The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken

April 23, 2019 By David Griesing 1 Comment

A growing part of the American economy—the part that’s harvesting and utilizing our personal data to drive what we consume—no longer depends on “the basic reciprocities” that once supported our social contract. In other segments of our economy, business is also profiting at worker’s expense and democratic capitalism’s promises to us about shared prosperity are regularly broken.

The mutual benefits of a capitalist economy were supposed to include our thriving as workers, being fairly compensated for our work and able to support our families and communities, while our employers also thrived when we used our paychecks to buy their goods and services. That virtuous circle has been the bedrock of capitalism’s social contract since Adam Smith first described it 300 years ago.

Today, its bonds are weakened, if not altogether broken.

A leading edge of the breakdown is tech platforms harvesting our personal data “for free” while selling it to others who use it to drive our decisions about what we consume. In what’s been called “surveillance capitalism,” we’re no longer valued at the front end of the exchange for what we provide (in this instance, our information). Instead our only value is at the back-end, determined by how much the companies that utilize our data can manipulate us into buying whatever they’re selling.

In this growing segment of our economy, largely exploitative exchanges have already replaced mutually beneficial ones. In addition to not paying us for our information, this economic model creates very few jobs in a departure from the consumer-oriented companies of the past. Its failure to value what we’re providing as workers and consumers relative to the enormous profits its trophy companies are reaping undermines both the health of the economy and the democratic institutions that depend on it.

In our economy’s more traditional jobs, we are also losing out today when it comes to the fair exchange of our work for its supposed benefits. A broader stagnation in the American economy results when the benefits that companies gain from pro-business policies fail to “trickle down” and benefit the vast majority of workers who lack the financial security to also be shareholders in these same companies. The result is a yawning wealth gap between the 1% (or, perhaps more accurately, the top 10%) and every other American.

Communities break down both economically and politically when we’re not compensated adequately for the work and information that we provide. What were supposed to be “a series of mutual benefit equations” between workers and employers, consumers and companies that sell us things, have become increasingly unbalanced.

The first discussion today looks at this breakdown in the social contract. The second part argues for a shift in priorities that can confront the perils of surveillance capitalism along with other distortions—like income inequality and stagnant growth—that harm all but a small percentage of those who participate in America’s economy today.

Instead of more failed attempts to increase economic opportunity through pro-business polices or to limit the harms of this approach with band aids for those it leaves behind, a far better alternative is promoting work for all who are willing to do it, while making the dignity of work (and the thriving families and communities that good work produces) our priorities. Rebalancing the economic equation for workers and consumers will enable the economy to benefit nearly everyone again while mending vital parts of America’s promise.

I took the pictures here in Germantown, a nearby “town” in Philadelphia where the Revolutionary War battle took place. Three centuries ago, America’s democratic capitalism began in places like Germantown. In the fabric of its old and repurposed buildings, it’s not difficult to find a metaphor when you’re looking for one.

In the side of one old factory, there is a bricked-in wall where there used to be a workroom. In the future of our work, I’d argue that bricked-over workrooms like this, where we used to benefit from our contributions as workers and consumers, need to be opened up and revitalized. We need to call out our increasingly feudal system for what it is, and reorient our priorities to restore basic economic relationships that are foundation stones for our way of life.

The Fundamental Breakdown

In a post from January, I discussed the arguments that Oren Cass makes in his new book The Once and Future Worker about how the mutually beneficial relationships between workers, consumers and businesses have broken down since the 1970s and our repeated failures to address the imbalance. As I said at the time:

[Cass] 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 [business profits] 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.

Cass argues that propping up business to create a bigger pie for all has been a failure because those bigger slices are being eaten almost exclusively by business owners and their investors as opposed to their workers, their communities, or the economy at large. To counter this result, Cass wants policy makers to adopt entirely different priorities than the Right and Left have been embracing, namely, active, sustained promotion of “a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities [as] the central determinant of long term prosperity.” Several of his proposals about how to do so, along with his views about the dignity of work and its importance to democracy, are set out in that earlier post.

Cass’s conclusion (and mine) is that America needs to change its economic priorities before the costs of failure get any worse.

In another new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff focuses on a leading edge of the current problem: the stark imbalance in “behavioral futures markets” where data about what we “are likely to want next” has tremendous value to companies selling us products and services but which no one has been paying us to provide. For Zuboff, these tech platforms, along with the marketers and sellers who buy our behavioral information, have created “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material” while implementing “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification.” If the industry players can seduce you into giving enough information about your motivations and desires to your smart phones, smart speakers, social networks and search engines, they can persuade you to buy (or do) almost anything.

Zuboff discusses how economic theorists from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek legitimized capitalism as a system where workers needed to be paid well enough to provide for their families, be productive members of their communities, and have enough spending money left over to buy the products and services that companies like their employers were providing. In an essay that laid out her argument before Surveillance Capitalism was published, Zuboff cites economic historian Karl Polanyi for his views about how American companies after World War II were expected to offer a kind of communal reciprocity that involved hiring the available workers, hiking wages when possible, and sharing their prosperity rather than hoarding it.

Polanyi knew that capitalism was never self-regulating, could be profoundly destructive, and that its foreseeable human tolls needed to be minimized. To do so, “measures and policies” also had to be integrated “into powerful institutions [that were] designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land and money.” Zuboff cites Polanyi’s post-War study of General Motors not only for for the ways that fair labor practices, unionization and collective bargaining preserved “the organic reciprocities” between its workers and owners but also for how much the public appreciated these shared benefits at the time.

In the 1950s, for example, 80 percent of [American] adults said that ‘big business’ was a good thing for the country, 66 percent believed that business required little or no change, and 60 percent agreed, ‘the profits of large companies help make things better for everyone who buys their products or services.’

It was a balance that persisted for almost 40 years until what Zuboff calls “the ascendancy of neoliberalism” promoted an extreme form of capitalism where owner profits and share price were paramount and a responsible commitment to workers and communities no longer held capitalism’s worst tendencies in check. Around 1980, Oren Cass notes a related shift. Instead of creating worker satisfaction through “the dignity of work,” there was an economic policy shift from promoting worker satisfaction through the quality of their jobs to keeping them happy as consumers by giving them more stuff to buy with their paychecks.

Zuboff argues that the surveillance capitalists stepped in once these established reciprocities were breached, with profound effects for individual Americans as workers and consumers, for communities whose vitality depends on them, and for our democratic way of life itself.

Instead of paying for the parts of us that they’re profiting from, the surveillance capitalists pay us nothing for our behavioral data. Given the enormous size and profitability of companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, they also “give back” far fewer jobs to the employment market than a GM once did. Moreover, these companies feel that they owe us nothing in exchange for manipulating us into buying whatever they’re selling—what Zuboff calls a kind of “radical indifference.” Without so much as an afterthought, they take without giving much back to us individually, to the job market, or to the community at large. Capitalism’s ability to lift all boats was supposed to be a driving force for democracy and the genius of the American Dream.

The absence of organic reciprocities with people as sources of either consumers or employees is a matter of exceptional importance in light of the historical relationship between market capitalism and democracy. In fact, the origins of democracy in both Britain and America have been traced to these very reciprocities. [the citations I’ve omitted here are provided in her essay]

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff describes the problem but doesn’t propose solutions. Cass, on the other hand, argues that capitalism remains the best hope for workers to reclaim their share of economic prosperity, but that we’ll have to change our public policies in order to restore the necessary reciprocities. As for surveillance capitalism, tech futurist Jaron Lanier made an early argument for countering tech company indifference and reclaiming the benefit of our personal data in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future? His proposals are even more feasible today.

The bricked-off memory of this old workroom seems more hopeful in the springtime.

Restoring the Balance

Cass’s Once and Future Worker is an important book because he backs up his ideological preferences with hard data. His solutions begin with the need for new government policies that aim to support thriving workers, families and communities by reinforcing the democratic give-and-take that is barely holding America together today. Along the way, Cass never loses sight of the real human impacts—for better and for worse—of economic forces and the policies that attempt to manage them.

For example, in his chapter “A Future for Work,” Cass argues that the workforce disruptions that will result from automation are a natural and positive effect of every innovation from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Learning how to do more with less is essential for economic growth. At the same time however, he argues strenuously that gains in economic productivity from new inventions and technologies (fewer workers producing the same amount) need to be matched by policy-driven gains in overall economic output (which will give displaced workers the ability to find new jobs as more wealth is created, living standards improve and consumer demand grows).

This is precisely what happened from 1947 to 1972, widely seen as the golden age of American manufacturing and the nation’s middle class. Economy-wide productivity increased by 99 percent; only fifty workers were needed by the end of the Vietnam War to do the work that one hundred could complete at the end of World War II. The result was not mass unemployment. Instead, America produced more stuff. The same share of the population was working in 1972 as in 1947, and men’s median income was 86 percent higher…[W]ith fewer workers required to produce the output of 1947, many could serve markets in 1972 that hadn’t existed a generation earlier or that had been much smaller.

Cass admits that these disruptions are hard for individual workers to weather but that expanding economic output always provides new jobs for displaced workers eventually. I’ve discussed the theory that at least some workers can prepare for disruptions like automation by developing skills “at the scalable edges” of their industries before their jobs disappear. But Cass also cites the introduction of ATM machines and fears about bank closures for an easier transition given the health of the economy at the time. In the years when ATM machines debuted, economic output (or an expanding economy) was matching productivity gains (and business profits). Since these ATMs lowered the banks’ cost of doing business, they repeatedly responded by opening more branches and creating new jobs.

Unfortunately, government statistics indicate that current productivity gains are not being matched by gains in overall economic output. It is a time when companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are using their innovations to maximize corporate profits but provide relatively few jobs while exploiting free user data–giving back little (beyond convenience) that can enable workers, families and communities to thrive as well. So if you don’t feel like you’re “getting ahead” today, it’s not your imagination; the output economy that creates new economic opportunities and new jobs isn’t keeping up, and it hasn’t been doing so for years. Writes Cass:

From 1950 to 2000, while productivity in the manufacturing sector rose by 3.1 percent annually, value-added output grew by 3.6 percent—and employment increased, from 14 million to 17 million. During 2000-2016, productivity rose by a similar 3.3 percent annually. But output growth was only 1.1 percent—and employment fell, from 17 million to 12 million. Even with all of the technological advancement of the twenty-first century, had manufacturers continued to grow their businesses at the same rate as in the prior century, they would have needed more workers—a total of 18 million, by 2016 [if output had also been growing].

While he does not describe the problem in terms of “reciprocities” between workers, businesses and consumers like Zuboff, Cass would agree that the imbalances between them are at the heart of the problem and need to be corrected. Once again, several of the policy solutions he proposes are reviewed in my January post. All reject the failed economic policies of the Left and the Right in favor of new approaches that will help workers, families and communities to thrive even if we have to settle for making somewhat less money as an economy overall.

Long before Shoshana Zuboff was railing about “surveillance capitalism,” Jaron Lanier was arguing that our behavioral information has tremendous value to the tech platforms, marketers and sellers or what he calls the “Siren Servers” that are harvesting it, and that we should be putting a price tag on our personal data before they take any more of it for free.

Like both Zuboff and Cass, Lanier believes in an economy that is sustained by a thriving middle class with plenty of hard, fulfilling work. His quandary is finding a way that more livelihoods can be sustained “in a world in which information is king,” as his Guardian book reviewer put it.

To that end, Lanier fears that in the early days of the internet we spent too much time worrying about open access and too little, if any time worrying about the digital economy’s likely impacts on job security and the monetizing of user information. Lanier emphasizes the highly personal nature of this exploitation by arguing that our behavioral data “is people in disguise” and morally intertwined with the humans who supplied it.

Lanier’s corrective is to implement a system where we would each be given “nanopayments” for the use of our biometric property. In 2013, he envisioned more sophisticated archives to record where our data originates as well as what it should be worth. He takes over half of his book to describe this mechanism. For our purposes, what he envisioned five years ago can be reduced (although far too easily) to a series of blockchain-based payments for our provision of useful personal data, similar to the system discussed here in a post from last August. Lanier’s nanopayments to individuals whenever a company profits from their personal information would be daunting to implement but it would also go a long way towards restoring Zuboff’s “organic reciprocities” and bringing Cass’s broader economic growth into the business of surveillance capitalism.

+ + +

The mutual benefits that we once enjoyed as workers, consumers and business owners in exchange for what we were providing is no longer a reality. The reasons for that loss and the blame for those responsible are just the front-end of our thinking about what we’re prepared to do about it.

In the election cycles ahead of us, it is hard to believe that our nation will have the kind of reasoned debate that we need to be having about the future of our work and its impact on our families, our local communities and our way of life itself. But maybe, hopefully, a conversation along the lines I am arguing for above will begin alongside the shouting matches we are already having about the need to abandon democratic capitalism altogether.

Cass, Zuboff and Lanier all begin with the proposition—and it’s where I start too—that our future needs to be built by human workers and that the work we’ll be doing needs to enable us, our loved ones, our neighbors, our shared economy, and not merely a protected few, to flourish.

We have managed to do this before.

Many of us have experienced its mutual benefit in our lifetimes, and we can experience it again.

But first, we’ll need to restore the social contract around our work.

This post was adapted from my April 21, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe on this page, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

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.

Edifice Complex

October 9, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

With more of us being priced out of higher education, there’s a startling divergence in how the folks who control the entry ramps are responding. But one of their responses could actually be quite good for you.

Most colleges and universities are bulking up to do more of what they’ve done for the past half century: running increasingly ambitious fund raising campaigns to support increasingly expensive buildings, administrations & faculties. A few other schools, along with a disruptive cohort of education-oriented companies, are moving in the opposite direction: de-emphasizing the traditional overhead in favor of providing as many students as possible with practical and affordable alternatives.

In this later category, there are some new and exciting options that are highly tailored to your needs if you see additional education as your way of getting either a first job, or a new & better job. At the same time these alternatives are becoming available however, the traditional college experience is getting farther from reach for nearly everyone who is neither rich nor “obviously brilliant” enough to be subsidized by someone who is.

The future of higher education could be a relatively small number of wealthy schools catering to the lucky few, with highly affordable, skill-based alternatives available to everyone else.

Inputs from a couple of different directions tend to support the truth of this forecast.

In his new book, Average is Over, economist Tyler Cowen argues that the US is well on its way to even greater income polarization than we’ve already seen, with all but about 15% of our citizens living not “in the middle” but “on the margins.” Among other things, he envisions American cities looking more like Rio de Janiero, with massive favelas ringing small but wealthy enclaves.

It’s already not so different in Philadelphia, so I couldn’t help but think about Cowen’s observation when I was on the University of Pennsylvania campus the other day, and took this picture of its magnificent new nanotechnology center.

THE $92M SINGH CENTER FOR NANOTECHNOLOGY

It is, as the local architecture critic described it, “easily the most impressive new design in the city since the Barnes Foundation opened last year.” But that’s not the whole story. Within a mile radius, I could easily draw lines from several dying outposts of Philadelphia’s public school system to Penn’s newest trophy classroom.

That these two tiers in education (and in American life) are increasingly a fact doesn’t make it ok. Indeed far from it. But in at least one way, some viable, alternative paths to productive life and work have started to open up for everyone who is rapidly being left behind.

I’ve talked about the value of a liberal arts education that is widely available on this page before. But there’s no disputing its staggering expense, the difficulty that many graduates have securing a paying job after making the investment, or many employers’ complaints that their jobs are going unfilled because their applicants lack the necessary skills.

You know what I’m talking about.

More than likely, either these frustrations are yours or are being experienced by someone close to you—which is what has made the rise of “massive, open, on-line courses” (or MOOCs) so promising. Now, it looks like the MOOC approach to higher education is starting to realize its promise by offering students the highly tailored course work they need for the jobs that employers have been unable to fill.

Much of the impetus is coming from the employers themselves.

MOOC provider Udacity has started to offer free “niche certification programs” with on-line courses in areas like computer science and supply chain management they’ve developed with input from Google, AT&T and others, in what they’re calling the Open Education Alliance. According to a recent news article, each company in the Alliance has:

committed to build at least one class at a cost of about $250,000. In return, [contributors] will receive access to a talent pool guaranteed to have studied the skills the employer wants. . . .

MIT and MOOC partner edX are offering a similar, low cost (up to $700 for a “verified certificate”) alternative in collaboration with employers like United Parcel Service, Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble. While we’re waiting to see which pay model works the best, the wolves in the ivory towers have already started to growl.

Is this a “vocational” approach to higher education? You bet it is. Is there a loss to students in receiving a “narrowly focused education” like this? No question about it. But it is also a loss to have philosophy majors working at McDonalds and downsized management employees cleaning toilets–when they can find gainful employment at all.

It’s also unfortunate that my old schools (like Penn), and others like them, are doing so little to fulfill the nation’s education needs, as opposed to the needs of an increasingly small minority of students.

Today, we are wasting many of America’s best minds because access to higher education has more to do with financial resources than individual promise. These new MOOC certificate programs are not The Answer to this wider problem, but they may well be part of our way out of the totally unacceptable place that we find ourselves in today.

Fierce Generosity

September 22, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Focusing on what you stand to gain—like getting the next buck or increasing your influence—is the wrong path when it comes to sustaining your best work. A better way may be forming relationships through the generosity of your giving and the vulnerability of your asking.

Customers and clients can always smell your hunger (or desperation) when all you’re after is their business. They’d much rather share in an exchange with you that’s mutually satisfying—collaborating to solve a problem, finding just the right product to meet the need, while also learning who you are, why you do what you do, what makes you happy or keeps you up at night, and how they might help you in return.

It’s an exchange based on giving not wanting, asking not telling, a dynamic that presents opportunities to meet one another’s needs while you both stand on a relatively level playing field.

Pie-in-the-sky? I don’t think so.

In 2007, the band Radiohead deepened the relationship it already enjoyed with its fans by offering its In Rainbows disk for whatever you wanted to pay for it, or for nothing at all.

The point wasn’t making money on the disk or even breaking even, it was about things like the band’s gratitude for loyal listeners, their confidence in their music, trust in their fans, and drawing attention to political causes that were important to them. In the randomness of opportunities they opened here, maybe you downloaded the album for free, but were drawn to support a cause the band believed was important. Giving and asking multiplied as well as strengthened Radiohead’s ties to its audience. (Frontman Thom Yorke just happens to be in my hometown this week as part of the Atoms for Peace tour.)

The bounty that comes from helping without expectation of return is the subject of Adam Grant’s book, Give & Take, which came out earlier this year. The following is from a story about the Wharton professor in the New York Times last spring:

’I never get much done when I frame the 300 e-mails [that are asking for my help every day] as ‘answering e-mails,’ Grant told me. ‘I have to look at it as, ‘How is this task going to benefit the recipient?’ Where other people see hassle, he sees bargains, a little work for a lot of gain, including his own.

For Grant, giving as well as asking for help is the motivator that spurs greater productivity on both sides of every exchange.

Another case for work-based reciprocity is currently being made by Amanda Palmer.

Palmer is a singer and instrumentalist who once made music with a duo called the Dresden Dolls (in her words, “a cross between punk & cabaret”) and now fronts an ensemble called the Grand Theft Orchestra. I love her music, her ferocity when she’s delivering it, and her thoughtfulness about the communication channels she’s playing with, particularly when it comes to giving and asking.

By making powerful expressions of generosity and vulnerability, she has ripped through the membrane between herself and her fans, and they in turn have reciprocated by holding her up when she has asked them to.

One way her fans have said, “No, we thank you,” was by crowdfunding her current album. Crowdfunding has been a regular topic on this page, most recently a few months ago. Social media involves strangers as well as friends in your story, while crowdfunding gives them a stake in your quest.

Palmer had been abandoned by her record label, was giving her music away, and couldn’t afford to make another record. As she explained in a video interview (which Palmer starts with a gorgeous song that’s neither punk nor cabaret), she asked for $100,000 on Kickstarter and received $1.2M, giving nothing to her contributors in return but the joy of helping and the promise of more free music. A few months later, in a TED talk called “The Art of Asking,” she elaborated on why she thought she had received more contributions than anyone in the music business had ever received before from a crowdfunding platform.

It’s a gem.

Palmer analogized the vulnerability of asking for something you really need to “falling into an audience and trusting” that you’ll be caught—a type of fan connection that was once a staple of every punk rock concert. Trusting in the kindness of strangers, what Palmer calls “random closeness,” when she asks for a bed to sleep in or the use of a piano in a strange town, led her to put her entire career into the hands of her audience.

Once again, it’s not a one-for-one type of exchange. Palmer shares music and asks for whatever she needs to continue making it. “When we really see each other, we want to help each other,” she says.

This may seem like a young person’s game, but Palmer is 37.

Over the past couple of years, her giving and asking has brought her a million followers on Twitter, the ability to produce her own music, a TED talk, a Brainpickings’ interview, and more than 15 minutes of fame for her songs and ideas. As an artist, she knows that all you need is “a few people loving you up close,” even though she may never know their names or recognize their faces. Will these digital networks of trust and reciprocity be enough to support her and her work at 57, or 77?

Do the relationships that Palmer (and others like her) are building give us the outlines of a new paradigm for sustaining yourself and your loved ones while working at what you love?

Is this a way for us to return to greater productivity where we live and work?

Can enough of us ever trust again this much?

Oprah Winfrey, Confessor

January 15, 2013 By David Griesing 23 Comments

I wrote about Lance Armstrong in early October and later that same month for a couple of reasons that relate to the work we do.

When you make mistakes that affect your ability to continue working & your reputation, you need to “speak for yourself about what happened” if you hope to regain your productivity. First off, it’s looking in the mirror and owning your mistakes so that you have the chance to be trusted and have influence again.

Coming to this acceptance also involves seeking the counsel of wise people around you—if you’re fortunate enough to have them. It’s only after “the owning” and “the reflecting” that you tell those you’ve affected what you did, why you did it, what you’ve learned, and how you’re going to do things differently in the future.

Each step hard, but necessary.

While its taken 3 months (or at least as many years since the allegations against him started to build), on Thursday Armstrong is promising to come clean to Oprah Winfrey. In an intimate television kind of way, her backstory is joining with his. Afterwards, we’ll draw our own conclusions.

We care about all of this because we need role models in our work—people to show us how—and for many of us, Armstrong fit that bill. Disciplined. Motivated. Triumphing over hardship. We were fortified by his example.

We also care about this because we know that the moral training we have today often comes from such “teachable moments” (as the president once reminded us)—that is, as long as we take them.

So we’ve followed the arc of Lance’s story. It was hard to absorb the allegations about a doping conspiracy he masterminded, to see him fired as the spokesman for products we buy, and finally to watch him have to break ties with his LiveStrong foundation. We were saddened by his apparent betrayal and surprised by his retreat into silence. Was it embarrassment? Was it shame?

In recent weeks, there have been some odd, Armstrong-initiated pop-ups. A surreal picture of him reclining in his den below his victory jerseys with the remark “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” Rumors that he was figuring out what he had to do to get back into the competitive sporting circuit, and how admissions he might make would impact the lawsuits & investigations still swirling around him.

The picture and its tag-line suggested denial. The rumors suggested the machinations of lawyers and media advisors instead of soul-seekers.

We’ll see.

Because what he’s looking for from Oprah is not merely a stage that’s big enough for him and his story, but also for a confessor who will help to change our perception of him. Facilitate our forgiveness. Lance Armstrong’s goes to Oprah’s mountaintop in order to be healed in our eyes.

When our turns come it won’t be about teams of advisors or media blitz, and maybe not even about a catch in the throat when you get to the hard parts. Because it’s not about orchestration. It’s just about telling the truth and being genuinely sorry.

Otherwise you shouldn’t bother.

Flourishing in Every Job

Edifice Complex

Oprah Winfrey, Confessor

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