I have two children: my boy is in fourth grade and my daughter in second.

The other day, with about two weeks remaining in the school calendar, they informed me that “learning was over,” and that the rest of the school year would be spent pretty much “just having fun.”

I would have taken this with a grain of salt, but I have noticed a significant diminution in their homework of late, and they do seem to be going to school each morning with a bigger smile on their faces.

Maybe a month or even six weeks ago, I heard a very similar comment from a young lady who is a senior at a South Hills high school. This young lady, who is the daughter of a good friend of mine, told me that her teachers had at that time (mid-April) told her, “It’s fun time for you guys from here on in.”

In other words, the teachers were pretty much saying that they were done imparting any new information, and that the kids would spend the last eight or ten weeks of their high school careers “showing up” but not necessarily learning anything new.

Where did this come from?

When I worked in the steel mill, we used to call guys that had only a week or so on the job remaining, “short-timers.” We would put these people on jobs that were a little less dangerous and a little less arduous, but they nevertheless worked just as hard and just as diligently as all of the other workers, right up to the last minute.

On their last day on the job, they might go to wash up a half-hour early. That was their “short time.”

Somehow, our country has now been infected with “short-timer disease.”

Think about holidays. Thanksgiving is actually my favorite one to analyze because it always falls on a Thursday, which necessarily means that no one works on Friday.

(When I first joined the workforce in 1971, everybody worked on the Friday after Thanksgiving. It was a given. You just did.)

And because Thursday and Friday are days off, people began “shutting it down” on Wednesday, or even Tuesday.

And of course once you start shutting it down on Tuesday, you may as well go for the sweep and just take the whole week off.

I’ve often heard people, and just before a long weekend, say things like, “Well, we’re off Monday so I’m planning on coming in late on Tuesday and I think I’ll also take a full day the previous Friday.”

Just try and get any state, federal, or academic institution to even answer the telephone on the Friday before a three-day weekend. They won’t.

Half a world away, our global competitors are smiling. They’re smiling because they are hungry and driven to replace us in the world hierarchy. I’ve said this on my radio show, but I’ll say it here: the Chinese create as many software engineers in one year as we have currently working in our country. That number is about 700,000.

Short-timer disease happens when people are sated. When people don’t feel pressure because there is no pressure.

This (lack of pressure) in part stems from the fact that we have lost our sense of urgency. The only places where I still feel a significant sense of urgency are those places where the employees know that without their contributions and hard work, there is no paycheck. Unfortunately, many workers fail to “connect” their paycheck with their output. They consider these events to be completely independent of one another when, in fact, they could not be more dependent.

Short-timer disease happens when the focus is on the hole, and not the donut. I can count on one hand the number of people that I meet in my day-to-day who actually think about their job after hours.

And some might say, “Why should I? I’m only paid to think from 9 to 5.”

But nothing could be further from the truth. For in today’s competitive environment, a knowledge worker succeeds by thinking. And ideas don’t necessarily “show up” neatly between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM.

Where does this all lead? Frankly, I think we’re seeing it. Our country is saddled with the largest deficit in its history, and we have no idea how we are going to fund retirement (read: Social Security) for people who are presently 50 years old and younger. The numbers just don’t work.

The other day, I had a guest on my radio show who patiently explained how Medicaid is broker than broke. People thinking that their healthcare needs will be taken care of by the federal government upon retirement had better think again. There simply is no money for healthcare no matter whose program is being used.

And our unemployment rate hovers close to 20%. (Yes, I know that the federal government would have you think it’s at 8-9%, but any serious examination shows that roughly 1 out of every 5 eligible workers cannot find work.)

Previous recessions were escapable because we could always turn on the jets and depend on our free market forces to pull us through.

But in this new world economy, this isn’t the case. Americans are continually frustrated by their inability to save or prosper primarily because there is now a new player at the table. And that player is called, “emerging markets.”

There will always be successful entrepreneurs. People who will invent products, services, and even markets that enable them to become “islands of success.”

But these are the exceptions. The vast majority had better realize that the days of the free ride are over and the short-timers out there are at the very far end of the pack.