ABOUT ME
My name is Richard Davis.
I was born and brought up in Columbus, Ohio and have lived there all my
life, in between sojourns in several other states and three foreign
countries. I have a bachelor's and master's degree in English from Miami
University and studied for a doctorate at Indiana University but did not write a
dissertation. I taught basic courses at several colleges and universities,
but eventually I ran out of positions. At the same toime I was doubting my vocation to
teach. I tried to find work in some other field that would make use of my
skills in English but found myself stymied. I kept getting turned down for
jobs I was well qualified for. One prospective employer told me he was
wary of ex-college teachers because they tended to work a short time and then go
back to teaching. But for a long time I was either unemployed or clerking
in a department store.
While I was unemployed, I had the leisure to think about why I couldn't find work, and why there were so many other people in the same boat. The term "overqualified" kept cropping up.. I realized that in the hiring process, the hirer holds all the cards
and can reject an applicant for any reason. (Since then, by law an
employer has to prove he is not discriminating on the basis of race or
gender, but the principle hasn't changed. If the unemployment rate is 6 or
7 per cent as it was in that era, it hardly matters who is left out. We
are no more civilized if the vast army of unemployed exactly matches the
demographics of the nation than if the whole burden falls on one
race.)
After some thought and study, I came upon the principle of the Clearing Price, which I got from a book by Lester Thurow. Eureka! That was the key. We have unemployment because everybody conspires to keep the price of labor above the clearing price.
With goods, we constantly adjust the price to the clearing price, and nearly
everything gets consumed. But with the price of labor, we take several
measures, some by law, others by custom, to protect the price of labor, and the
result is chronic unemployment. After all, I was willing to do the
same quality of work for less than the going rate, but was not allowed
to. We try to compensate with a progressive income tax, unemployment
insurance, and inflation, but that does not cure the problem, merely alleviates some of the distress.
Having worked out my theory in the
form of a book-length essay, I tried to sell it. And I wrote innumerable
shorter essays and submitted to whatever publications I could find, but nobody
was interested. Editors who did respond demonstrated that they did not
understand my theory. They would say, "We recently published something
quite similar," and I would go to that essay and find that it was nothing
like what I was trying to say. The problem with my theory is that at first
glance it is conter-intuitive, going the opposite direction of traditional
conventional wisdom, and though it is not a difficult concept, it takes
considerable exposition. People would read until they came to the first
hurdle and quit, thinking they had found the fatal flaw, when that objection was
somehting I was fully prepared to deal with in due time.
I tried writing to people who were
passionate about the inequality in the world and dedicated to the plight of the
poor, but seldom got a reply. They are too dedicated to their own
solutions, which usually involved a kind of relgious conversion on the part of
the oppressors. As I make clear in one of my chapters, Marxism is the
great curse of the Twentieth Century, because the Marxist solution does not deal
with the real monetary value of labor and actually aggravates the problem by
trying to throw out the baby instead of the bath water.
Before the advent of the Internet, I
had no other option because I could not afford self-publication. And for
several years I felt intimidated by the complexity of the process of going on
line. But God works in mysterious ways and brought me into contact with a
teacher of the subject who explained the first steps and encouraged me to
begin. So here I am.
Getting back to my
biography. Having exhausted my prospects in the U. S. A. a
friend, a fellow classmate from Uruguay, invited me to teach at the
Instituto Crandon in Montevideo, which I
did for two years. When I came home, I took courses in Teaching
English as a Second Language and then got a job teaching in Costa Rica for
five years. Then I joined the Peace Corps to go to Poland in 1990
right after their Revolution, to help set up a system of three-year
colleges to train English teachers to replace Russian as the required high
school foreign language.
In those countries, I experienced three different economies whose problems confirmed my theory about how unemployment and poverty (which is nothing more or less than institutionalized unemployment) persist. The new Global economy complicates the situation but does not substantially affect my theory.I have now embarked upon a new adventure which I am chronicling in the companion website: www.geezerinarmenia.com
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