Skip to footer

What can be done to create jobs? Six leading ideas.

The job market has shown some very welcome signs of improvement lately, but it still has a long way to go before approaching something Americans would call normal. So the practical question – what can be done about this? – continues to be urgent. Here's a look at some of the proposed solutions out there. A few, like mortgage relief, have been tried before but might deserve consideration again in a new form.

1. Call in the geek squad

Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize/AP/File
Edison2's 'Very Light Car #98' shown in this file photo on a testing track can get 102 miles per gallon. The US, some policy wonks say, needs to build up its ranks of entrepreneurs, scientists, and innovators.

  • By Mark Trumbull Staff writer

The economy has been hit not just with a deep recession, but with longer-term challenges as well – notably, the rise in global competition for economic leadership.

Thus the United States, some policy wonks say, needs to build up its own ranks of entrepreneurs, scientists, and innovators – just as the Geek Squad at Best Buy stands ready to help with technological issues. President Obama and allies in Congress have already taken some steps along these lines such as reforming the patent system.

Another idea touted by innovation experts is simply to lure more of the world's best and brightest from overseas. Often they come to the US to study. Adapting immigration policies to encourage more of them to stay and work could pay dividends.

Government could also offer more prizes for innovation, following a path taken by bodies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the private X Prize Foundation.

"Prizes for most of these contests are relatively small, less than $10 million apiece – evidence enough that small investments can nurture really big ideas," technology scholar and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa writes in a new issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

1 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.