Unemployment Or Unemployability? A Story.
So the recession is over but unemployment is not falling, at least not yet. How on earth can a recovery be "jobless"? And how might this fit with the fact that, in the 1960s, about 60,000 new businesses a year got started in the US, while over a million a year were getting started in the years before the collapse? Here's a little story; bear with me:
In the summer of 2003, I drove my aging BMW over to Dave Marshall's garage, a converted two-bay service station on Pleasant Lake near my summer home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, hoping to find out from Dave--the solid son of the former Chief of Police--where in Concord or Manchester the nearest BMW dealership was. The "climate control" system was gone, a system governed (I correctly surmised) by a complex little computer module--not your change-your-oil-by-the-beach kind of problem. Dave got behind the wheel, confirmed the symptoms, shrugged, and told me he could handle it. I told him I doubted it. He smiled, not quite condescendingly. I followed him inside.
Sitting down at a terminal, Dave tapped a few soiled keys, and logged on--so he took pains to explain--to a network he paid a nominal price to access--a network of tens of thousands of independent, certified mechanics just like him, nationwide. He took a history of my problem--year, make, type of failure, etc.--and transmitted my description in some detail; then he gave me a coffee, told me he'd be back to me when he could "work up a report" and sent me home.
Later on I learned that the website Dave logged onto was set up by the IATN--the International Automotive Technicians Network--which itself began as chartered non-profit back in 1972. The network has grown enormously since then, with nearly 50,000 users worldwide: archives, databases for all cars, a library of technical literature, and over a dozen engineering forums on leading edge automotive design problems. Dave was logging into a "groupware" site, which other mechanics haphazardly checked, to see if they could help a fellow member, or solve a product of their own.
Three hours later, I was driving by the garage again and stopped in. Dave was about to call me. He showed me pages of responses, which produced a consistent number of solutions (17 of 21 were more or less identical), describing methods of repair, parts descriptions, parts numbers, software settings, and part sourcing. He was also able to determine whether his diagnostic computer could actually reset the relevant module. By the end of the day, he said, he could give me a complete analysis and estimate, educating me to the module's engineering in the process. Even if I could not give the car to him, he told me, the printout would help me "ask intelligent questions" of the dealer.
DAVE IS not one for policy clichés. But if the "ownership society" had ever needed a poster-child, it could have done worse than capture the smile of reason on his face as he revealed his powers to me. Dave could not have survived as an independent entrepreneur of this sort a mere fifteen years ago and he knew it. His two bays had become five. His peer-to-peer information network, his "platform," had matured into a settled work environment, which meant the world to him: from diagnostic machines to parts ordering systems. These integrated technologies are now so pervasive that our children simply take them for granted. But to those of us who came into our own in the 1960s and 1970s, Dave included, they remain magical.
For every problem with every car, in other words, Dave now saw an opportunity to assemble snips of knowledge into a "deliverable"--a bundle of technical know-how with market "know-about." He became a better business strategist as well. He might procure components and tools from suppliers from virtually anywhere--California, Mexico, Canada, even the Far East--and then use inventory control software to track how to maintain margins on parts, distinguishing between parts used everyday (such as bolts), and parts ordered only once in while (such as ball-joints).
Dave could learn what his competitors were charging, or paying for parts. He could instantly explore the burgeoning roster of mechanics who were also his brains-trust. He could help maintain the evolving skills of his employees, anyone of whom might become a competitor.
In short, the platform enabled Dave to offer--not standard services--but custom "solutions," much like an IBM consultant or a Siemens engineer. The platform meant that Dave could compete with, not go to work for, the dealers in Concord or Manchester. It meant not having to offer only "commodity-like" services, like oil changes--and then see his prices (and style of life) eroded by competition from the Jiffy Lube a half-hour away off south 93.
AND ANOTHER THING. Dave would not be (as Adam Smith once put it) "mutilated" by repetitive, mind-numbing tasks in some industrial division of labor. The platform meant that he would have to out his mind to things, even that his wife Carla, a literature graduate of the local college, Colby-Sawyer, could work with him on the myriad human problems involved in customer care--and not get swamped by tedium. It meant that, together, they could establish something like a family practice for cars, and charge accordingly, hiring two or three like-minded people to the team.
Once, when Dave was growing up, such badly educated people held more or less steady (though, let's face it, distasteful) assembly jobs in the gear factories, or wool mills, or shoe factories that had studded the roads and rivers of the state. People with high school education had held sales jobs in small retail stores and banks. Most of those jobs have been lost to the platform in the larger sense, that is, to networks connected to robots governed by custom software or computer-integrated machine tools; or to scheduling and book-keeping software, or even just to ATMs. Most famously, perhaps, such jobs have been lost to Wal-Mart's outsourcing logistics, while the low prices of the things ordinary wage-earners buy at Wal-Mart keep them in what resembles a middle class.
Labor unions could not make a difference here. It was precisely because direct labor used to be so simple, mechanical and yet critical to value creation that labor unions made sense. The logic behind unions may still apply to some kinds of work--fast-food servers, apparel assemblers, hospital orderlies. But any job that is simple and repetitive, that requires so little individual creativity that an employee would rather join a union than negotiate an individual career path, has become a prime target for the computer-integrative technologies.
All of this has meant that tens of millions of people--people with children, people hobbled by dullness and self-doubt, people who played by rules that simply evaporated from the time they were 15 to the time they were 35--are hard pressed to see a future. When President Obama spoke during the campaign of people consoling themselves with guns and fundamentalism (and, he might have added, FOX), he was putting his finger on the crisis. After all, the school system we conceived, the union movements we adjusted to, the "leading" economic indicators we tracked, the Government programs the New Deal put in place--none of these things assumed that virtually every member of society would need the equivalent of college-level skill just to get a decent job. Paul Krugman said he hoped Obama would be a new FDR. But FDR is not what we need. By comparison, FDR's challenge was simple. We need the equivalent of nation building here at home.
For people with college educations like Dave and Carla, working conditions have generally improved, no doubt, even when we do not work for ourselves. Salaries for college graduates, on average, are more than 100 per cent more than for high school graduates. And then there are the perks. But everyone, including highly educated people, are dealing with higher levels of risk. Knowledge companies do not survive like the old industrial ones did. On the whole, the old command-and control corporation has been replaced by the love-'em-and-leave-'em corporation. (Duke University's Arie Lewin has shown that even Fortune 500 companies fail or are acquired at a rate three times faster than was the case in the 1980s.)
So the dangers of the knowledge economy are clear enough, but so are the opportunities. Once, in an economy defined by the industrial division of labor, a person who owned none of what Marxists called the "means of production" was helpless and periodically desperate. The welfare state acted to assure that all citizens remained consumers--which stimulated the economy as it saved their lives. But the great danger was once periodic unemployment for have-nots. Now it is chronic unemployability for know-nots. The challenge is to be a qualified producer, not just a qualified consumer. What we need, rather, is a mentor state, about which more in the weeks ahead.
I find this description of people: "not-quite-enough schooling, too much beer, too much TV" really troubling coming from you, Bernard. It's a little condescending. The notion of a "mentor state" is also a little disturbing, but I'll wait for you to unpack that idea.
Provacative stuff.
September 29, 2009 11:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's WAY too polite, Destor. This guy is self-inflating.
Life's good in his future, as long as you're not "people with children, people hobbled by dullness and self-doubt, people who play by the rules." Yeah. Doncha just hate it when those people come over and mess up your place? Pretty obvious Bernie's not hobbled by self-doubt - probably not even acquainted.
And now he's gonna tart up a Mentor State. Like, this guy and his pals did just SO DARNED GREAT with the Business Schools and KPMG and 80's style advice. So now we're gonna get Bernie's new & improved "mentoring" - bet they've even updated the buzzwords. I hear there's gonna be a big launch... and we're all signed on for lifelong learning... right down to the evening classes and Weekends at Bernie's 2.
"I'd recognize that smirk anywhere."
September 29, 2009 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good points. I'm working on a post about this and have definitely reconsidered my more reserved judgment here.
September 29, 2009 5:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just don't be hobbled by dullness or self-doubt.
For further mentoring, see Bernie's 2.
September 29, 2009 5:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think I voided those traps. And fortunately I don't have any kids yet. It might have gone smoother with a beer though.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/destor23/2009/09/your-unemployment-is-your-faul.php?ref=reccafe
September 29, 2009 5:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think globalization is going to run aground on this issue. There have to be jobs for high school graduates and lower that allow them to get and stay married and raise families, otherwise the society will fall apart. I've written about this before. I'll take the liberty of quoting myself:
In this world a simple, poorly educated person from little Chinese village can take a train to the big city and find a job on an assembly line, but an American can't.My bottom line is that "dumb" people are human too and a lot of very "intelligent" people had dumb grandparents and many intelligent people will have dumb children... we tend toward the mean.
We cannot doom everyone who isn't verbal to a life in hell.
Avishai has really turned me off here.
September 30, 2009 10:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that some of Avashai's descriptions of the less advantaged are condescending, but I'm not so certain that the intent of the article was quite as negative as just about everyone else has tended to presume. Isn't Avashai's premise here that our society must somehow find ways to accommodate those persons who cannot adapt to new changes in our economy and society? What's so bad about that?
It appears to me that the condescending comments in the article may have caused many to view Avashai's assessment of the problems facing us as something prescriptive - as in the thread comment that "He thinks anybody who isn't very, very smart should be very, very poor, or, better still, just fucking die" - but those unfortunate characterizations aside, I read the article as primarily a description of the problems facing us now. I agree with him that this economic crisis is fundamentally different than the one faced by FDR, and that we're going to have to come up with different solutions. I don't know yet what he means by a "mentor state," but even if that turns out to be something that isn't palatable, that doesn't change the fact that his assessment of the problem is worth considering.
September 30, 2009 2:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
My father was the kind of amateur intellectual that thrived in this country until creative thinking and analysis was professionalized. He posed a question in the 80s that has troubled me ever since and seems to go to the heart of this problem.
By definition, 100 is the median IQ in this country. Half of Americans have an IQ of 100 or less. What do they do in an information based economy?
I pose this question because I don't know the answer. Will there be a permanent underclass? A servant class? Can a just society condemn half or some significant proportion of half its population to poverty or servitude based on biological characteristics?
Or does it really not take too much intelligence to master these technologies and utilize them?
Anyone have an answer?
September 29, 2009 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is the great question. First, a million new little business can create as may jobs as 60,000 big ones, though many less jobs for people who cannot bring their heads to work. Second, what seems to be happening, in places like Silicon Valley, is that prosperity in the information economy creates service/servant jobs. But, on the whole, a transitional generation will face serious problems. A mentor state will have to do what Obama has done: rebuild infrastructure and schools with massive, job-creating investments: many big digs.
September 29, 2009 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
It has been my experience, limited though it is, that a college degree is a rather poor indicator of mental capability in the modern workforce. I have worked with "uneducated" people, by your definition, who can work circles around people with advanced degrees.
And I have also worked with people who seem intelligent enough at first glance, but who can't comprehend the most basic of computer skills.
Since you told an interesting anecdote, let me tell you one of mine.
A friend of mine is a programmer with an associates degree. Several years ago he was working as a contractor for a large overnight package carrier, writing code for their systems. They decided that the time had come to make his job permanent, and since they offered good benefits, he applied for his own job.
He was not hired. He wasn't qualified, you see. His job, the job he was doing at that very moment, required a master's degree in computer science. So he didn't get the job. Instead, he was kept on for a few months to train the person with the master's degree who got his job. So he wasn't qualified for his own job, but he was qualified to train someone else to do his own job.
In my opinion, this is largely a result of an archaic system of higher education that largely predates the industrial revolution. Uneducatated is the wrong term - we should call them undegreed.
We really need to go back to the very root, if we want to solve this problem, and redifine what education means. Corporate America is bursting at the seams with very highly educated idiots who can't even use Microsoft Word without the daily aid of undegreed hourly wage slaves working in technical support.
Unfortunately, the very solution we need most is the one least likely to happen, as it would threaten the very foundations of power. A true meritocracy would save this country from economic ruin, but it was also damn to poverty the middle-management human dross living off the gravy train of low-wage, undegreed productivity.
September 29, 2009 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your "friend" probably didn't know as much as he thought he did, and that employer probably knew that, and the degree requirement was their way of telling him that he was more dangerous than useful, doing things he really didn't know how to do. Good for them, if that's the case.
Not let me tell YOU a story.
I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I was recently laid off, in favor of a fellow like your friend, who was able to convince people in this company - almost entirely electrical engineers - that he was a programmer. His buggy and incomplete software is literally in the process of putting the company out of business: without a CS education, he's working on user interface software not knowing the difference between a stack and a queue (windows are stacked, events like mouse motions and clicks, and key presses, are queued). He can't fix it or finish it, though - he doesn't know how - so now he mostly spends his time, and takes up his colleagues' time, chasing bugs that never would have happened in the first place, had he known how to write software safely and reliably. And the employer lets him get away with it, because it looked to the untrained eye like he might know what he was doing - in fact, he really didn't know what he had gotten himself and the company into.
I knew, but wasn't allowed to do anything but try to clean up his messes. Electrical engineers generally don't understand about sunk costs.
There's a saying in software development, about knowing just enough to be dangerous.
By now, I truly believe that software developers should be licensed, just like lawyers, doctors, and even nurses. If one can't change a bedpan without knowing how, why should one be able to develop medical instruments and other life-critical technology without knowing how?
Arrogant, wannabe programmers who think they're doing just fine, maybe should be getting second opinions about what they should know but really don't have a clue about. I'm talking about people like your "friend."
On the other hand, people who do know what they're doing are well worth what they get paid; companies are just reluctant to pay it, because there are so many underqualified programmers getting away with not knowing how to do their jobs, so the more expensive educated and truly capable people are not deemed worth the additional expense (been there, done that, more than once). This amounts to a disincentive regarding computer science education, which in the long run will make the problems far worse. Employers, unfortunately, don't know enough to know the value of an educated programmer, but an educated programmer certainly does know it.
So I think you're just wrong. You may thing you know, but you have no idea. Tell your "friend" to get a degree, and stop trying to take work away from people who have already paid their dues by getting theirs. Your "friend" is devaluing at least a whole industry with this kind of attitude - not to mention other industries that depend on it - shame on your "friend".
September 30, 2009 1:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, my friend has a degree now, thanks, in philosophy. He is an independent contractor and has his pick of high-paying programming jobs, sets his own schedule, works out of his house, and makes enough money to spend 8 weeks a year in China studying martial arts.
In the long run, he ended up much better off by not getting that deadend corporate job. He didn't need a PhD to succeed because, for the most part, programming is still a meritocracy for people of real talent and skill, despite the best efforts people who have proven their superior ability to go to school.
And no, I'm not talking about myself, so you can drop the irony quotes.
September 30, 2009 10:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
We are really not talking about impostors in knowledge work, but the lack of low skilled jobs with a minimum of dignity, which is what avoids having a sordid underclass... Having dignified, decently paid work for people who aren't the brightest bulbs is essential to having a healthy society.
September 30, 2009 11:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
David, you probably know the work of Mike Davis. I was really shaken by his book Planet of Slums. The neoliberal ethos which has accompanied US domination following the collapse of the Soviet Union seems to place little value on employment itself as an essential social policy, and is all about production, commerce and growth. There is as a result a growing global underclass of people who inhabit the "informal economy", people who are not participants in the global economic order, and have in effect been jettisoned from the human race by the neoliberal order. This strikes me as a tinder box waiting to ignite.
September 30, 2009 1:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why a restrained "decently" paid? Why not "well" paid? Most people wouldn't notice if, say, George Stephanopoulos disappeared from our TVs but if the guys who pick up our garbage each week stopped showing up, life would quickly become chaotic. I don't see why their standard of living should be any lower than George's. Re Avishai's characterization of unions as havens for the inadequate, they are just the opposite. Union organizers understand power and how to harness it so that the wealth they help produce is distributed more fairly than their employers might like.
September 30, 2009 8:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Small businesses already create half the jobs in the country, so I'm told. But you know, the stresses of working for a small business are different than the stresses of working for a large one. Office politics is more personal. Job descriptions have to be more fluid. Everyone's on call all the time. Not that these things don't happen in large corporations too but, it just goes to figure that in a 5 person operation folks have to be more flexible if it's a complicated business while in a larger company, people can specialize a bit more.
September 29, 2009 1:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bernard Avishai, that condescending, anti-union, globalist jerk, has a summer-house near Wilmot, New Hampshire. He thinks anybody who isn't very, very smart should be very, very poor, or, better still, just fucking die.
Meanwhile, the pampered offspring of parents who are very, very smart or very, very rich sleep peacefully in their dorms just a few miles away from Bernard Avishai's summer-house, in Andover, New Hampshire, where George W. Bush was commissioner of the stick-ball league once upon a time, and bonded distantly but forever with other "products" of Phillips Academy in Andover, like Dick Cheney.
"FDR is not what we need," says Bernard Avishai, and I have to agree with him.
What we really need is MFMIdR (Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre), who would know what to hang from the nearest tree in the beautiful hardwood forests around Wilmot, New Hampshire.
September 29, 2009 1:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nice with the Robespierre.
September 29, 2009 2:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't often agree with you Ruddy...but this time..SPOT ON !
C
September 29, 2009 2:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
We Beta Gamma Epsilon frat-boys have to stick together, or the Dekes will burn down our house!
September 29, 2009 2:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
"He thinks anybody who isn't very, very smart should be very, very poor, or, better still, just fucking die."
That was my impression of this post as well.
September 29, 2009 3:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Or, to put it another way, "How many Dave Marshall's do we need?"
What if Dave was the fiftieth car mechanic in rural New Hampshire to get connected to the internet, rather than one of the first? Would you still blame him for working as a Wal-Mart stock boy?
September 29, 2009 3:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hear! Hear!
September 30, 2009 2:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
September 30, 2009 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
I take my car to a "Dave" who's in his 60s and I know a lot of the strugglers, too. The friends, acquiantances and colleagues I know who have done OK-to-well in the past 10 years are all highly adaptable and skilled individuals, flexible, fast learners, and not scared of change -- many have changed jobs yet stayed with the same employer. So despite your critics of this post, it sure sounds familiar to me. Maybe it can sound less demeaning if we consider what Robert Reich posted a few weeks ago about automation, not ignorance, resulting in the real and lasting job loss. In time, overseas factories will not be immune.
Who will build the robots? Other robots (it's robots all the way down).
September 30, 2009 5:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Aldus Huxley did.
All those Gammas and Epsilons making life a pleasure for the Betas and Alphas.
C
September 29, 2009 11:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is a great story, and told well, but it forgets the most fundamental issue.
But everyone, including highly educated people, are dealing with higher levels of risk.
Tell me about the high level of "risk" in the life or the real owners of our "ownership society," you know, the Goldman Sachs fraternity, the Paris Hiltons, the George Bushs, the Robert Rubins, the Tom Friedmans, the Warren Buffets? How come nobody re-engineers Tom Friedman's job so it can be done more intelligently? What "risk" means for the top dogs at Lehman Brothers or AIG?
If owning the "means of production" means so little these days, why can't we have it?
Yeah right!
September 29, 2009 11:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, when I read this post (for which I have Destor to thank -- normally I wouldn't bother), I thought, "Geez, this sounds like that idiot, Tom Friedman."
Flying through life at 30,000 feet (where it's always sunny), and sharing your great insights on this ever-changing world of ours... Thanks for nothing, BA.
Also agree with others that the anti-union jabs were unattractive (not to mention untrue).
-- ARG
September 30, 2009 1:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
But what you describe is what our great mentor, Saint Ronny glowingly called "A service oriented economy". Service jobs are a big part of an economy but if we aren't coverting raw materials into usable goods (manufacturing) we aren't creating wealth. If we aren't creating wealth we are running a trade deficit and creating debt.
I'm glad your mechanic friend is sucessful but in the big picture he is runnig his shop on borrowed money and when the bill comes due his customers' cash flow will peter out. The only long term solution for him and all of America is to bring manufacturing back to America and "free market" be damned.
September 29, 2009 12:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hilarious.
The metaphorical use of the “climate control” system on a German saloon car is priceless. And the “summer home’ thing. It took me a while but I got it. Your summer home, due to global warming, is soon to become your desert retreat. So the “climate control” problem is a metaphor for how we must reprogram our way of thinking. Love it. I’m not sure I got the chief of police/auto mechanic with the liberally educated wife part. Was that a nod to Lady Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, she being the known as the first computer programmer? Or is it just an inside baseball MIT thing? Anyway it added color. And finaly the image of the auto-mechanic sitting at the computer joining with his “community.” Right out of ZARDOZ. “Mind meld in five minutes at level three.”
I can’t wait for the next installment. Undoubtedly something about replacing all those pine trees on your summer compound with cacti.
September 29, 2009 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
The picture one gets from this anecdote is that the contemporary world is just so inherently fraught with dynamic change and ceaseless creative destruction that no one can survive any more on average, stolid intelligence and workaday responsibility. Everyone in America now has to become a "creative thinker" and an entrepreneur, and spend their brief moment on Earth restlessly "negotiating an individual career path" to keep up with the torrent of change.
To me, that sounds like a very annoying, stressful, spiritually lonely and unsettled way to live. Is it true, nevertheless, that we are doomed to this kind of life if we want a decent standard of living? I have no way of knowing. But if it is true, why is it true? Is this inherent in our stage of cultural development? Or does it just reflect choices we have made, and that can be unmade? Why can't we aim to build a society that is stable and sustainable, that is organized cleanly and efficiently, that is physically and mentally healthy, and that isn't so consumed by the itchy drive to destroy and remake its material framework constantly?
Do we really need to make the creative, high-investment, high-intensity satisfaction of every restless human craving and lust the driver of our economy?
I think many would be happy with a stable and secure job in a peaceful and sustainable community, a job that provided a life with more leisure time and fewer challenges to time management, but perhaps also fewer toys and entertainments and gadgets; a job that allowed one to meet one's responsibilities, but wasn't a scene of perpetual crises and insecurity. Many would probably thrive in a human environment that eschewed the anxious, bubbling, go-go hysteria and noise of contemporary American life. Shouldn't people at least have the choice to live that kind of life? If so, are they being denied the opportunity for such a life by the dominant individualistic economic culture and its greedy, exploitative and anarchic ruling ethos?
I am struck more and more frequently lately by the amount of sheer waste of brain power that characterizes our supposedly brainy "knowledge economy". I recently was doing some independent research on certain areas of mathematics - not because its my "career path", but just because its stuff I like to think about and learn. The more I learned about these areas, the more disturbed I was by the huge amount of intellectual energy that is devoted to video gaming, and other forms of remote yapping, chattering and stimulation. All of this brain power could be employed in engineering a healthy and sustainable world, and rationally organized human communities. But instead of designing communities and systems for the more efficient production of the necessities of life, the brains are applied to ever more "creative" means of escapism and remote masturbation. I am appalled by the amount of intellectual talent that is drawn to edgy, decadent and expensive outposts of human desire and craving, while the fundamentals of human life are neglected and taken for granted. Our lives seem deeply out of balance.
September 29, 2009 1:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan,
That is beautifully put.
Avishai wants everybody to be a corporation. Some nuttering nabob of positivity wrote a book about that, I think it was called "Me, Inc." The correct title should have been "sociopathy as freedom."
September 29, 2009 1:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I love that. "sociopathy as freedom."
Ain't it the truth.
C
September 29, 2009 3:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, I have worked on an assembly line. Is this what you do, when not doing math and writing lovely comments? I suspect not.
September 29, 2009 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow, what's with the venom there?
September 29, 2009 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gawd. What a prick comment.
I am really glad you live in the rarefied world of successful entrepreneurs and innovators. The rest of us have to exist to. We have to buy that stuff. Your disdainful conceit is nauseating. I know a lot of great hardworking smart people and this economy is utterly failing them. My whole life has been watching our middle class struggle to stay in place. Maybe that is a product of a poor local economy (Oregon), but it is my reality.
I understand your experience is different. Good for you, I am glad you got yours. But maybe you should get out a bit more. I would be happy to give you lots of people to talk to.
September 29, 2009 2:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not an assembly line, Bernard. But my days are fairly uniform and repetitive, and are mainly spent cranking out various kinds of sales reports on spreadsheets, and calling customers.
In the current economy, I'm happy to have a job and to be able to support my family.
September 29, 2009 4:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Say it ain't so Dan!
I had imagined you as an eloquent philosophy professor somewhere, or a creative writer, or history prof ( actually you are too good a writer to be a philosopher). Don't tell me you are a prisoner to Excel like the rest of us. There is no justice in the world.
September 29, 2009 4:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was a philosophy professor once. Didn't work out.
September 29, 2009 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have worked as a legal assistant, Oracle programmer, technical writer, bartender, bouncer, door-to-door environmental lobbyist, and finally as an accountant. I have written one novel, two screenplays, two full-length plays, several one act plays, and several hundred poems.
And my creative work is primarily based on the horror of unemployment and underemployment.
Unemployment and underemployment is a spiritual condition. To fight for every scrap and keep a cool head while pretending you don't need some contemptible yuppie scum to give you work.
I would rather work on an assembly line into my grave at a living wage with a living retirement than live under the constant threat of unemployment or underployment.
So spare me.
September 29, 2009 7:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have been reading your comments about Israel with interest for some time, but I never realized till now that you were such a nasty little momser. And this is an Israeli "progressive"... menuval more like it.
We are talking about human beings that are willing to work hard and raise families and that is literally the salt of the earth and from that seed all the geniuses of the world have sprung and to that seed most of their decendents return. If we cannot find useful and dignified things for them to do that allow them to lead reasonably healthy and pleasant lives, then we will become a third world country with masses of slum dwellers who from live day to day by their wits... and without good schools and health care at the rate we are going.
With progressives like this who needs neocons?
September 30, 2009 12:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hey . . . Dan . . .
How many "professional" guitar players have you met?
Forty years on tour on the road and I've met them all.
Town to town ... Room to room ... Stage to stage ...
Every hero has their personal adventure.
Bernard here wishes he had one.
~OGD~
October 1, 2009 4:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure your analogy is very solid--speaking both as the owner of an older BMW and a holder of a Master's degree in design. First, the car; Older BMWs are much more likely to go to independent garages, because they were much easier to work on (that's why I got mine). Today's BMWs don't even have a dipstick, and require ever more elaborate electronic diagnostic systems than pre-2000 models. Like most cars today, they are increasingly designed to be serviced only by factory dealerships--is Dave the Mechanic really going to understand Dual Clutch Technology? Also, for all the wonderment, we DIYers have generally the same 'system' available to us that Dave the Mechanic had--it's the Internet, and there are plenty of BMW forums to find answers to basic problems and fixes--though increasingly, the answer is, 'take it to the dealership.'
In short, I think your anecdote is a nice story, but one that itself is facing decline.
I think you're also similarly mistaken regarding education, careers, and jobs. The education system has increasingly become a treadmill with a good job being the carrot that you never quite reach. In many fields, people with an undergrad degree are told that a master's degree is the way to success, until they work for that degree, only to be told at that point that they are suddenly 'overqualified.'
Regarding my own career, this is the 3rd recession i've had to go through, and this time, I was laid off from a huge entertainment conglomerate with a large management layer that treats the creatives like galley slaves. Their focus solely on hitting quarterly numbers made the layoff decision seem rational, yet they failed to understand the long-term value of in-house staff versus outsourcing (the kind of work I do doesn't get outsourced to India, but to design firms, and management didn't seem to get the real impact of this on their business, since payroll is now viewed differently than project costs.)
It also has been my experience over the years that rates and salaries for designers and technical production artists have plunged, and management in general has increasingly viewed design as a commodity. Besides my degree, I have a long track record of learning new technologies and skills such as object-oriented programming, so despite the fact that I also like to drink beer, and watch some tv, I don't fit into Bernard's anecdotal thesis du jour. Instead, I blame the inflation of middle-management by people who's skill is in talking a good game, rather than actually knowing how to play it. Our work culture venerates the manager above all, because of the self-perpetuating myth that those under the manager are disposable and interchangeable.
September 29, 2009 2:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Outsourcing creates a lot of jobs of the sort that colleges prepare people for and which the existing cadre of managers can understand.
On the buy side you have people writing requests for proposals, doing proposal analysis and scoring, contract negotiation, project management, project oversight, acceptance testing, dispute negotiation, invoice processing and accounts payable.
On the sell side you have sales staff, proposal writers, technical sales support, presentation creators, contract negotiators, project managers, customer relations staff, project delivery specialists, invoice preparers, dispute negotiation, accounts receivables, and collections.
The beauty of the system is that the managers on both sides mainly have only to understand the generic business functions. They can be pretty clueless as to the actual business results to be achieved by the project and how to execute the work. This makes it a lot simpler for the managers in both the customer and vendor organizations. Also, if the project fails, the buy side manager has someone to blame.
Without outsourcing, the managers actually have to understand what the company needs, what the capabilities of the existing employees are, hiring and training employees, building teams to do actual work, and supervising the execution of the work. This is risky and requires more skill on the managers part.
September 29, 2009 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
and spend their brief moment on Earth restlessly "negotiating an individual career path" to keep up with the torrent of change.
As so much of Dan's writing, this is exactly right.
I am relatively young (early 30's), and this is the experience of my generation. I have friends who have already gone through 3 career changes already- mimicking the economy at large (dot.com, real estate, service, etc.). I know engineers that have spent their last employed months training overseas replacements. One was just laid off from a good printer company (the one that gave Carly 20mil plus) and now works a late night fish taco stand. He has a masters from UC Berkeley. He has only one other 'good' job prospect- going to Tianjian to train. On contract. MASTERS.
Reminds me of when i would travel in third world countries and used to be shocked that a doctor would be a taxi-driver. I get it now. I know so many older smart hard working people who are now permanently underemployed it, or worse. They have been screwed, and they are not the 'too many beer folks' Fucking Prick.
No the smarter ones went into jobs in Universities or the government, not for the glamor but for the security and comfort of a good life. And we are about to completely defund their retirements (watch the next decade). These jobs are perfectly respectable, not everybody can invent the next Cool thing. Somebody needs to buy it.
I take real issue with the claim that working conditions have improved for college educated people. Have you looked at the historical data. From Reagan on things have gotten worse. Real wages have declined. But now we have ipods and flatscreen tvs. Along with blackberries and working vacations, and CC debt just to try and keep afloat. That is if we are lucky to have a job.
Oh but all hail the genius of 'creative destruction'. I full on agree with the rest of Dan's comment. Our 'free market' system is atrocious at allocating resources at things that matter. The whole concept is just pisspoor, its like letting your child's basest instincts determine where we collectively should invest. Fast food, video games. Good times, sure. But why the hell do we need to produce so much anyway? The basic necessities are cheap enough that we could share them easily. Why are we working so hard? Towards what goals? We can't even take basic threats to our own existence seriously- it is too big and too far down the road to really bother us. And What happened to the leisure we were promised once we solved the bottom half of Maslow's hierarchy? Oh, sorry all that excess goes to the top.
And even then they needed 2 trillion more from the Fed and our taxes to keep their illusion afloat a few more years. Total Bull shit.
Work 24/7 or you get nothing- well okay You can have 10 days in Cancun if you are really good. So Dave will relentlessly work his ass off while the larger base of consumers who have cars that can afford his service will continue to shrink. And he will compete more and more, until he is too old or some larger entity steps in and undercuts him. Then hopefully he will have squirreled enough away to eek out a respectable retirement. In a safe place where the poor 'too many beer' folks won't steal his shit, since they really won't have any other way to make a living themselves.
How will we make new jobs for all these underemployed people, when we can't even make jobs for our educated people. Doing what? I look forward to your solutions. For myself I think we are simply creating our own homegrown caste system complete with our version of 'Untouchables'.
Long live the new economy, same as the old economy.
September 29, 2009 2:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
p.s. Very well written and thought provoking post. However, obviously it touches a real nerve.
September 29, 2009 2:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think the nerve it touches is what I allude to in Rich Emissions today: The middle class is shrinking and it is painful. Avishai ascribes success in this environment to education and being nimble, and that does play a part, but being well-connected and self-interested also plays a part, as does being lucky.
September 29, 2009 3:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly right Donal.
Educated and nimble will get you the crumbs, but the size of the meal is rapidly getting smaller- better to know the master.
At the risk of going personal- What's particularly grating I think is that Ashishai own experience of Israel's globalization success stories relies in a large part on a community and culture working together to insure relative success. Sure they have an educated workforce but a lot of the investment in Israel comes directly out of the diaspora- for personal and cultural reasons (this would be the 'well-connected').
I am not begrudging that, on the contrary I laud it, but that is exactly the sort of community cooperation (like Unions) that we in this country have torn down in parallel with our shrinking middle class. The fact that he disparages unions yet his own career's success has depended on similar principles is utterly offensive and hypocritical.
September 29, 2009 3:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
The fact that you forget about Israel, is that the rise of Avishai and his coastal friends to the globalized gala was also the occasion of the sinking of most of Israel into growing poverty.
see e.g.
http://www.alternativenews.org/english/1141-on-economic-class-and-political-choice-in-israel.html
And that is the good part. Because to sweeten the deal for the 80% of Israeli Jews who are the losers of the globalization bonanza, the state transformed the occupation into a status boost + welfare system for Jews, with of course the ever growing immiseration of Palestinians.
September 29, 2009 4:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed, but I don't feel that is relevant. For one, I certainly can not attribute that to Avishai- on the contrary his works are responsibly cognizant of this and he has called to remedy that.
Furthermore in the case of Israel would I not make a casual linkage between the two. They have not grown prosperous at the expense of their arab population. They have simply let them stay poor and deny them the necessary tools to improve their lot.
September 29, 2009 4:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
They have not grown prosperous at the expense of their arab population. They have simply let them stay poor and deny them the necessary tools to improve their lot.
That is a simplification I am afraid. First there is absolutely no doubt that until about 1987, Israelis did got rich at the direct expense of the Arab population, which provided a reservoir of very cheap labor while consuming almost no outlays (in welfare or development). This was the foundation of a lot of the wealth that would later become doubled and tripled through globalization.
Second. You are right that the wealth achieved through globalization itself was not (generally) taken from Palestinians (some was, but not a lot). However, a lot of that wealth WAS amassed directly at the expense of the majority of Jews.
The intensification of the occupation, the creeping land theft, the growing brutality, the expanding settlements etc. were the conditions that made globalization socially acceptable to the majority of Israeli Jews. So these processes are socially linked.
September 29, 2009 4:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry, I misinterpreted your comment slightly I have now read the link.
I stand by my comment but I do agree with the class issue. I don't really don't get how everyone can be so complacent with the growing inequity that our market system encourages. The rich will of course get richer, those with good credit will of couse get better deals, making them even richer etc. Of course Its fundamentally not sustainable. I thought we learned that once.
Regardless I don't wish to dwell on Israel, I just find his personal hypocrisy on the importance of community tools nauseating.
September 29, 2009 4:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
The neoliberal and Third Way element of the Democratic Party has been trying to convince us since the 90's that this is the life we actually want, Saladin: the life of "change". We have been instructed to believe that we want to change careers 7 or 8 times in our lives, to struggle every day to hold together normal human relationships as we sail our little one-passenger entrepreneurial boats among the shifting dips and swells of the phantasmogoric modern economy, and sometimes end up living thousands of miles away from every person who ever meant anything to us. But at least we'll all be electronically networked together like the freaking Borg.
We can't even count on the damn natural environment to stay the same any more. The physical places we love, and that used to provide solace, comfort and familiarity are constantly wrecked. I heard a couple of years ago that the average wintertime temperature in New Hampshire has risen 4.5 degrees over the past 50 years. But the creative destructionists are in charge, so we can't get control of our environment either.
But it's all the fault of those beer-swilling union troglodytes. The nerve of them! Wanting to work in one place for a whole lifetime, with their uncreative and prehensile brains, so that they can build a real life with a real family and a real community, and so their kids can develop permanent and healthy friendships, and then still have a family homestead to return to with their own kids when everybody is older. Where is their Social Darwinist spirit? Don't they get the new world, where every human being is supposed to live the life of an Army brat, and just get used to changed schools, changed friends, changed houses, revolving parents and swapped-out mates?
What's interesting is that no matter how often people complain about this crappy modern world, and suggest timidly that it might actually be possible to build the world we want to live in, the message we get from our economic masters is "No, we can't!" Or at least that's what they say when they aren't busy mocking the old-fashioned desires and community values of the Old Economy dinosaurs.
September 29, 2009 4:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can't agree more.
Where did we go so wrong? I just don't get it. We have the technology and the knowledge, we can create a great place to live. But instead this life of diminishing expectations while serious problems go unchecked. Sink or swim. Why?
September 29, 2009 5:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Having been employed by several large corporations over my adult working life, I can attest to the constant drumbeat by management that we must "embrace" change, that the "only thing that stays constant" is change.
In one rah rah meeting asking us to celebrate yet another restructuring seemingly implemented because senior management in our division had run out of other ways to make us miserable, I offered the comment that another term for constant change could be "chaos." It was not received particularly well.
September 29, 2009 6:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ha ha. Who moved my cheese? I loved that book. I once asked, shouldn't this actually be titled Who Stole My Cheese?
That also didn't go over well.
September 30, 2009 10:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
A hundred years ago, people were a lot smarter.
Most men knew the basics of animal husbandry, dairying, and veterinery medicine; tillage, planting, and harvesting of crops; butchering and curing of meats; carpentry, masonry and mechanics; forestry and logging; as well as management and business. Most women knew the basics of baby and child care; nursing; spinning, weaving, sewing, knitting, embroidery, crochet; gardening, harvesting of fruits and berries, canning fruits and vegatables; raising and tending poultry; as well as teaching the children.
Then we moved to the cities and became a lot dumber. It was probably the television that did it.
September 29, 2009 3:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh nonsense. People learn the skills they need. Cities require a different set of skills. Social abilities and cultural knowledge are rewarded with connections and opportunities. Now though those are less valuable because the pie is shrinking (except at the top- the Perez Hiltons of the world are doing very well).
September 29, 2009 3:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
The worse things get, the more we're going to get smart arguments why class doesn't matter, why power doesn't matter, why democracy doesn't matter, why who owns the "means of production" doesn't matter.
That's on the sane(r) side. On the insane(r) side, the worse things get, the more we'll be getting arguments why the problem is the Mexicans, the Jews, the Arabs, the welfare queens, the illuminati, the birburberbings, and so forth.
This is not going to be a stalemate. Unless we build a large and effective coalition that focuses like a razor on power, on democratizing both the economy and the political system, the insanity will eventually win.
We know the outline of the story. Right now we're just filling in the details.
September 29, 2009 3:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have to say that you are an excellent writer and thinker.
September 29, 2009 9:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
What are you? Pro-birburberbings?
September 29, 2009 9:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sometimes.
September 29, 2009 11:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
As my avatar hopefully suggests, I try sitting on the shoulders of giants.
Thanks!
September 30, 2009 8:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
I used to do electronic service work myself until the occupation left as equipment became smaller, more complex and cheaper. Not economically viable to repair. It was my favorite job by far. Now I baby sit computers. Dull, repetitive and mind numbing. And this is supposed to be progress.
The current crop of techno-gadgets have parts so small that it requires special equipment to replace even the simplest part.
So what do we do ? We just pitch the stuff out. Tons and tons of electronic garbage that we toss everyday. That is shipped to Asia and quietly forgotten about but winds up polluting the air and water of those that live there simply because we have yet to come up with a way to recycle most of it.
We can produce this junk fast and cheap but when it has outlived it's usefulness we just toss it like Lisa Douglas did with dirty dishes on Green Arcres.
And believe me good old Dave's enterprise will meet the same fate if we ever embrace electric transportation. Since it too will become just to labor intensive to maintain. More and bigger electronic junk that we get rid of because it's not the right color, or type, or size or the company that made it went belly up.
And now we are doing the same thing to people who are no longer viable in the work force.
C
September 29, 2009 3:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Like grad students at universities, who sometimes unionize? I guess they're not creative. I mean apart from performing most of America's science and math research, that is.
September 29, 2009 3:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Web courses. Its all the rage. Who needs those pesky grad student teachers anyway?
September 29, 2009 10:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
One thing that is ludicrous is how 1980s this blog is. Security for college grads is, in fact, so very 1980s. These days kids graduate with a ton of debt, to a job market that has six applicants for every opening. That's why we recently witnessed a talented recent grad -- double major -- die from lack of health insurance when she came down with H1N1.
People who graduated in the 1980s and 1990s have no security either, since there is an army of ready replacements.
But hey if it makes you feel good we'll give you a PhD in asshattery.
September 29, 2009 4:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you take Mr. Avishai's thoughts to the logical conclusion there should be no health care reform...why provide health care (or jobs) to beer drinkin' dolts who are not smart enough to not get f@*ked...they just don't matter.
I see this as social Darwinism at its worst. It is trying to set up a society where people who are intellectually gifted (at making money?) are the only ones who matter. The rest? Well they can work at Wal-Mart for minimum wage, with no benefits and die 20 years sooner than normal life expectancy due to not having insurance. As others have noted it furthers the caste system that has been developing in this country for a few decades now.
But as long as Avishai's Beemer is running ok we can all sleep well tonight. I don't know who are worse conservatives, neo-cons or neo-liberals.
September 29, 2009 8:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
No doubt that Avishai doesn't have the cajones to respond to a spot on post like this. Keep kicking ass, Libertine!
September 29, 2009 8:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oy. Another stoopid snob.
September 29, 2009 10:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
This was beautifully-crafted story, Bernie. Too bad it either misunderstands or misrepresents the nature of the knowledge economy. Yes, there are personally gratifying aspects to it. I've been in Dave's shoes twice now, the first time as a 'partner' and the second as an 'independent'.
The first time I was pretty arrogant and told my unemployed acquaintances with Masters degrees that all they had to do to be successful was be like me. Constantly research the market, hone your skills, 'play' your work like its a game that you want to be the best at. How's that for mentoring? Then the other partner started having marital difficulties. She spent all day cooped up in her office commiserating with friends about her personal troubles. The business headed toward bankruptcy and the other partner decided the way to go was to bring in a former high-level government official with 'connections'. It fell apart.
I was one of those poor "people with children." So when the business became untenable, I stayed home to look after the little one while his mom worked. I took in contracts to work on in the intervals between her three part-time jobs. Eventually, a few years and a break-up later, I was back on top -- flying across the country to negotiate with top executives at the BIG corporations, being sought out and offered contracts rather than having to respond to requests for proposals.
Then my niche just evaporated.
One day, after about a year with only two small contracts, I saw a help wanted sign in the window of the neighborhood co-op grocery store that I usually shopped at. For some strange reason, I really wanted that routine, union job more than I wanted to re-invent my entrepreneurial self yet one more time. I'm happy I got it.
The dangers of the knowledge economy are not just "chronic unemployability for the know-nots." I've known plenty of "know-nots" who are quite secure in positions where they get to decide which of the feverishly competing knowledge workers to award a contract to. One thing I learned as a small business person is that many of those "small businesses" are supplying business services to government, big unions or large corporations. The auto mechanic may offer a personalized face but the communications consultant or office janitorial service is more typical.
There is also a danger that I can only describe as the treadmill of "being unemployed even though you're employed." Always having to look for the next job and the one after that even though you've already got too much on your plate. A steady job with a paycheck feels like a vacation after being an RfP-chasing knowledge worker for a decade or so.
When I hear the phrase, "the mentor state", I can't help but think of internships. A few years ago it was fashionable to offer unpaid internships to young people. The idea was you'll never get a job without experience in the field and you'll never get experience unless you're willing to work for free. I suspect a lot of these "internships" were simply a way of unloading the recruitment, training and probationary costs onto prospective entry-level new hires. The mentor state has this ominous undertone of a smug adviser handing out pat prescriptions but taking no responsibility if that advice turns out to be useless. So, like I said, nice story -- but I'm not buying it.
September 29, 2009 10:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for telling him the truth.
September 30, 2009 1:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sir,
Remind me again exactly how much a loaf of bread costs in "intellectual capital"?
I have a PhD and am very familiar with academic types. The level of your pomposity is matched only by the level of your foolishness.
Perhaps you aren't familiar with the fact that the US is currently sending huge amounts of venture capital oversees? Perhaps you aren't familiar with the fact that the unemployment rate for electrical engineers is at an all time high? When was the last time you talked with someone from Sand Hill Road? When was the last time you talked with farmers who grow things for a living?
When was the last time you needed to look for a job?
Rodney Dangerfield understood a person such as yourself quite well.
You keep theorizing. Be happy that it requires essentially no credentials to do what you do except be in the proper social groups. Your theories are untestable and aren't even required to organize society. One would assume you would be a little more grateful and humble before the rest of us found out. Because from where I stand, there isn't any room to reinvent yourself from where you are -- you don't contribute to begin with.
September 30, 2009 1:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
I had no idea you were such a condescending, elitist reactionary.
It's very easy when you're life is cushy to criticize the poor bastards that don't have it so good (from birth) and whose daily struggle would reduce you to a puddle of tears in almost no time if your lives were switched.
I detest the arrogant disrespect for common people this piece oozes with. What bothers me most about this sort of drivel is the innate assumption of your unquestioned superiority over these people whose "poor choices" have left them behind as if that mattered one fucking bit! How short sighted and foolish! You sir, are every bit as expendable to the swine who own everything as those you believe to be less worthy, no matter how fucking creative you might think yourself to be. You are living under the delusion that what you do matters in this system owned and operated by a handful of greedy, rich people for the benefit of themselves and themselves alone. The moment you are no longer useful you're just as screwed as the guy working at the convenience store and I sure hope you're prepared when it's your turn and that you receive precisely the empathy and understanding you show for others.
I pray to God I shall live to see the day when the common people of this country rise up and hand to people with this sort of attitude exactly what they fucking deserve.
September 30, 2009 2:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
There are times when I wish I was in my 30s rather than my 50s. This is not one of them.
September 30, 2009 10:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Stilli ... Shoots . . .
. . . and hits the bull's eye.
This Third way progressive butt-head Bernard is the type of stuffy asshat that when on an adventure to the Eastern Sierras in the early '70s would be left at the gas station to find his own way back home.
And if he's lucky, in Mojave.
After the first fill up.
~OGD~
October 1, 2009 5:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hero of the common man, Avishai ain't.
September 30, 2009 11:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is fascinating. Ya'll are smart, well educated and eloquent. Yet even you cannot escape feeling sorry for yourselves to the point of wishing OTHER people would foment revolution and fix it all with violence and death. I'm sorry you feel so put-upon, so helpless that all you can do is scream "It's not FAIR!" (eloquently of course).
There are two ways of addressing this: 1) pick up a brick (not verbal, not metaphorical) and chuck it at an oligarch's window, or 2) find a person with an IQ less than 100, ask them what they need and help them get it.
September 30, 2009 12:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure what your point is....This is a blog, there's no real bricks, and no people in need of help here...(well, mental help maybe).
Certainly the ideas and opinions expressed here are insufficient to make a difference in the real world. But luckily we are all flesh and blood, and we can take these ideas into our real lives and where we can make a difference.
September 30, 2009 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Some of us do spend our days with those people helping them get it so don't be so quick to conclude that it's all talk and wishful thinking.
September 30, 2009 6:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have to say I really feel tight with the TPM community today...
September 30, 2009 12:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Me, too. And as I posted upthread, I have Destor to thank (since had it not been for his own post about this, I probably would have skipped reading BA's).
Clearthinker and oleeb (just above here), very well said.
I'm proud that this post got such a large and clear reaction from some of the TPM regulars.
-- ARG
September 30, 2009 1:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
CT and Oleeb in agreement made me sit up and take notice!
September 30, 2009 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ain't that the truth.
September 30, 2009 2:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bernard definitely touched a nerve here.
September 30, 2009 1:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hope he continues to post stuff like this, it's great for consciousness raising, which is half the battle to change the world.
September 30, 2009 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
It really brings home how endemic dissatisfaction with our new "knowledge economy" is among the educated in America. To hear the Bernies and Robert Reichs tell it, the world should be our oyster.
But the majority of smart people weren't trying to get into Wharton when they were fourteen years old. And, unless you went into the market manipulation business, all the brains in the world, and a fine education of your own, more often than not left you underemployed, hustling to ride the next mini-trend in the ranks of middle management, software design or engineering, always threatened with job loss, and generally less financially secure than your blue collar parents.
I'm doing contract work reviewing documents related to the bankruptcy of a major investment bank last September after fifteen successful years in old-line banking. It's at least nice to know that I am not the only one facing the pressures and disappointments of life in these United States.
September 30, 2009 4:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
You sound like you've joined the David Frum & Charles Krauthammer school of Canadian ex-pats. It's embarrassing.
P.S. CB MacPherson would roll over in his grave if he read this.
September 30, 2009 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
My point, precisely, is to get "progressives" to take into account changes in the workings of a market society when they think about solutions. Aside from the personal attacks--which are, let us say, creative--many of the responses to Dave's story, particularly from Destor23, have been automatic.
I am not saying people without education deserve to be poor and abandoned. Deserve has nothing to do with it. Nor is diagnosis contempt, though it is often confused with it: AIPAC, after all, thinks people who analyse the deficiencies of Israeli democracy are just attacking "Israel." I am saying that work that is repetitive, which used to provide a livelihood for people without education, will not do so on the future--at least not in factories, etc.--owing to fascinating and pervasive technological changes; that these changes can actually be thought good by people with democratic imagination, for it means work, more and more, invites intelligence and growth, as with Dave, not mutilating in the classical sense that Charlie Chaplin skewered.
Nevertheless, these changes mean an unprecedented crisis for people without education or the poise to deal with flux. To ignore systemic changes is to ignore all kinds of things, from the velocity of business cycles (which I wrote about last year), to the best ways to deliver a public health option (which I wrote about last week). We cannot be reasonable about solutions if we resist seeing how this new commercial ecosystem works.
We need the commonwealth to invest massively in the education and cultivation of our young people. We need the state to think of ways to help engender entrepreneurship and cosmopolitan values.
We cannot "stimulate" ourselves out of this crisis, though (as I've also written here before) we may need many "big digs" for a long while. We need the state to help qualify us as producers, not just qualify us as consumers. We need, that is, Obama and his call for responsibility, over and above healthcare and daycare and schools and universities and summer camps. Romanticizing the "security" of the old capitalism gets us nowhere. I shall try to flesh out some of these ideas in subsequent posts.
September 30, 2009 5:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bernard:
Please explain to me how your version of mentoring will help Steve -- a talented 30-something carpenter, as was his dad before him. Steve, who was one of the only people of principle I knew at the school where I taught last year. Steve, who was so distraught when he was asked by the school facilities manager to install "look like" fire doors (because they were cheaper than actual fire doors) that he blew the whistle to the township fire inspector and was immediately and predictably, axed. Steve, not only a consummate craftsman, but also a young, computer-savvy technician at his trade..... who CANNOT GET WORK because the housing bubble has burst, and he now has a black mark on his record for "insubordination" rather than a gold star for integrity. What a concept: he cared that adolescent children might burn to save a few hundred dollars.
Please tell me how your mentoring is going to help Steve, when he can already run rings around most of us with his combination of principle, handcraft and computer skills.
September 30, 2009 7:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gosh, maybe Steve just needs a little more "poise to deal with the flux"? Look, the Sandwichman would be the last person in the world to "romanticize the security of the old capitalism. But I'd do even that before romanticizing the insecurity of the new feudalism.
I commend Bernard Avishai for provoking a needed conversation. Maybe what he is saying is what has to be said to get people to really think about what has to be done. Because surely the Pollyanna view he puts forward goes nowhere. Tim Jackson in the Prosperity without Growth? report from the UK's Sustainable Development Commission produced a spot-on analysis of where we're at and the direction we should be going in... and the response? Pretty much silence.
September 30, 2009 8:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Raise wages, cut hours, cut obscene profits for do-nothings like this blog writer.
Oh, and condescending horseshit should be fined, heavily.
Watch yerself.
September 30, 2009 10:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the reference Sandwichman. I just downloaded the report.
October 1, 2009 7:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bernard, I just don't accept your passive and impersonal language about "changes", "flux" etc. You are working with a conception of the economic realm as a self-organized, trans-personal and uncontrollable leviathan that we can't really shape, but can only adapt to, and where the technological changes are not deliberately chosen in democratic ways, but just happen along in their commanding and entrepreneurial way.
But I have more hope than that. In the end, the economy is something human beings have built. And if they raise their consciousness enough, and do a little more reflecting and a little less hustling after the main chance, then they can understand their collective handiwork, and can begin to work in effective solidarity with others to build a very different kind of economy: one that they control and that doesn't control them; one in which they live with neighbors and not just next to neighbors; and one that elevates humane and social values over the commercial, crudely hedonistic and avariciously individualistic values that dominate our sick present way of life.
And my hopes for educational reform are different as well. I would prefer we not focus so much on training the brains of the young for a life of individualistic entrepreneurship, or encourage them to adopt a self-image as economic "producers" in a world of competitive and destructive flux. That means training them to be servants of the commercial leviathan. I still have some hope that we can aspire to teach the young - all of the young - the history, dreams, profound reflections and spiritual legacy of their forbears, so that they will finally be able to discern how deeply unsatisfactory, socially failed and wretchedly pathological is the depressing and atomized world into which they have been born.
They need to learn to respect the humane voice inside them that is crying, "Something is really, really wrong here" instead of being told to learn how to deal with those feelings, get some poise, grab some antidepressants, pick up a brain-skill, and embrace the rolling stone flux of the system of Total Commerce in which we have enslaved them.
You're deceiving yourself if you think that training people to do more "creative" brain work is going to liberate them from the scourge of workplace mutilation. Work is always going to be repetitive and potentially tedious for the vast majority of people. Most work - whether done with hands or heads - will continue to sustain the routine humming along of established systems of production. Food has to be grown and shipped, houses have to be built, essential tools have to be manufactured, bills have to be paid, gas has to be pumped. That's life. Only a tiny sliver of humanity will have the opportunity to do deeply creative things in their workplaces. However, if we build a social life in which we work more efficiently, live more simply and provide more leisure, then our fellows may find that they can pursue rewarding and genuinely enriching and creative activities when they are not at work.
The most gloomy people I know work in IT departments. Head work, yes. The started out, no doubt, as clever and excited young people doing cool and fun brain stuff with computers, those intoxicating new technologies of their youth. But all that exciting and cool computer stuff has evolved for most of them into cubical-bound drudgery. They sit and get fat, and pore over code. And its always going to be that way for most of the knowledge workers. Yes, these workers will have to "bring their heads" to work. But not everything that rattles around inside human heads, even if it takes genuine smarts and cleverness, is uplifting or rewarding in other than financial ways. Straightening out a detabase is no more exciting or less mutilating than straightening out a warehouse or a storeroom.
So what can make work tolerable and even enjoyable? For most, its not an imaginary landscape of endless intellectual delights. It's other people. The days when I am interacting with lots of people; when we are joking and laughing, commiserating or just trading stories and news; when I feel like I really lightened someone's load, solved a daunting problem for them, or helped someone with their daily struggles, those are the good days. The days when I am trapped in my cube doing whatever with myself? Those are dispiriting and lonely days.
When I first got my present job, I had to travel a lot. I would travel to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and other great American cities, and a few times to Europe. My friends were envious, and there was some initial excitement. But it quickly wore off. What was the problem about all those places? None of my family and friends were there. I would go out to really good restaurants at night, but the food didn't taste as good because it wasn't shared with others. I would go to a museum, but there was nobody to converse with about how I felt about what I saw. I did love San Francisco, and rented a bike once and rode it up the coast highway and across the Golden Gate Bridge. It was amazing. But you know what I did when I got halfway across? I called my wife and son, so they could be there with me. And I wished they were there. I am not ashamed to say that I sometimes ended up sobbing in my bed from loneliness. I guess I lacked the poise demanded by my exciting world of gypsy flux and entrepreneurial dynamism.
My supposition is that if we want to prepare and educate the next generation of young people for a fulfilling life, then we need to think a lot more about how to help them build a world in which they are working shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart with others, and not just sending depersonalized commercial gibberish to each other over blackberries, and dancing the entrepreneurial hustle all over the country or the globe.
And what is "creative" anyway? I am often amazed by the creative talent that is on display in advertising. Some young lover of art studied design or art history, and is now making art themselves. You can just feel the bubbling creativity and imagination struggling to get out. Unfortunately, it is all scrambled up with inauthentic and ugly messages about how awesome is some new bar of soap, item of underwear, airline seating arrangement or gut-busting food. What a tragic waste of creative human endeavor. Talk about mutilation.
Our entire social and media atmosphere is like a mustache on a Rembrandt, with so many forced to prostitute their beautiful selves into something filthy, ugly and demeaned. So who is the more creative and beautiful human being? The educated knowledge worker making a clever but cheesy ad campaign for the latest entrepreneurial master of the universe? Or the skilled workman painting a straight, simple and elegant yellow line on the highway, and smoothing the asphalt with practiced and experienced care.
You say "We need the state to think of ways to help engender entrepreneurship and cosmopolitan values" in our young people. I would prefer that they focus a bit more more on instilling solidarity, comradeship, the capacity for love and friendship, the appreciation of genuine beauty, reverential awe for the parts of the natural world that we haven't destroyed yet, and community values. Some of us would still like to live in an actual society, even a tight-knit community of real friends, not just an entourage of transitory acquaintances, or an extended cosmopolitan "network" of individual producers and consumers. I want to be a person, not a freaking node. I don't want my son to be a node either, not even a well-paid and somewhat more brainy one.
You talk about exciting technological changes. Well, a lot of the technological changes taking place in the world I see around me are not that exciting at all. Most are a big ho-hum. If somebody invents a new gadget, it seems fun and liberating for about a week. I do think the internet itself has been a fantastic invention. But what are the other great changes? New weekly video games so I can eviscerate ogres and go to bed with Omnivia, Queen of the Boob Maidens, in virtual jerk-off land, maybe electronically groping some remote virtual partner? No thanks. I'm not 19 anymore. (Hey, isn't it great that the geniuses William Rowan Hamilton, Sophus Lie and their successors discovered the fantastic intellectual paradise of quaternions, Lie groups, spin rotations and vector spaces, so that I can now rotate my virtual arm in virtual space, and chop off some gang-banger's head with my virtual hunting knife!)
Is the exciting change to be found in new business tools that allow my boss to climb completely inside my head from 10,000 miles away and nag me to answer my email. Awesome! What an exciting new toy! What a brave new world!
Before we throw a fortune into educating people to live the life our economic masters have decided we are required to live, we could stop to ask ourselves how people really want to live, and then think about how we can build a world they want.
By the way, did you hear the story today about France Telecom? They were privatized ten years ago, moving to the wonderfully competitive and entrepreneurial American system, adapted to the creatively destructive world of flux that is America's gift to the world of social relations. In the past year and a half, there have been 24 suicides at the company:
Gauthier Rollin, 52, has been employed by the company for 20 years. He says the work environment has been unbearable since France Telecom was privatized a decade ago.
"France Telecom has spent its time breaking up teams and breaking down solidarity," Rollin says. "They cultivate individualism and selfishness. So the support you might have found amongst colleagues in difficult times is not there. France Telecom manages its employees like cattle."
A former state monopoly, France Telecom was privatized in 1998 and now competes on the world market. It has undergone several major reorganizations in recent years and cut 22,000 jobs in the past two years. But company officials say those were voluntary departures and that the firm is the only telecom giant not to have carried out mass layoffs.
How babyish those French are! Imagine, expecting a world containing some security, and without perpetual fear of unemployment. How romantic of them! Where is their poise?
October 1, 2009 12:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
This post of Bernard Avishai has had an almost "poetic" response from the TPMers, I am moved by much of what I read here. Certainly I think the progressive community of the United States deserves a better home than the Democratic party. Things have to get done, people have to get organized, strikes and demonstrations have to be called and the Democrats are never going to do any of that... They exist so that those things wont ever happen.
October 1, 2009 1:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Look, Dan (and others), we all love Marx's 1845 manuscripts. (I actually did my doctorate on the implications of the Grundrisse.) I take for granted, what even Adam Smith did, that the world of exchange value is a narrow and artificial world, in which the things we really care about are marginalized (or, to quote the young Marx, inverted). I am not saying we should love the market, for God's sake. But there are many reasons to be skeptical of purely socialist alternatives. And as long as we advantage ourselves of what markets provide--especially technological progress and certain freedoms--we have to understand what the technologies really imply: the ways they work with democratic hopes. Dave's garage is a horror as compared with More's Utopia, where everyone is secure in their skills, nobody makes things others stop wanting, and every day means spiritual solidarity. But Dave's his garage is a lot better--for him, and our democracy--than what he would have faced if the world were still dominated by the mass production technologies I grew up in, from car assembly lines that were 50% "labor," to dealer and Jiffylube dominated repair. Paul Sweezy once said, back in the 1960s, that mass production, "monopoly capitalism," was a world in which it cost a million dollars to ask a question. Today it costs virtually nothing. And were it not for our own Dave, i.e., Josh Marshall, how many of us would be publishing our ideas to thousands of people?
October 2, 2009 9:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't support purely socialist alternatives, Bernard. For one thing, I do not want to eliminate private property and replace it by public ownership of the means of production.
But I do think we can do many things to redesign and better regulate the institutional and legal environment in which private businesses function, so that the outcomes that are produced promote democratic self-governance, peace, a beautiful and sustainable natural and human environment, and healthy human relationships, rather than working against these things as as our current system does.
We can require that governance of the workplace be more democratic. We can pass laws that promote social equality by placing stricter limits and requirements on the distribution of income as wages within firms, and the distribution of profits to investors. We can re-design our capital markets to make the flow of savings to ventures less capricious, Barnumesque and exploitative, and that incentivize investment and production that serves broad, socially supported goals, rather than capitalizing on ephemeral, self-destructive and anti-social lusts.
There are many different choices we can make. But we do have a choice. What I don't accept is that we simply have to adapt ourselves to every kind of economic change that comes along. The economic system in the large and in its details has a basic shape and exhibits general tendencies that are the products of human design, even if that design is very complex, and even if the design choices were thoughtlessly blundered into rather than being made with care and deliberation. We can design a different system, one in which the tradeoffs are made in different ways, and different kinds of values are promoted.
I haven't read much Marx, so I wouldn't be able to comment on that part.
October 3, 2009 10:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
What is a market society?
How does it value friendship? family? health? education? quality of life? all those pesky externalities?
Why is that the world we want to make?
I would really like you to answer that. The rules our system operates under are not the laws of physics or handed to us by god; They our written by man. We can change them.
Secondly, I find it just astounding that the whole damn system collapsed and we are right back to pretending that it didn't, and that the market is god. We printed trillions into the banks and suspended accounting rules and are carrying along like nothing happened.
"The market revolution is coming... its inevitable..."
Bull shit. This is not a cling to 'security of old capitalism' this is a call to use our imaginations and revisit the rules that have clearly failed.
October 1, 2009 2:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
They our written by man. We can change them
As you can see I am a big fan of changing written things. Ah spelling.
October 1, 2009 12:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is certainly has been an amazing thread, with a collective wisdom that exceeds most of what goes around here, coming surprisingly in response to pretty unimaginative and unreflective (although well-written) paen to enterpreneurial wheel spinning.
For a more interesting framework to think about how to connect social change to technology, I'd suggest listening to David Harvey here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQb0fthNfI&feature=player_embedded# asaway to continue this discussion in a productive direction. As much as it is fun to bash BA for his "learn to love your master" posts, the challenge is to move beyond that.
October 1, 2009 5:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would like to see Bernard Avashai and the commentators here respond to Robert Reich's recent post, The Truth About Jobs That No One Wants To Tell You, which the Sandwichman would best describe as soft-hearted and soft-headed. Reich seems to believe that spending piles of money on "roads, bridges, schools, parks and everything else we need..." will do the trick for unemployment. The Sandwichman begs to differ.
October 1, 2009 11:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
"'There’s nothing out there,' said Jerry Lamirande, a technology systems engineer in Amarillo, Tex., who has been without a job since April 2008.
"During the technology boom of the late 1990s, Mr. Lamirande, 62, worked for I.B.M., where he drew a salary of about $130,000. After a layoff seven years ago, he has earned about $70,000 a year as a technology consultant working on contract.
"Since the spring, he and his wife have lived on her modest salary as a public school teacher and on hardship withdrawals from his retirement account. He has searched nationwide for his next contract, willing to relocate.
"'I’ve got to go where the opportunities are,' he said. 'The problem is, there aren’t many opportunities.'"
October 3, 2009 1:46 PM | Reply | Permalink