Kicking Off the New Year with the Mummers

January 6, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Does Philadelphia’s wildly improbable Mummers Parade even happen each year if we don’t have the pictures to prove it?

Interestingly, all of us taking pictures to prove that the unbelievable is happening for the 119^thtime (and that we’re all a living part of it) is just a recent addition to this highly interactive event.

I’ve gone since the first New Years Day after my move to Philly. That first year, I asked several locals (who, looking back, were probably suburbanites) about going to the Parade, and to a one they described a bestial rite that you’d only attend if you were interested in having someone vomit on your shoes. Watch it on TV “if you have to,” they said, “and turn it off “when you’ve had enough.” Happily, I didn’t take their advice, never got enough, and never once went home with dirty shoes.

In fact, I always ended up feeling more like I was wearing the same golden slippers (Ok, gilded sneakers) that the strutters with their dainty parasols had been wearing as they made their way down Broad Street—Oh dem golden slippers. The Mummers always portrayed a huge cross-section of the City that rarely gets its day at its friendliest and most colorful. It is our Mardi Gras.

After I’d been here for several years, I took a job at the local gas utility to try and leverage its strategic locations and infrastructure for a global energy market. There were maybe 300 of us “in management,” but the other 1500 workers were the rank and file representatives of the City’s sprawling neighborhoods like Nicetown, Tioga, Point Breeze, Frankfort, Port Richmond, and Bella Vista. As I learned, a large number of them transformed themselves into Mummers at their local clubs for every New Years Parade. Sometimes when I went to one of the plants to rally them to one cause or another, I imagined these men and women in their end-of-the-year finery as they huddled around me and knew them all the better for it.

The following pictures prove that I was there with them again this year along with Wally, some old friends and thousands of new ones. I think that the grey skies and the mild weather on Tuesday set off our local dazzle particularly well. Every New Year needs to begin with revelry, optimism and local connection that looks something like this.

From the Wenches Division, a trio of lovelies

Kid-size golden slippers, a next generation Mummer taking a load off

From Broad Street’s median strip, the Americans are coming

Remembering the Day of the Dead for some reason

A Fancy Division captain works the rails

I hope you enjoyed a quick view of this year’s Mummers Parade. The last time this page contained a photo essay was after I visited New Orleans and saw a similarly local connection–this time to those who had died–in the City’s potters field. Here’s a link to it if you missed those heart-felt memorials the first time around.

This post was adapted from my January 6, 2019 newsletter.

A New American Dream

December 23, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I took this photo on the Fourth of July in Glenside, a town just outside of Philadelphia. Its citizens had set out chairs, waiting for a parade to honor a struggle that began in revolution but seems to have lost its momentum today.

Looking back at past newsletters and from them, even farther back in my life and my parents’ lives, I was surprised by how much I’ve been thinking about the future this year. It wasn’t my original intention.

I guess I’ve become convinced that the deep-down quality of the present isn’t the same as it seems on the surface—that the core I remember has been hollowed out—and that what’s coming next may shatter the illusion that the party we’ve been enjoying in spite of it will go on forever. Still, there is no denying that the party has been pretty grand while it’s lasted, a place to enjoy ourselves amidst all the comforts of home.

In our lifetimes and our parents’ lifetimes, America sold the Dream of sunny, middle-class home ownership, consumerism, material comfort, and upward social mobility that it thought it needed to reward its WWII veterans and win the ideological battles of the Cold War. (Our kitchens are nicer here than they are in Moscow.) Madison Avenue’s advertising machine helped with the sales pitch, and today we’ve not only won these wars but continue to live the Dream we were supposedly fighting for. And let’s face it, that American Dream has been delivered to many, if not most of us despite our rising income inequality, our concern that our kids may end up with “less” than we have today, and our shabby public infrastructure.

Of course, Edmund Phelps’ “mass flourishing” has been tapering off since the 1970’s (my 11-25-18 post) and our safety nets are fraying, but even the poorest neighborhoods have wide-screen TVs, smart phones, and more than their pets could ever want or need. So why, amidst all of this plenty, are we wondering: “Is that all there is?” Is that comfortable surface all that we’re working for? Living for?

Maybe some of the uneasiness is recalling—on some level—that we once had more ambitious dreams than getting the latest gadget from Amazon delivered in an hour, binge-watching another series on Netflix, or pleasuring ourselves with the latest meme on Facebook. We’ve either heard about or actually remember a time when the American Dream was much bolder than the warm bath we’re sitting in today—and that those more vital days weren’t so long ago.

In his 1999 book For Common Things, Jed Purdy recalls the transformative political climate of The Great Society of the 1960s where America debated ways “to eliminate” inequalities based on race and “to wage a war” on poverty. A half-century later, that debate has been reduced to “managing” the poor with welfare programs and racial inequality with good intentions. Looking at the diminishment of our public aspirations, Purdy argues that:

Americans who came of age after 1974 have never seen the government undertake a large-scale project other than highway maintenance and small wars, and relatively few are inspired by the idea that it should.

Of course, state-engineered income and racial equality would likely interfere with the mass flourishing of Phelps’ more individualistic and entrepreneurial economy. But what may be most noteworthy about where we find ourselves is the absence of any serious debate—really any tension at all—between the basic problems we face and the different ways we could solve them. This acceptance of “the way things are,” along with our sedating comfort, are the principal reasons that the American Dream has become “fossilized” and needs to be reimagined. Very little of it still resonates with any of us at its core.

Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream by Sarah Churchwell ends with that argument. But before getting to its conclusion, most of her new book is about returning to the newspapers, speeches and other original sources over the past 150 years to identify “the gaps” between “what we tell each other that history shows and what it actually says” about the quality of the American Dream.

While Churchwell finds plenty of evidence of darkness in our nativism, racism, and materialism, the forces of light have nearly always shined brightly in our history as well. In the five years between 1915 and the end of the Great War, America rocked between an isolationist, America-First agenda to making the world safe for democracy on the battlefields of Europe and trying to create a new League of Nations. Before and after the Civil War, during the Gilded Age of business monopolies and mass immigration, and during the Great Depression some of our most selfish tendencies as a nation were in pitched battles with champions of social justice and “principled appeals for a more generous way of life.”

Through much of our history, there has always been a push and pull that defined the American Dream for the generations that were trying “to make it” here—at least until fairly recently. It’s the long stretch since the Great Society of the 1960s to the present that Churchwell is most worried about.

According to the historical record she has unearthed, the America that is reflected in its Dream has “diminished,” and the fact that we once “dreamed more expansively” has been “obscured.” As she eloquently argues, “if even your dreams are ungenerous, then surely you have lost your way.” In its 300+ pages, Behold America demonstrates how a “rich, complex, difficult dream” has been forgotten in a race that focuses on wealth, material comfort and disengagement from a broader struggle for America’s soul. For Churchwell, the time to re-energize a Promise that once motivated us as workers, as citizens and as a nation is now.

So why aren’t we doing so? Churchwell doesn’t say, but I’ve tried to offer some explanations here over the past several months—at least for our personal reluctance. Beyond disengaging from any notion that sounds like rally-around-the-flag or that asks us “to believe in something” instead of remaining at a cynical distance, preoccupation with our comforts and “the rush of the future” leave little space for the kinds of activism that challenged America’s worst tendencies in the past.

Almost a year ago (in my 1-7-18 newsletter), I quoted from a Roxane Gay essay about “the tiny house movement” that quickly turned from playful to serious regarding the promises that we make to one another.

When we talk about the American dream, we never talk about what that dream costs. We never talk about how so many Americans are one financial crisis away from losing their savings or their homes. And we don’t talk about how the American dream should not be grounded in material things like large homes or fancy cars rather than, say, single-payer health care, subsidized childcare, or a robust Social Security system.

We don’t talk enough about what should and shouldn’t be included in the American Dream and spend even less time acting on our convictions. Perhaps there’s not enough hope that anything we do will matter. But believing in our priorities enough to act on them always matters. As John Berger says in my post last month about the rescuers after the Paradise California fire, hope is the fuel, the “detonator of energy,” that drives us to act on our convictions. A dream, the American Dream, is just a good story that embodies those hopes.

I mentioned several reasons why the fuel line between hope and action gets clogged in another post last August.

The Future Is Coming At Me Too Fast to Do Anything Other Than Meet It

Whole industries can change in a heartbeat. Think local travel (Uber, Lyft). Remote travel (Airbnb). Outside shopping (Amazon). Personal transport (self-driving cars). Our phones change, the apps on them change, how we use them and protect them changes. We’re so busy keeping up with the furious pace of change, we can’t think about any future other than the leading edge of it that we’re experiencing right now.”

I’m Too Absorbed By My Immediate Gratifications To Think Long-Term

The addictiveness of social media. The proliferation of entertainment to listen to, watch, and get lost in. The online availability of every kind of diverting information. A consumer economy that meets every real and imagined need for those who can afford it. We move between jobs that fail to engage us to leisure time that gratifies us into a kind of torpor. We’re too sedated by the warm bath we’re in now to worry about a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

My General Laziness and Inertia

And not just during the dog days of August….

The only way to overcome these obstacles is by finding enough hope to want to demonstrate our capabilities and act on our generosity once again.

In the Shadow of the Washington Monument

In his poem the Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot described the moral emptiness that seemed to him to envelope everything in the wake of World War I. What he wrote then is not so different from where we find ourselves today.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

The July 4th parade in Glenside aimed to celebrate what we’ve “created” and how we’ve “responded” to our challenges as a nation but it has fallen into Shadow. In our jobs, as members of a community and as citizens, the only way out of the Shadow is to “respond” once again to priorities that are bigger than our comfort or cynicism and to “create” an American Dream that is worth living in again: one capable and generous step at a time.

This post is adapted from my December 23, 2018 newsletter.

These Tech Platforms Threaten Our Freedom

December 9, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We’re being led by the nose about what to think, buy, do next, or remember about what we’ve already seen or done. Oh, and how we’re supposed to be happy, what we like and don’t like, what’s wrong with our generation, why we work. We’re being led to conclusions about a thousand different things and don’t even know it.

The image that captures the erosion of our free thinking by influence peddlers is the frog in the saucepan. The heat is on, the water’s getting warmer, and by the time it’s boiling it’s too late for her to climb back out. Boiled frog, preceded by pleasantly warm and oblivious frog, captures the critical path pretty well. But instead of slow cooking, it’s shorter and shorter attention spans, the slow retreat of perspective and critical thought, and the final loss of freedom.

We’ve been letting the control booths behind the technology reduce the free exercise of our lives and work and we’re barely aware of it. The problem, of course, is that the grounding for good work and a good life is having the autonomy to decide what is good for us.

This kind of tech-enabled domination is hardly a new concern, but we’re wrong in thinking that it remains in the realm of science fiction.

An authority’s struggle to control our feelings, thoughts and decisions was the theme of George Orwell’s 1984, which was written 55 years before the fateful year that he envisioned. “Power,” said Orwell, “is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” Power persuades you to buy something when you don’t want or need it. It convinces you about this candidate’s, that party’s or some country’s evil motivations. It tricks you into accepting someone else’s motivations as your own. In 1984, free wills were weakened and constrained until they were no longer free. “If you want a picture of the future,” Orwell wrote, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

Maybe this reflection of the present seems too extreme to you.

After all, Orwell’s jackbooted fascists and communists were defeated by our Enlightenment values. Didn’t the first President Bush, whom we buried this week, preside over some of it? The authoritarians were down and seemed out in the last decade of the last century—Freedom Finally Won!—which just happened to be the very same span of years when new technologies and communication platforms began to enable the next generation of dominators.

(There is no true victory over one man’s will to deprive another of his freedom, only a truce until the next assault begins.)

20 years later, in his book Who Owns the Future (2013), Jaron Lanier argued that a new battle for freedom must be fought against powerful corporations fueled by advertisers and other “influencers” who are obsessed with directing our thoughts today.

In exchange for “free” information from Google, “free” networking from Facebook, and “free” deliveries from Amazon, we open our minds to what Lanier calls “siren servers,” the cloud computing networks that drive much of the internet’s traffic. Machine-driven algorithms collect data about who we are to convince us to buy products, judge candidates for public office, or determine how the majority in a country like Myanmar should deal with a minority like the Rohingya.

Companies, governments, groups with good and bad motivations use our data to influence our future buying and other decisions on technology platforms that didn’t even exist when the first George Bush was president but now, only a few years later, seem indispensible to nearly all of our commerce and communication. Says Lanier:

When you are wearing sensors on your body all the time, such as the GPS and camera on your smartphone and constantly piping data to a megacomputer owned by a corporation that is paid by ‘advertisers” to subtly manipulate you…you are gradually becoming less free.

And all the while we were blissfully unaware that this was happening because the bath was so convenient and the water inside it seemed so warm. Franklin Foer, who addresses tech issues in The Atlantic and wrote 2017’s World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, talks about this calculated seduction in an interview he gave this week:

Facebook and Google [and Amazon] are constantly organizing things in ways in which we’re not really cognizant, and we’re not even taught to be cognizant, and most people aren’t… Our data is this cartography of the inside of our psyche. They know our weaknesses, and they know the things that give us pleasure and the things that cause us anxiety and anger. They use that information in order to keep us addicted. That makes [these] companies the enemies of independent thought.

The poor frog never understood that accepting all these “free” invitations to the saucepan meant that her freedom to climb back out was gradually being taken away from her.

Of course, we know that nothing is truly free of charge, with no strings attached. But appreciating the danger in these data driven exchanges—and being alert to the persuasive tools that are being arrayed against us—are not the only wake-up calls that seem necessary today. We also can (and should) confront two other tendencies that undermine our autonomy while we’re bombarded with too much information from too many different directions. They are our confirmation bias and what’s been called our illusion of explanatory depth.

Confirmation bias leads us to stop gathering information when the evidence we’ve gathered so far confirms the views (or biases) that we would like to be true. In other words, we ignore or reject new information, maintaining an echo chamber of sorts around what we’d prefer to believe. This kind of mindset is the opposite of self-confidence, because all we’re truly interested in doing outside ourselves is searching for evidence to shore up our egos.

Of course, the thought controllers know about our propensity for confirmation bias and seek to exploit it, particularly when we’re overwhelmed by too many opposing facts, have too little time to process the information, and long for simple black and white truths. Manipulators and other influencers have also learned from social science that our reduced attention spans are easily tricked by the illusion of explanatory depth, or our belief that we understand things far better than we actually do.

The illusion that we know more than we think we do extends to anything that we can misunderstand. It comes about because we consume knowledge widely but not deeply, and since that is rarely enough for understanding, our same egos claim that we know more than we actually do. For example, we all know that ignorant people are the most over-confident in their knowledge, but how easily we delude ourselves about the majesty of our own ignorance. For example, I regularly ask people questions about all sorts of things that they might know about. It’s almost the end of the year as I write this and I can count on one hand the number of them who have responded to my questions by saying “I don’t know” over the past twelve months. Most have no idea how little understanding they bring to whatever they’re talking about. It’s simply more comforting to pretend that we have all of this confusing information fully processed and under control.

Luckily, for confirmation bias or the illusion of explanatory depth, the cure is as simple as finding a skeptic and putting him on the other side of the conversation so he will hear us out and respond to or challenge whatever it is that we’re saying. When our egos are strong enough for that kind of exchange, we have an opportunity to explain our understanding of the subject at hand. If, as often happens, the effort of explaining reveals how little we actually know, we are almost forced to become more modest about our knowledge and less confirming of the biases that have taken hold of us. A true conversation like this can migrate from a polarizing battle of certainties into an opportunity to discover what we might learn from one another.

The more that we admit to ourselves and to others what we don’t know, the more likely we are to want to fill in the blanks. Instead of false certainties and bravado, curiosity takes over—and it feels liberating precisely because becoming well-rounded in our understanding is a well-spring of autonomy.

When we open ourselves like this instead of remaining closed, we’re less receptive to, and far better able to resist, the “siren servers” that would manipulate our thoughts and emotions by playing to our biases and illusions. When we engage in conversation, we also realize that devices like our cell phones and platforms like our social networks are, in Foer’s words, actually “enemies of contemplation” which are” preventing us from thinking.”

Lanier describes the shift from this shallow tech-driven stimulus/response to a deeper assertion of personal freedom in a profile that was written about him in the New Yorker a few years back. Before he started speaking at a South-by-Southwest Interactive conference, Lanier asked his audience not to blog, text or tweet while he spoke. He later wrote that his message to the crowd had been:

If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?

Lanier makes two essential points about autonomy in this remark. Instead of processing on the fly, where the dangers of bias and illusions of understanding are rampant, allow what is happening “to filter through your brain,” because when it does, there is a far better chance that whoever you really are, whatever you truly understand, will be “in” what you ultimately have to say.

His other point is about what you risk becoming if you fail to claim a space for your freedom to assert itself in your lives and work. When you’re reduced to “a reflector of information,” are you there at all anymore or merely reflecting the reality that somebody else wants you to have?

We all have a better chance of being contented and sustained in our lives and work when we’re expressing our freedom, but it’s gotten a lot more difficult to exercise it given the dominant platforms that we’re relying upon for our information and communications today.

This post was adapted from my December 9, 2018 newsletter.

Men At Work

December 2, 2018 By David Griesing 1 Comment

What makes your work worthwhile?

Last week economist Edmund Phelps got me thinking about some of the possibilities. Is you mindset at work to expand your capabilities, to become your “better” self by confronting risks on the job for the possibility of even greater rewards—the fuel of entrepreneurs and everyone else who works to advance their own accounts—OR is it to pursue greater security in your life, accumulate more savings, and earn more time away from work? OR maybe instead of working for yourself, you are striving to build solidarity with others through the services you provide: to strengthen the social fabric instead of just your strand of it.

Phelps also argued that competitive, entrepreneurial work produced tremendous success in the economy overall, while efforts to divert that energy into engineering a more secure, equal and just society has not only caused people to derive less satisfaction from their work over the past 50 years but also for the economy in general to stall. Phelps chose the values of rugged individualism over more collective social values when making his argument about pursing a good life through work.

Over the past week while I was mulling over some of your reactions to Phelps’ thesis, I discovered Harry’s Masculinity Report for 2018 on Twitter. In an era where gender roles in the American workplace are clearly in flux, what could “a masculinity report” possibly contribute? Was it a company’s marketing ploy or something more than that? Would it champion the rugged individual at work or somebody else entirely?

Harry’s is an on-line company that has carved out a highly successful niche for itself by selling men high quality razor blades and other shaving products more cheaply than market leaders Schick and Gillette. The write-up I caught said that its Report had:

surveyed 5,000 men ages 18-95 across the US, weighted for race, income, education, sexual orientation, military service, and more. The respondents were asked about their happiness, confidence, emotional stability, motivation, optimism, and sense of being in control. They were then asked how satisfied they are with their careers, relationships, money, work-life balance, physicality, and mental health, and also about the values that matter most to them.

The results showed a clear trend: The strongest predictor of men’s happiness and well-being is their job satisfaction, by a large margin—and the strongest predictor of job satisfaction is whether men feel they are making an impact on their companies’ success.

This measure, the study finds, is influenced by whether men feel they are using their own unique talents at work, whether they are surrounded by a diverse set of perspectives, how easily and often they can chat with co-workers, whether they feel their opinions are valued, and whether they’re inspired by the people they work with.

The Report itself seemed a bit thin after all that build up, but there were still some nuggets in it. The first was their data-supported effort to re-brand their customer base at a time when “how men act” and “what men want” has been broadly criticized. Another take-away came from seeing how Harry’s portrayed “the American man” it discovered in an ad campaign the company launched around the same time that the Report came out. And finally, the Report used some interesting words and phrases to describe the most significant component of male satisfaction.

According to Harry’s polling, American men are happiest when they are working.

Men at work are men at peace: everything else flows down from satisfying employment. Men who have high job satisfaction are more likely to feel optimistic, happy, motivated, emotionally stable, in control and confident. Job Satisfaction is by far the strongest predictor of positivity, being around three times higher than the next strongest predictor in every region and across the US overall…This is not primarily about wealth, but a sense of making a difference, being part of something bigger and more meaningful… Job satisfaction and the dignity of labor fulfills men’s desire to provide and protect.

Polling found that “Health” was the second driver of male positivity, while “Income” was the third.

I was initially dubious when the Report said Income was only important because of men’s desire “to provide [for] and protect” their loved ones. In my experience, many men (as well as women) want to make as much as possible so that they can consume as much as possible–or at least more than their neighbors. But the observation gained some legitimacy from how men described the central role that work plays in their lives. Martin Daubney, one of the Report’s authors, found that self-determination was far more important than making money for the majority of men who identified work as their primary source of self-esteem. He noted how frequently “autonomy – such as being a consultant or self-employed – was associated with increased job satisfaction.” On this point, Harry’s Report is both consistent with and different from Edmund Phelps’ assessment. It acknowledges the self-defining satisfaction of entrepreneurial labor but seems to reject the lure of financial reward beyond its ability “to provide and protect.”

In addition to re-branding its customers with this Report, Harry’s also wants to influence American policy makers. After all, this is an era when automation is eliminating many middle class jobs, robotics and artificial intelligence will replace even more of them, and post-industrial parts of America (like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia) are struggling with high unemployment rates among mid-career men as well as the epidemics of addiction that seem to be associated with feelings of uselessness. In this regard, Harry’s Report wants to change the policy-making focus from a negative to a positive one.

When service providers seek to engage men, whether in health, education, community, voluntary activities or any other front of social policy, there is often a temptation to address either the problems men have, at best, or the problems men cause, at worst. Our findings strongly suggest that the values which men aspire to most are traditional, moral frameworks. Men want to think of themselves as honest, reliable, dependable and fair-minded and it is perhaps those traits which agencies should emphasize when they wish to earn the trust and co-operation of male service users. Much previous research into masculinity has negatively focused on the problems men cause, often through the nefarious concept of “toxic masculinity”. This has never been more so than in this post-#MeToo landscape and after every mass shooting or domestic terrorist incident.

Lately, the dialogue has expanded to include the problems men have: such as the male suicide epidemic, depression, anxiety and addiction, while offering scant few solutions.

But Harry’s wanted to progress this dialogue forward, by flipping the telescope and focusing on what gives men a positive outlook. We wanted to find out which American men were the most positive and content, then look at the core values and behavioral attributes that nurture these men’s mental wellbeing. (the emphasis above is mine)

Consistent with Phelps’ predilections in Mass Flourishing, Harry’s Report seems to dictate a jobs-focused approach to addressing our economic problems. Creating new jobs and re-investing in old ones can often tap into a man’s natural motivations to make a positive contribution for himself and for those who are depending on him. This Report makes a powerful argument that every man in America who wants a job should have a job–because a man is a terrible thing to waste.

Consistent with its “accentuate the positive” view of masculinity, Harry’s launched a provocative new advertising campaign earlier this year. A female reviewer writing in GQ had this to say about it:

Selling men razors and shaving accessories often relies on the fact that it’s a rite of passage for men and a symbol of masculinity. That usually means beautiful women, severe cheekbones, and model-grade abdominal muscles [Schick and Gillette again]. Harry’s newly released “A Man Like You” ad doesn’t entirely stray from that tradition, but its statement about manhood feels refreshingly modern. The video follows a boy as he teaches a space alien what it means to be a man: how to walk, dress, and of course, shave. In the process, the kid—who’s got a mysteriously absent maybe-astronaut father—comes to the realization that, actually, “there’s no one way to be a man.” The fact that—spoiler alert for a commercial here—the boy appears to be imagining the alien out of grief or longing for dad adds up to a serious tear-jerker of an ending. Razor advertising has maybe never been softer or sweeter than this.

Harry’s ad is well worth a look because it presents an earnest if unexpected view of what men are growing up to be today.

Philosophers and social scientists talk about human nature, but easily as influential (and maybe even more so) are advertisers, playing with our emotions to make their points about who we are and what we’re like.

We already know about the dangerous side of marketers who are using the data collected from our social media exchanges (Facebook), shopping sprees (Amazon), and information searches (Google) to target us in increasingly precise ways. Harry’s ad is an instance where influencers are using our data to show us our best, or at least our better selves in the course of selling us their products.

Portraying a positive masculinity, their ad feels timely as well as necessary. It simply says: this story about men is real too and overdue for some attention.

This post is adapted from my December 2, 2018 newsletter.

Flourishing in Every Job

November 25, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Taking greater satisfaction from your work may be your goal, but it seems that it’s hardly the government’s or the economy’s goal. Not so long ago it felt differently, that those goals were all more aligned—and maybe they could be again–but only if we gain a better understanding of how that alignment came about in the first place and the choices we can make in the workplace and at the ballot box to support it again.

Economist Edmund Phelps provides a powerful argument for how the American worker’s wellbeing and capitalism’s productivity became intertwined in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. His aim in writing it (I think) was to remind us that there used to be more of an alliance between how good we felt about ourselves when we were working and the benefits that our good work produced in the economy at large.

Phelps makes several proposals to restore that sense of equilibrium. But in a wide-ranging argument that relies on history, philosophy and quantitative analysis, his primary objective seems to be an ethical one: to get us thinking about what is important about our work and how to advance those priorities in the choices we make about the quality of life we want to be working for.

When his book came out, Phelps (who teaches economics at Columbia) gave a lecture with the related title: “Mass Flourishing: How It Was Won, Then Largely Lost.” It summarized several of his book’s arguments in a highly accessible format. Most of the quotations below come from that lecture. It is only a few pages long and well worth your time to read it in full.

Phelps’ thesis is that modern American capitalism created a culture of innovation, which refers to each worker’s entrepreneurial mindset as well as to the broader economic and social benefits that mindset produced. For the individual worker, this culture fostered:

a spirit that views the prospect of unanticipated consequences that may come with voyaging into the unknown as a valued part of experience and not a drawback.

In other words, at the same time that an innovation culture produces economic growth, it also gives rise to the experience of human flourishing as workers become more powerful and capable both as explorers and creators of the new world where they’ll be living.

According to Phelps, it was the Industrial Revolution (around 1800) that ushered in a period of individual and countrywide thriving that continued in America through at least the 1960’s. It was an explosion of individual and economic energy that would not have been possible without the Enlightenment values that took root, particularly in America, during an overlapping historical period.

The impetus for high dynamism, my book argues, was the modern values arising in Jacques Barzun’s Modern Era – roughly from 1490 to 1940 – particularly the values we associate with individualism and vitalism. They include thinking for oneself, working for oneself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making a mark. The courage to express one’s self by creating or exploring the unknown and the gumption to stand apart from community, family and friends are also modern values. The thesis is that these values stirred a desire to flourish; they shaped a modern conception of the life to aim for – the good life. A prevalence of these values in a nation tends to generate an economy that offers work gratifying those desires – an economy that delivers flourishing.

How these values changed individual workers and the economy around them may be Phelps’ central insight. The standard argument has been that capitalism or “free enterprise” merely took advantage of discoveries and innovations that had been produced by science. Phelps argues that competition between workers in order to prosper contributed at least as much to individual and economic advancement—that capitalism creates innovation instead of merely feeding upon it. For him, it is the Enlightenment values that we brought to work for more than a century and a half that made “the good life” possible.

As quoted in a Thanksgiving article from a few days ago, this is the vitality and ambition that Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed when he traveled across America in the 1830’s, with its grassroots “religious, moral, commercial and industrial associations” standing in for the nobility and bureaucracy that limited European progress. It is what Lincoln was talking about when he observed that in America, “every man can make himself,” as illustrated in a speech he gave in 1859:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This… is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

But then says Phelps, starting around 1970 and extending into the present day, the values of “free labor” have been constrained or overtaken by other values. In the wake of the New Deal of the 1930’s and even more so of the Great Society of the 1960’s, “traditional” social values have increasingly challenged what used to be our “vigorously individualistic” ones, including the current preference for “solidarity, social protection and security.” Among other things, these society changing priorities gave rise to “a vast canvas of entitlements… [and] to thickets of regulation” that impeded and sometimes overwhelmed the culture of innovation.

Instead of driving an economy that championed a good life from the ground up for individual workers, American policymakers began to manage the economy from the top down so that it would be what they conceived of as good for everyone. For Phelps, the satisfaction that came from realizing yourself through your talents at work along with the explosion of productivity that accompanied it in the economy—a century and a half of “mass flourishing”—was increasingly constrained by the parallel pursuit of other, well-meaning priorities. We tried to do two things at once, with a number of unintended consequences.

For one thing, the personal pride and psychic reward that were yours when you seized the opportunity “to make yourself” through your work were replaced by the promise of material wellbeing. Realizing your potential and learning new things about yourself while you overcame challenges in the rough and tumble working world were increasingly exchanged for the security of income and savings and for your leisure time away from work. According to Phelps, this trade-off no longer serves the individual worker’s “non-material experience” at all, draining work of everything that had once made it so satisfying.

These [recent] formulations overlook the world of creation, exploration and personal growth. Gone is the conception of the good life as a wild ride through an economy with an open future, an economy offering challenges with unimagined rewards. In this climate, young people are not likely to grow up conceiving the good life as a life of Kierkegaardian mystery, Nietzschean challenge and Bergsonian becoming.

(I know, pretty philosophical for an economist.)

Unfortunately as a result, work today has not only become the 8 hours you have to “get through” on your way to a paycheck and a week of vacation, but it also accounts for the startling pull-back of national productivity over the past 50 years. If we accept his thesis, “mass flourishing” has been replaced by widespread worker dissatisfaction, a decline in economic opportunity with few “haves” and many “have nots,” and an overall economy that seems to have run out of gas.

According to Phelps, the creative competition inherent in grassroots capitalism and the Enlightenment values that allowed it to thrive are essential to an innovation culture that brings prosperity at the same time that it makes work engaging. For him, Washington and the decision makers in other Western governments may believe that they can create more orderly and just societies by regulating, taxing and reducing economic growth, but by doing so they have nearly killed the golden goose.

When the values of the corporate state overtake the values of an innovation culture, the result is slower wage growth, reduced productivity in the economy, greater inequality among the nation’s stakeholders, less inclusiveness in promises like “the American Dream,” a sharp reduction in individual job satisfaction, and workers who have lots of stuff at the end of the day but little sense of personal meaning in their lives. One of the great virtues of Mass Flourishing is that it backs its arguments with the kinds of statistics that you’d expect from a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Phelps.

Artist Saul Steinberg imagines today’s workers, out to recover what they’ve lost

What Phelps does not provide are any statistics that quantify the loss of individual, work-related “meaning” over the past 50 years. But to me at least, his conclusion seems bolstered by the findings of a Gallop Poll that was taken around the same time that Phelps’ book came out. Its data proved the sorry state of worker engagement both here and elsewhere, as measured by an employee’s “psychological commitment” to his or her job as well as worker disengagement due to a “lack of motivation” and the disinclination “to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.”

Among North American workers, the Poll determined that 71% of the workforce was disengaged, while globally the level was an even more alarming 87%. Moreover, a substantial subset of checked-out workers was found to be “actively” disengaged. These individuals were not only “unhappy and unproductive,” but also “liable to spread [their] negativity to coworkers.” That all four corners of Phelps’ argument are evidence-based makes it particularly compelling food for thought.

As a result, his thesis challenges my sometimes belief (or is it arrogance?) that greater justice, equality, etc. can be achieved by enlightened government policies, even though experience tells me that there never seems to be a large or robust enough majority to produce real change. Does a tried-and-true system like Phelps “grassroots innovation,” with its mix of individual and system-wide incentives, have a better chance than well-meaning political agendas of producing “a good outcome” for both workers and the country’s economy?

Unfortunately, many of Phelps’ proposals for recovering what’s been lost seem impossible in today’s America. One of them still appeals to me however. It would mandate that members of Congress be people who have done more with their lives than practice law or connive in politics. Phelps’ proposes that all of our legislators be workers who have experienced competition first hand and, therefore, have been forced to innovate on the job. They would bring what they know about flourishing at work to Washington before returning, after term limits, to their highly productive lives.

Today, at the end of 2018, there is still grassroots innovation in America, and not just in the garages of Silicon Valley. When your work goals are in line with Enlightenment values like thinking for yourself, enjoying competition and overcoming obstacles, while experimenting, creating and exploring the unknown, you’ll find the opportunities for innovation at work. But these days, you may need to make a more deliberate effort to find them.

This post is adapted from my November 25, 2018 newsletter. Subscribe today.