A Winter of Work Needs More Color

January 27, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Over the past week, it’s been cold here, then warm, and now cold again. But one of the constants has been how this season seems to drain the world of its color.

It strikes me as a fitting metaphor for what has been happening to the nature and quality of our work in this economy. Choices have been made, and continue to be made, by policymakers on the left as well as right that are draining the color out of work for many, if not most Americans. To restore some of work’s dignity—its life force if you will—we need to make some different choices in the future than we are making today.

In recent newsletters, I’ve been considering how we landed in this increasingly barren place and what we might do to get out of it. Today, we’ll mull over the bold solutions that Oren Cass offers in his new book The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Cass argues that for the sake of our families, communities and individual wellbeing, we need to make some difficult choices about what is good for us as a country and what is not. Before turning to his arguments, here’s a quick review of the discussion we’ve been having recently about the declining prospects for the future of our work.

An immediate challenge is the impending loss of our jobs to machines that can work more efficiently than we can. In an economy that champions “making the most of everything as cheaply as possible,” many of us will simply become too expensive and, at the same time, unable to retrain fast enough for the few jobs that will be left for us to do. My post a couple weeks back considered where opportunities might remain at the “scaling edges” of business today, how an aging workforce can maintain its value during this period of rapid transition, and perhaps most importantly, how government policies that support workers need to be implemented if we want America to continue to capitalize on its human resources.

Around Thanksgiving, I wrote another post about “the mass flourishing” that America enjoyed through much of the 19^thCentury and deep into the 20^th. During the century and a half when the economy flourished, the workforce generally flourished as well. American leaders celebrated the human values of thinking for yourself, working for yourself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making your mark. On the other hand, for the past 50 years as policy makers have tried to mitigate every kind of modern risk with regulations and safety nets, the psychic rewards that once came from “the rough and tumble working world” were gradually replaced by a different economic promise, one of ever greater material well-being. Edmund Phelps and others argue that this trade-off has undermined “the mass flourishing” we used to enjoy. Instead of worker satisfaction coming from working, the economy is being driven to produce more and more stuff for the workforce to consume when they’re not in order to keep them happy. Unfortunately, the promise of ever cheaper and bigger television sets and faster gadgets cannot meet the “non-material” needs that used to be satisfied for many by working.

Both of these posts assume that work has inherent value—that it is not merely the means that gets you more money, stuff, influence or time off. By giving us an opportuniy to demonstrate our capabilities, work allows us to realize our potential, be proud of our abilities to provide for ourselves and our families, be similarly proud of what we’re making or doing, and be more confident when facing the future because we feel that we have a stake in it and that it is not merely “happening to us.” When enough individual workers flourish like this, Phelps argues, an economy overall flourishes.

Cass’s argument in The Once and Future Worker assumes this too, before he documents how working families and communities are currently in jeopardy across America. What follows are highlights from his book, from a half-hour talk he recently gave to a group of policy wonks, and from some of the reactions to his value judgments and original proposals.

For Cass, the crisis for the American worker is evident from several unassailable facts: that wages have stagnated for a more than a generation while reliance on entitlement programs has grown and life expectancy has fallen due to addiction and obesity. He is concerned about the vast majority of urban, suburban and rural workers who are not sharing in America’s prosperity because of policy choices that have been made over the past 50 years by “the Left” (for more government spending on safety nets) and “the Right” (for its insistence on driving economic growth over every other priority). Putting expensive band-aids on the victims of pro-growth government policies—when we could simply be making better choices—is hardly a sustainable way forward in Cass’s view. He argues that if:

a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity, so it should be the central focus of our public policy.

When it comes to work, Cass is convinced that working—and the social benefit it provides—is more satisfying to individuals than being able to consume bigger and cheaper stuff. He is particularly concerned about the human toll, reliying on studies that say workers never recover economically from unemployment; that men only form families when they have work that can provide for them; that unemployment is a trigger for divorce; and that children have better outcomes when at least one parent is working. Moreover, communities where people are working are more vibrant and tend to attract more investment. In other words, communities filled with workers are good for those living there and good for everyone else too.

In addition, Cass cites time-use data indicating that men who are not in the workforce are watching TV or sleeping, not engaged in other productive activities. Making products or providing services that other people want is also satisfying to many who are doing so every day. Where people aren’t working, they (in Cass’s phase) “export their needs” instead, resulting in a massive transfer of payments from taxpayers to meet those needs–the Left’s band-aids. On the Right, a relentless drive to grow the economy with pro-business policies so we have more to consume at the lowest possible price not only overrides other priorities, but also makes the false assumption that short term material gratification will provide long-term economic health and stability. Whatever is satisfying consumer whims in the moment is not necessarily good for any economy long term.

So what can be done about this?

A slice of winter color by the cold Schuylkill River

With the co-dependent (but effectively dead-end) positions of the Left and the Right providing no sustainable way forward, Cass has several ideas.

In addition to questioning many of our investments in growth or safety nets, Cass challenges other allocations that America is making with its wealth, some that I agree with and others less so.

Challenging both sides’ longstanding preference for the elites, Cass would sharply reduce government subsidies for college degrees, noting that most Americans don’t even attend a community college today. These subsidies supposedly produce economic growth because the best students become the most innovative workers. But he argues that a better and fairer result would be less “college prep” and more “vocational training” for the vast majority of students who will never be going to work for a tech company in an innovation hub.

In terms of trade policy, Cass wonders why America has (at least until recently) promoted unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world instead of creating new jobs here that are equivalent to the ones that were lost through globalization.

He argues for a reduction in environmental investments because (again) they are focused on consumer welfare instead of other considerations. To Cass, the cost of, say, clean air or water is not merely the cost of the equipment that’s needed to produce it but also “the costs” of all the other things that we could be doing for our citizens if we weren’t so preoccupied with environmental safeguards. In his cost-benefit analysis, he’d weigh the costs of subsidies for alternative energy and complying with more EPA regulations with the benefits of more jobs or higher wages. I think weighing, balancing and considering different investment strategies is always a useful exercise, but would question whether environmental investments are “short-term” consumer welfare benefits instead of longer-term, life-sustaining ones.

While admitting that labor unions in America have been overtaken by the politics of the Left, Cass argues that stripped of this influence, we should all be excited by workers who are organizing. He references several initiatives here and in Europe that are challenging pro-growth policies on the Right and championing pro-worker issues that have very few advocates on either side of the political divide.

Cass’s most warmly received proposal has been to take some of the funding for programs that currently support non-workers and give it to low-wage workers in the form of a salary boost, providing them with a supplemented income that can better sustain them and their families. (Think of the vulnerability of many federal employees after recently losing a single paycheck.) Cass notes that we let the government take money from our paychecks (like taxes), why not put additional dollars into them for struggling workers on a regular basis? In addition to encouraging work instead of idleness, such a policy change would be revenue-neutral by moving monies from programs that support non-workers into a new one that bolsters the most vulnerable end of the workforce.

Cass’s bottom line is that investments that help all working families and communities to thrive will sustain our long-term prosperity more effectively than most government investments today. As taxpayers who finance and citizens who vote for the future that we want, he invites us to throw many of our current social expenditures on the table and consider whether they are more (or less) important to the future than enabling all of America’s families and communities to thrive—particularly when much of the country is already missing out on America’s prosperity today. Given the fools bargain we have all accepted, Cass wants us to “try on” his work-based ethic and help to decide whether our country should be embracing very different priorities than it has for the past five decades.

Two prior posts, on June 3 and 10 last summer, argued that whenever a dissenter from the prevailing wisdoms like Cass takes a principled stand, he is inviting those who are unclear about their priorities to clarify them and those who disagree with them to speak up. Principle-based dissent and the conversation that follows almost always makes our “next steps” as stakeholders more assured. To facilitate that forward movement by putting Cass’s ideas into a broader context, here is one helpful reaction to his priority-of-work arguments that also manages to echo what several others have been saying.

Winter color for families and the rest of the community at a playground in Bella Vista

After Cass’s book came out, Ross Douthat wrote a column in the New York Times about the struggle amongst the members of “a small church” of moderates “to claim a middle ground between left-wing pessimism about the post-1970s American economy and right-wing faith in the eternal verities of Reaganomics.” Given the similarity between how they and Cass saw the problem, Douthat summarized some of the issues that he and other moderates have with Cass’s proposed solutions.

[A] common thread is that Cass’s diagnosis overstates the struggles of American workers and exaggerates the downsides of globalization, and in so doing risks giving aid and comfort to populist policies [like Trump’s] — or, for that matter, socialist policies, from the Ocasio-Cortezan left — that would ultimately choke off growth.

Not unlike Edmund Phelps, who would also favors largely unencumbered profit seekers, Douthat initially puts more faith in the continued vibrancy of a growth economy than in the need to make as many new investments in our families and communities as Cass advocates.

On the other hand, Douthat allows that America may have made as much progress as it can along its current path, and that the dead-end many (including me) are feeling may already be here.

[I]s the West’s post-1980 economic performance a hard-won achievement and pretty much the best we could have done, or is there another economic path available, populist or social democratic or something else entirely, that doesn’t just lead back to stagnation?

He concludes with what I’d call a fork in the road. If you tend towards the pessimistic view from the perspective of America’s working families and communities then pursuing some of Cass’s proposals may be the only way to preserve at least some of the American economy’s growth prospects going forward.

Perhaps the best reason to bet on Cass’s specific vision is that the social crisis he wants to address is itself a major long-term drag on growth — because a society whose working class doesn’t work or marry or bear children will age, even faster than the West is presently aging, into stagnation and decline.

At the same time, Douthat also notes (with some of Cass’s other critics) that working America’s challenges may be “cultural” instead of economic. I imagine that he’s thinking of factors like declining commitments to organized religion, marriage, community life and even participation in democracy itself, along with greater self-absorption with our devices and crises like opioid addiction. Encouraging work and redirecting the fruits of growth for the sake of thriving families and communities won’t help if what ails working America can’t be cured by larger investments.

I don’t happen to agree with this last possibility—but there it is.

+ + +

One of the reasons that I write this newsletter is because much of the discussion about work and work-related policy, to the extent that it occurs at all, happens below the radar. I’m convinced it’s a discussion that needs to be heard (and chewed on) more widely.

I’m also convinced that good work is of vital importance to those who are doing it as well as to the health of their families, their communities and to the country generally, and that our policy-makers are not grappling at all today with good work’s rotting underbelly.

My hope is that thinking with you about Phelps’ “flourishing economy,” about proposals to survive the future of work, and about Cass’s ideas on work-based investments in families and communities might help to open a wider policy debate as we enter the long, painful slog towards choosing our leaders again.

This post was adapted from my January 27, 2019 newsletter.

We Are Making a Difference

January 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When we set out to make a difference with our work, we usually are. It empowers us by doing it and empowers others who are trying to change the same things. It’s the belief in possibility that makes a new year, well…doable.

I came upon a guy last week who begins his day reading these phrases:

This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will.

“What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.

“When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever. In its place is something you have left behind…let it be something good.

However “make the most of it” that sounds, it’s about whether we dare to face forward and declare ourselves because none of us has an unlimited number of days ahead of us when we can.

Historian David McCullough has written a dozen or so highly acclaimed biographies about Americans like Teddy Roosevelt, the Wright Brothers and John Adams. (You may also know him as the sonorous voice behind some of Ken Burn’s public television documentaries.) When he was interviewed about Truman, McCullough discussed this same quandary: whether to bother standing up for what’s important when it’s so easy to give up before you’ve even started.

The interviewer began by noting that “your writing makes readers feel like they are there,” and McCullough replying that his writing this way is deliberate.

What I’m trying to do is show readers—especially young readers—that things didn’t have to turn out as well as they did. I want them to know that life felt every bit as uncertain to people back then as it does to us today.

There were these moments when they had to be thinking, there is no way we can get this bridge built, or get this canal dug. But things worked out—because individuals behaved in certain ways, with integrity and resilience. They figured out how to work with other people, and they tried to do the right thing.

And my hope is that these stories will inspire some readers to behave the same way in the face of the uncertainty in their lives.

I found the immediacy and uncertainty before what happens next to be most compelling in McCullough’s 1776. But for tiny acts of imagination and courage all coming together 250 years ago, America would never have happened. And I can be a part of the same miracle today—if I choose to.

In a strange twist of fate several years later, McCullough found himself talking with his new internist about the Truman interview, about how today is no different than it was in the past, and the amazing things we might accomplish by acting despite today’s uncertainties.

I try to make that point in every interview. It’s really the main reason I do the work I do.

McCullough’s rationale for his lifetime of work is sharing this knowledge. Everyone who went on to accomplish something important could just as easily have sat it out, yielding to fear or inertia It’s not just a perspective for the young but for those at every stage of life who have a limited time ahead to leave behind something that they can be proud of. And finally, It’s not only advice for opinion writers or biographers, but for everyone who employs their skills on the gamble that they just might achieve a good result.

Writing this morning, it is easy to see 2019 as a gathering mess. No wonder people are looking for “unicorns” like Beto O’Rourke “to save the coming day for us” so we don’t have to get down into the trenches and do the hard work ourselves. But why not be a part of it, putting the faith in our own judgments instead of in a savior’s, particularly when so much that’s good has already been achieved in our lifetimes?

I can’t be reminded enough about the positive side of the ledger that’s laid out in Steven Pinker’s books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) (according to the data: life, health, prosperity, safety, knowledge, and happiness are all on the rise, and not just in the West, but worldwide), which builds on his earlier The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) (that we’re living today in the most peaceful era in history). Like David McCullough, the perspective of time helps me to overcome my excuses and failures of nerve.

In the last couple of days, there was also Greg Ip’s helpful column looking both back at the past year and forward into the new one in the Wall Street Journal. Ip called it “The World is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better,” and he begins it with a promise:

If you spent 2018 mainlining misery about global warming, inequality, toxic politics or other anxieties, I’m here to break your addiction with some good news: The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year.

But what I liked the most about the column was his conclusion after reviewing the data about rising incomes and global progress.

Perhaps it…feels irresponsible to celebrate the many ways the world is quietly getting better because it distracts from the fight against things that are loudly getting worse: polarized and authoritarian politics, deadly opioids, nuclear proliferation, and most of all, a warming climate—a consequence of all those new middle-class entrants burning fossil fuels.

Yet obsessing over [these remaining] perils is how we’ll likely solve them.

Ip is saying that with focus and forward momentum—we can do this, and I happen to believe he’s right. We still have the hard work of planting the seeds that are there, but the ground is also in better shape than our sky-is-falling fears like to admit.

I wrote several posts last year about the threat of technology that arrives and is widely embraced before its downsides are known or anyone has had a chance to put reasonable safeguards in place. Social networks and smart phones today, with drone deliveries and autonomous vehicles soon to follow. The ethicist in me kept asking: “Just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should, at least before we understand more of the implications than we do now.” So last year felt like frantically catching up with the aggregators who are selling our personal data and the too-big-for-our-own-good companies that no one worried about soon enough. Much of the time, it felt like not having enough fingers for the holes in the dike.

But still I railed against the privacy profiteers like Facebook and Google (for the sake of our ability to make decisions without manipulation) and monopolists like Amazon (because the free flow of goods and labor really is important). And all the while, others with similar sensibilities were jumping into these trenches too, with no certainty that anything would come of it. Well, this past week saw several news stories about progress that is being made where I doubted it ever would.

A story on January 11 announced that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile would no longer be sharing their users’ location data with those who are selling it to trackers because of privacy concerns that had been raised. Yesterday, Sprint followed up with the same decision. It was a victory (for now) over some of the tech giants with a brand new cohort of privacy advocates behind it.

Last Friday, there was a news report that customers, investors and employees are challenging Amazon’s facial recognition software because of similar privacy concerns. A group of nuns who are also investors have submitted a resolution for a vote at Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting. The company has refused thus far to halt the sales of personal data generated by its software, but it has been forced into a dialogue it would never have had without widespread pushback.

My favorite marker from last week also speaks to the critical mass of individual voices that have been building, one by one, against Facebook even when the odds against them seemed most daunting. Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company, was one of them. Despite becoming rich, having a personal relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, sitting on Facebook’s board for a time, and being a prominent member of the insider’s club in Silicon Valley, McNamee was one of the first to challenge Facebook’s excesses that nobody could ignore. It took his early critical statements along with the past 9 months of populist backlash to culminate in Time’s cover story this week—a testament to how voices both big and small can coalesce into a wave.

I want to mention something else too. I’m hardly a frontline tech commentator, but Roger McNamee signaled me through Twitter yesterday after I profiled his essay in Time. I’m not telling you this because it’s cool that he did but because taking a stand in your work, however you can, often puts you in the company of those you can be proud to be associated with. The experience of this kind of solidarity also helps me to forsake the safety of my fence and dive into the fray even when I’m reluctant to do so in the work that stares back at me every day.

It’s not just pushing the same rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down to its same old place. There is progress when I look for it, and I’m almost never alone.

There’s a wooden arch at our backyard entrance. It’s heavy with wisteria branches that are hung (as if for the holidays) with seedpods.

A few years ago, when Brendan Ryan’s painting crew was here gentrifying the place, I was outside, by this archway, talking to one of his painters when a prior generation of seedpods started popping like firecrackers, propelling their seeds loudly and with amazing velocity in all directions. It happened in March, with some change in temperature or water pressure that neither of us could feel triggering the explosion. We laughed when we realized what was happening, and eventually fell into quiet to absorb the miracle of it.

The wisteria was thrusting itself into the future.

Of course, we need more than nature’s rhythms to motivate us to get up and keep doing good work for another day or year. Plants also don’t make excuses, or have the luxury of feeling hopeless when their time has come.

But there are markers that bolster optimism when I bother to look, that help me to believe that I’m neither Sisyphus nor going it alone. Perspective. A record of progress. Occasions of solidarity. It’s about winning the game in my head so I have another day’s worth of fortitude to win it outside.

This post was adapted from my January 20, 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.

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.