Our Weirdly Random Employment System

State-run socialist economies like the Soviet Union and China under Mao deployed thorough occupational and aptitude testing regimens on their populations beginning in infancy. School coaches were trained to act as talent scouts, identifying athletes with potential early so they could be funneled into state-run institutions dedicated to building world-class teams of athletes tasked with making their countries proud in international competitions. Students with a knack for STEM were diverted into challenging curricula designed to pump out the world's finest scientists. Whether a brilliant cyclist or poet or dancer or administrator was from a rich family in Moscow or a poor one from the Urals, there was a good chance their skills would come to the attention of authorities who could find a way to cultivate their abilities.

The socialist system was far from perfect. Being good at a subject doesn't mean you want to spend your life dedicated to working on it; I was an excellent math student, but my professors' suggestion that I become a mathematician made me want to die. Occupational interest surveys are inherently subjective and less than perfectly reliable. Still, the one I took in junior high school (when the U.S. was influenced by its competition with the USSR) that found I would be best suited as a lawyer -- and least suited to sorting tobacco leaves by size and color -- was not far off the mark. I do love the law. Though the solution may not be easy, the problem is undeniable: The U.S. has millions of people, young and old, whose remarkable talents in a field go to waste -- and not because those citizens aren't interested in exploiting them.

America wastes its geniuses. Great would-be novelists are pumping gas. Awesome should-be coders are serving coffee. Fantastic engineers are running themselves ragged in Amazon warehouses. At most, an American only works an average of 50 years. Compassion, humanism and macroeconomic national interest calls for an employment market that makes those five decades as satisfying and fulfilling as possible for as many people as possible.

This syndicated column by a professional writer was authored by a guy who, as a young man, could often not find work at all, or got stuck as a dishwasher and telemarketer who also drove a cab. One of my colleagues at the telemarketing firm is now a wildly successful ad exec. These transformations are not stories of a system succeeding -- they are individuals surviving and subsisting and blossoming despite a system devoid of mechanisms to identify, say, workers with a knack for advertising and writing and train them to get better so they can be funneled into positions where they can do their best for themselves and their country.

Even as those with potential sink into depression and opioid addiction, the subpar are elevated to positions they do not deserve and in which they cannot excel. So we have U.S. senators who do not understand history or geopolitics; many do not even use the internet they're trying to regulate. Companies put CEOs in charge of enterprises they shouldn't even be part of, much less running into the ground.

There's got to be a better way. But who'll think of it? Not the idiots in charge.

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Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited. You can support Ted's hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.