They are going to take 15 years to half the drop out rate to a still-unacceptable 30%. Sad.

Every single Bahamian is a victim of the PLP Holocaust starting with Lyndon Oscar Swindling.

Sad. Just plain sad. My momma would say *"There but for the grace of God, go I".* Another unsolvable problem in the socio-economic fabric of the Bahamas.

The problem with building family offices, is that the infrastructure of the Bahamas is quite antiquated for dealing with the sophisticated financial instruments that are now being exploited in personal wealth management.

Like every other field, servicing high net worth individuals has moved on from the staid trust fully investing in bonds and blue chips, to fully hedged positions with strike prices of underlying investments determined by economic partial differential mathematical analysis in real time. For the ultra-high net worth individual, they have fled the Bahamas, taking with them massive amounts of capital under management with them.

In the Bahamas, we don't know what we don't know, and that is why our economy is sinking like a stone. There are no quick fixes, no answers unless we have economic diversification, and throw open our doors to all kinds of foreign professionals, from lawyers to bankers to IT professionals to engineers. It is our only hope for salvation. These people know what is what and how to create jobs. They know the modern needs of consumers of these services, and those needs are far different from what the practitioners think (including the author of this article) in this parochial backwaters called the Bahamas.

Adrian -- you shouldn't have done this. This whole column is in poor taste. Maybe because you are young and full of testosterone that you picked up a poison pen. The email to you was private, and your response should have stayed private as well. You are usually a classy person and this column shows no class.

Clyde Lea has retired from ConocoPhilips. I wish that someone would do fact checking for this newspaper.

Sick and tired of me-too ideas. Our lawyers are too corrupt to be impartial arbitrators and the whole world knows it. Our judicial system is quarterbacked by a corrupt Attorney General, as demonstrated by the Baha Mar fiasco. With millions of dollars at stake, no one is going to roll the dice of arbitration in this banana republic where 90% of the players have no moral or ethical compass.

Hilarious -- if they all weren't a bunch of criminals.

Sad. Another wasted opportunity. Just announced that a Jamaican writer, Marlon James has won the Booker Prize for his novel about the Bob Marley shooting in 1976.

We do not have any scholars, and largely because of the education system and COB. Our young men have been socialised to pick up the gun, rather than the pen. We do not have a culture of learning and erudition.

St. Lucia, which is much smaller than the Bahamas has won the Nobel Prize in LIterature with Derek Walcott. ( I was at Ian Strachan's presentation in Nassau where he had a conversation with Walcott). Naipaul has won the Nobel Prize in Literature from Trinidad. Saint-John Perce who was born in Guadeloupe, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sir Arthur Lewis, also of St. Lucia has won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

We, as a nation, obviously don't care about learning. Heck, we don't even care about reading and books. Has anyone been to the library on Shirley Street lately? Other peer countries take the initiative. Many parts of the Caribbean have begun in recent years to host literary festivals, including in Trinidad and Tobago the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, in Jamaica the Calabash International Literary Festival, in Barbados Bim Literary Festival, in Dominica the Nature Island Literary Festival and Book Fair, Alliouagana Festival of the word in Montserrat, and the Antigua and Barbuda Literary Festival. Us, we have a festival to get half-naked and dance in the street while the government pays millions to it cronies, using the Carnival festival as its corruption vehicle.

The average Bahamian on the street cannot speak English, never mind write it.

The Bahamian middle class was largely artificial in the first place. It was based on unionised workers in the service industry, in a monolithic economy dominated by large foreign companies with deep pockets operating the resorts.

This worked well when the tourism product was in heavy demand. It was the engine that drove the economy, and elevated the middle class. That engine is sputtering and dying, and no amount of brainstorming, as Obie suggests, is going to reboot the middle class.

The "middle class" is defined economically in various ways. One metric is that one is a member of the middle class if they make between 67% and 200% of the national average, and do not spend more than 30% of their income on housing and have enough money to live. Another measure is to divide the population and subtract the top 20% of incomes and the bottom 20% of incomes and what is left is the middle class. All of these measures are predicated on a diverse economy.

If you know anything about math, you can see the issues here. If in fact you do make between 67% and 200% of the average, and the average is so low, that you cannot live decently, you are not really middle class in the semantic sense that you do not have enough money to live on.

Or, suppose that the the bulk of the population resides in the lowest 20% of the income distribution, because the range of income distribution is low (meaning that the top wage is not very high amongst the ordinary people), then being in the middle class isn't saying much, and it doesn't take much to drop you in the lower classes.

The middle class has been in a ten year decline in most developed countries. This is part of a trend where the upper income classes are going with the knowledge industries populated by educated people. People with no specialised education and skills are dropping into the lower income classes.

I'm afraid that because of the level of education and the lack of economic diversity, nothing can stop the slide of the "middle class" in the Bahamas. Consumer debt is at stratospheric levels, incomes are not rising, unemployment is rising, and tourism which drives the whole engine, is flat.

There is economic good news on the horizon, and nothing can reboot it. The only method to save the Bahamas economy, is to diversify as fast as possible, while improving education for the next generations. These generations are doomed, as well as those in the education system today.