With Upward Mobility Frustrated at Every Turn, Let’s Revitalize the American Dream

October 6, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As I write this, tens of thousands of people are waiting in line in London “to pay their respects” to the Queen. This is no casual choice, since the viewing-line stretches for miles and it could take you a day to reach your goal, which is a walking glimpse (and perhaps a bow of the head or bended knee) before her standard-draped coffin in Westminster Hall.

If you were lucky enough yesterday, the trajectory of your arrival might also have coincided with the brief visit by the Queen’s children (and new King) who were there paying homage to her memory at the compass points of her resting place. But the lines that kept forming outside didn’t need the glimpse of any living royal.

Some asked why so many would wait so long to just walk by.

In my own wondering, I learned that since at least World War II, the Brits have developed a curmudgeonly fondness for standing, waiting for something and ambling towards “whatever it is” with others, chatting and complaining as they go. In the War years, the quest was for rations; today, it’s for a different kind of sustenance.

The British are known for their love of getting in line, which in Britain has long been called a ‘queue,’ from the French word for tail. It was once said ‘an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’

Despite the solitary joke, joining a queue is essentially a group experience, the participants joined by a common desire about what they’re likely to find at the end along the way.

Jenny Muskat, a middle-age woman from London, emerged from Westminster Hall late Thursday and said it took her ‘only’ six-and-a-half hours of waiting. She said she had been unsure earlier in the day about joining the line, but was happy she did after making fast friends with others in the queue. ‘We spent all these hours together, we laughed together, we just now cried together, and it was beautiful,’ she said.

What most of these Brits are doing—and it seems incomprehensible to some—is investing a great deal of time and effort to express their collective respect. They’re saying by this stupendous outpouring: “Thank you. As our Queen, you have given me, given all of us a great deal. In fact, you’ve given us a view of our best selves: Steady. Gracious. Tireless. Of our wry sense of humor. Thank you for being there, for making the rest of us look this good for all these years.”

Masses of people “paying their respect” seems almost unthinkable at a time when irony and cynicism make short work out of anything that’s cherished. People on social media were incredulous that anyone in their right mind would wait for that many hours to walk past a box with a body in it. If a national figure with millions of followers like Donald Trump (certainly a ”comparable” in terms of devotion) were to die tomorrow, the crowds would surely come out, but their gathering would be more of a political act, a kind of middle finger to everyone who didn’t come out, instead of a mass demonstration of respect for public virtues and the personal impacts of their mirrored glory.

_{The Queen’s Queue}

To me, the Magic of the Queen derived from the fact that she was always, throughout her very long life, a kind of cipher. We knew what she wanted us to know about her, and almost nothing more—those virtues again, like steadfastness, self-restraint and even nobility while she was greeting “her people” and accepting their hellos and flowers in her “walkabouts” at another town hall or soccer field.

Because the Queen was a kind of screen, her subjects and other admirers could project what they wanted onto her—a sense of majesty or a quintessential Britishness—and see such qualities reflected back upon them. Her fans are grateful today, eager to express their thanks and respect, because this idealized Queen made these “commoners” feel better about the parts of her that they see in themselves, and that at a time when almost nothing else in modern life does.

The closest that Americans come to this kind of “give and take” with popular figures tend to involve individuals with two qualities that are very different from those that the Queen projected and then returned by way of “reflected glory.” Our idealized figures are usually both “self-made” and “very rich.” The clearest example I can think of is Steve Jobs, who turned his particular mirror back on the rest of us by encouraging the dream that we could also transform the world (and become fabulously rich in the process) by having an idea and a garage in which to realize it. Interestingly, some of Jobs’ unshakable aura may also have come from his timing. In the years after his passing, social media’s cynicism and irony have done a better job of rightsizing his successors (like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) so that their reflected glories are much less desirable to see in ourselves.

Instead these days, most of us have to project our plans about “making ourselves” and “becoming rich” onto a faceless American Dream, while hoping that what gets reflected back encourages our self-sacrifice, inventiveness, hard work and everyday desire to give our children better lives than we’ve had. Unfortunately, while millions continue to believe in that Dream, its promises are no longer encouraging most of us to work harder to achieve it. Instead, those workers who are paying attention in the lower 4/5ths of our economy feel stifled, stuck, betrayed, undermined and “quietly quitting” instead of having their upward mobility encouraged and advanced.

I say “those who are paying attention” because the “tradeoffs” of a top-down, government-managed economy (from the more entrepreneurial one that we had until the 1970s) were not only greater “fairness to all” (without regard to individual talent or effort), but also more material well-being (that is, more stuff) so that hopefully no one would feel quite so badly about the loss of an economic upside, and well-oiled corporations could reap more profits by satisfying our consuming desires.

Having this glut of stuff, along with the distractions of entertainment and social media—its full-bore anesthetizing effects as the years spooled on—are what Aldus Huxley forecast in “Brave New World Revisited,” written in 1932. In a prior post called Whose Future Should We Fear Most (which contrasted George Orwell’s and Huxley’s forecasts through today), I tried to capture the context for mass sedation that Huxley’s book so accurately anticipated.

In our era of 24/7 entertainment ‘on demand,’ of non-stop drama from our ‘news’ outlets, and of a constant barrage of social media updates, none of us ever has to pay much attention to what is happening in the so-called “real world” or the roles we should be playing in it. There is always a new ‘prompt’ from our phones, watches or “smart” speakers to provide us with a refuge from reality. The soma of near constant screen distraction and ‘the internet of things’ has also become a fixture of our daily lives in the four score years since Brave New World was published.

Too many who are no longer animated by the American Dream or disappointed by its promises have also been reduced to passivity by these diversions. They simply can’t be bothered to muster a justifiable sense of outrage before Netflix or YouTube suggests the next thing for them to watch.

But as inflation bites and more data gets mustered, it’s amazing to me that anyone “who’s not already rich or totally checked out” can avoid a sense of outrage and its class-driven political upheavals.

In a post from a couple of weeks back called The Great Resignation is an Exercise in Frustration and Futility I cited data suggesting that government management of the economy has caused the middle, lower middle, and lowest economic classes to realize essentially the same income at the end of their working (or non-working) days due to government transfer payments. But these redistributions of wealth also stifle upward mobility. Mass quitting followed by a frantic search for “better lives via better jobs” is not only a fool’s errand but also an invitation to deeper resentments against “capitalism” and “the American way of life.” It embodies the reality that most Americans these days feel stuck on their rungs of the economic ladder.

The effective death-knell for upward mobility may be saddest for previously disadvantaged people who have struggled and saved and sacrificed so that they could reach the middle classes only to find that they’re still experiencing economic anxiety over the costs of health care, education, a comfortable retirement or an unexpected emergency. It’s hard working rural or immigrant whites, urban Blacks, second or third generation Latinos who finally thought they’d broken through—were on their way to the Dream they’d projected their hopes upon—only to find that nothing but futility was reflecting back on them and making them feel like failures.

These white, brown and black Americans have sometimes directed their anger and bitterness towards the poorest among us who seem to be living as well as they are, or towards rich/oblivious Progressives at the top of the pile who can afford to have privileged views since they come at the expense of the remaining 80%. Instead of having someone to be thankful for (like the Queen) or to aspire to be like (such as Steve Jobs), Americans have been finding scapegoats for their rage like Black Lives Matter and its supporters or the Coastal Elites.

Notwithstanding where we find ourselves today (and in spite of all evidence to the contrary), the American Dream still encourages more hope than it can deliver on, and the country’s ire still hasn’t turned on the richest 20%, or the corporations that are also accruing a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth.

Instead, there are enough folks in that lower 80% who still believe they can hit the economic jackpot that neither the “Occupy Wall Street” uprising of 2011 nor Bernie Sander’s democratic socialism movement in 2016 could enlist enough of the disgruntled masses. Moreover, while President Trump was directing his ire at poor and often minority protestors after the death of George Floyd, he and Congress enhanced the protections for the richest Americans and our most profitable corporations in the so-called Tax Reform Act of 2017. Like we were his game-show contestants, he continued to hock the Dream by telling us: Everyone in America can be a billionaire, just like me, once we rid ourselves of all these freeloaders.

Our increasingly empty Dream was about to lose even more of its hold on our imaginations during the pandemic. As a consequence, the pressure in the pressure cooker for the vast majority that finds it nearly impossible to better their circumstances will continue to build against the way that our elected leaders (both Democrat and Republican) have managed the American economy and designated its winners and losers for the past 50 years.

So where do we go from here?

Like an anti-addiction program, the first step is acknowledging the overwhelming evidence of the American Dream’s fragile state. In 2015, according to a study reported in Fast Company, the U.S. already ranked “among the lowest of all developed countries in terms of the potential for upward mobility, despite clinging to the mythology of Horatio Alger.” That article, called “The American Dream is Dead: Here’s Where It Went,” provided a breakdown of the developed countries where your chances of rising economically were the strongest.

1. Denmark
2. Norway
3. Finland
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Sweden
7. New Zealand
8. Germany
9. Japan
10. Spain

America is simply not the Land of (Economic) Opportunity that it once was.

In my Great Resignation post, I joined Nobel-Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps in waxing nostalgic for a more-entrepreneurial/ less-government-managed economy given the psychological and economic benefits that it brings to everyone who’s willing to work hard to get ahead. But Phelps didn’t provide much of a roadmap to recover our economic vitality when he wrote “Mass Flourishing.” On the other hand another economist, Oren Cass, has several ideas about boosting upward mobility for all American workers given the much-changed country that we’re living in today. (See my 2019 post A Winter of Work Needs More Color for an overview of Cass’s proposals, including incentivizing all of the country’s working families instead of subsidizing only a few of its most impoverished ones.)

In line with both Phelps’s and Cass’s thinking, we need to come to a more inclusive approach to the harms that follow when we stifle individual initiative and deprive a vast majority of the workerforce of its financial and psychological rewards.

A study that was reported out of Yale University this week argues that the lack of upward mobility early in life increases mortality rates in all young adults who confront it. While the emphasis in the study’s presentation was on groups that suffer the most (like young urban Blacks), it’s important to note the pernicious effects that are felt by every young person when they feel that they can’t improve their personal fortunes. A similar message came from studying pockets of white rural America that are dying from opioid abuse and suicide as chronicled in Angus Deaton’s and Anne Case’s ground-breaking “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” a book I briefly discussed here in another earlier post.

Many of the researchers and prognosticators who have confronted these problems have argued that “intergenerational wealth accumulation” is essential for upward economic mobility. In other words, how much your parents or even grandparents “had” and “left to you” may be as significant (if not more) to upward mobility than your personal work ethic. Some observers, like the author of this New York Magazine essay, clearly agree:

Without the safety net of accumulated family wealth, the children of self-made men and women can be ‘unmade’ in a hurry. With such wealth, by contrast, the trust-fund deadbeat’s child can follow her grandparents’ footsteps back through Harvard.
Thus, making America an exceptionally [upwardly] mobile society [again] will require a greater degree of income and wealth redistribution than most politicians would dare to suggest: To get more poor kids up the ‘ladder of opportunity’ we’re going to have to shorten the space between its rungs.

With my caveat that it’s not just “poor kids” but (more accurately) nearly everyone in the middle, lower middle and lowest classes, I am reluctant to argue that the same bipartisan government that nearly killed the American Dream should be given the mandate of “redistributing” the accumulated wealth at the top of our economy’s pyramid. But something needs to be done. If unlocking the nation’s sleeping economic vitality can’t be driven by wise leaders, than it is likely to be advanced by protests (and worse) on the streets.

Projecting my hopes for upward mobility onto the American Dream doesn’t have to become a reminder of my failures as a worker, it simply doesn’t. And allowing that kind of resentment to keep accruing is a dangerous thing.

Just as the Brits saw their reflected glory in their Queen and wanted to thank her for it, we can recover our reflected glory in the promises of that Dream—but we’ll have to want it as a country, almost more than we want anything else, given how hard that revitalization process is likely to be.

This post was adapted from my September 18, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

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.

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.