It is Tuesday’s general session at Safety 2012, and Lowell B. Catlett, Ph.D., exuberantly graces the stage with a bit of optimism for his audience. “What the world will demand is exactly what you’re doing,” Catlett exclaims. “Folks, that’s called job security.” Using a personal example, Catlett discusses his father’s initial reaction to seatbelts: “I think I'd rather just be thrown outta the damn car.” Years later, right before his passing, Catlett’s father pulled the safety harness on and sighed, “My gosh I feel naked without it.”
“Thank God,” Catlett says to the audience. “Or rather, thank you.”
The economist from New Mexico State University spends most of his speech discussing the waves of economic depression in America. If you read history, it really puts things into perspective, he says. This has happened before. But after every recession, the U.S. makes financial gains. In fact, after our most recent economic depression, the U.S. became the world’s first $15 trillion economy. And that was with a smaller workforce, he adds. “Output goes up, input falls. You’d call that productivity, right?” Right. As Catlett puts it, “It’s not so important where you stand, but the direction that you move.”
For better or worse – and Catlett seems to think better as he points to his Kindle – the world is about to be more technology-driven than ever before. Open-source hardware, for example, will “blow the doors off the world.” In open-source culture, products and ideas generally entitled to copyright protection are made available to the public. With this revolution, comes garage manufacturing, and with garage manufacturing, comes severed hands, cut fingers and burns, Catlett adds. “It’s going to happen, it already has and the world is going to be better. But guess what? The demand for what you [safety professionals] do in this world will go up.”
With that, Catlett departs from the stage. Cue the standing ovation from the audience, there is hope for all!
