors as “poverty”–or, more generally, “percentage of students receiving a reduced or free school lunch”–and come up with “explanations” that make the Rational Expectations Economists envious doesn’t at all mean the story ends there.
“Countries that do a better job of making certain their students are eating three meals a day outperform do better on PISA tests” is an empirical description of results, not just a damnedable fact.
ken
i think we are in agreement. what i was saying is that “we really do better than all those other countries, if we don’t count where we do worse,” is not much of an advertisement for our education system.
and despite my mixed feelings about the value of a harvard education, i don’t think that “rich” american schools are likely to be any worse than foreign schools… i mean, if they were, then we would have ONE kind of an education problem, but we have the other kind of education problem.
Yes, but I sense that Immelt is really a victim here.
So long as we in this country continue to see teaching as a second rate profession it will surely live down to that expectation. The funding of public schools within very circumscribed community boundaries is a sure fire plan to create a two, maybe more, tiered system of education in this country. Wealthy communities spend at least twice per pupil than do the rest. on the north shore of Long Island, the Gold Coast so to speak, budgets in the low $20,000 range are the average. There’s gold in them thar hills. Most other districts are spending $10-$15,000, with expected results. That “special education” comes out of the same budgets only further distorts the picture of you get what you pay for.
Buy teachers for an average of $50-$60,000 and you get mediocrity mixed in with dedication. No way to run a first class system. A guy fixes your eyes and he’s paid $750,000. Your teeth, $500,000. Your kids education $60,000. A couple of guys fix the price of goods and services and we pour gold into their bank accounts. We’re truly fu___ked up.
Jack
i spent a short time as a teacher in Florida during a strike. (yep. scab.) I found the 12th graders not understanding geometry in spite of their very fancy geometry book with lots of pictures and three colors of ink and a teachers guide telling me how long to spend on each paragraph. and i couldn’t understand the book either… new math written by people who didn’t have time to make sense.
so i taught them geometry the way i learned it. they caught on quickly and were happy. silly me. i told the county supervisors what i had done. they told me to teach it their way or get out.
it ain’t just the money.
It’s never just the money, but what ever text you use costs money. Whatever teaching methodology you bring to the task is brought by a teacher and the quality of that teacher, in general not individually, costs money.