Re-Bundling Protections and Benefits Around Our Work

May 27, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Not so long ago, jobs came with a bundle of economic advantages beyond a paycheck. Those advantages included health insurance for you and your family and a pension or post-retirement paycheck based on your years with your employer and how much you’d been paid.

While already a vestige of days past, my job at a municipally-owned utility a little over a decade ago came with family health benefits, a matching 401(k) plan, a pension that vested after 5 years of employment, and days off for a raft of holidays including Flag Day.

That job also included additional economic benefits that I didn’t appreciate enough at the time such as the creditworthiness of my regular salary, continuous training to bolster old skills and develop new ones, regular contributions to Social Security for additional retirement security, unemployment compensation if I ever lost my job, and the stability and continuing enrichment of that job for as long as I had it.

Today, in many of our full-time jobs and nearly all of our part-time ones, between some and all of this bundle of protections and benefits has disappeared.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this unbundling.

Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at Yale calls it a shift of economic risk in his new book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream. Hacker argues that the loss of this financial cushion around our work tests our economic resilience whenever unexpected burdens arise.

In the 50 years following the Great Depression, both employers and the government insulated workers from many of the economic risks they might confront when they weren’t working. By contrast, from the 1980s and continuing through today, there has been:

a massive transfer of risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as the government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families. This shift has fundamentally reshaped Americans’ relationships with their government, their employers and each other. And it has altered and sometimes dashed the most fundamental expectations associated with the American Dream: a stable middleclass income, an affordable place to live, a guaranteed pension, good health insurance coverage, greater economic security for one’s kids.

As a result of this sea change, the American worker is increasingly on his or her own when confronting whatever comes next, like sudden illness or loss of a job.

Writing this week in the New York Times, Hacker talked about how this “risk shift” is impacting the run-up to the next presidential election, particularly the fact that so many Americans feel insecure.

They may be doing well at the moment, but they fear that, however high they are on the economic ladder, a single bad step or bad event could cause them to slip. A booming economy hasn’t quieted these concerns, because insecurity remains a huge and growing problem in ways that voters and candidates instinctively get, but the sunny job numbers largely hide.

Of course, this insecurity affects not only workers but also the ability of their families, their communities and the country as a whole to flourish—an impact that I discussed a few weeks ago in the post “The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken.”

As more of us are “on our own” shouldering the economic risks that employers and the government once protected us from, it has become an increasingly important priority to re-bundle new versions of the benefits and protections that have been lost around working in America.

The leading edge of these rebundling efforts are perhaps most visible when it comes to the gig-economy workers who are striving to build a stable and dependable “living” out of a series of independent-contractor jobs both large and small.

As I argued last week, technological advances involving blockchain, digital currencies, on-line exchanges and markets are promising to make it possible for independent workers to preserve existing income streams while gaining new (and unexpected) ones. The needs of this growing number of gig-economy workers are stimulating efforts to re-bundle some of those traditional insulators around their work. Fortunately, these same innovations will also help to meet the needs of every insecure worker who is trying to get by in a job with few, if any, of the traditional benefits and protections.

1. Getting Paid for Jobs Both Big and Small

One of the most tantalizing possibilities of a future enabled by blockchain and digital currencies is that we could all get paid for time and effort we currently give away for free. Last week I mentioned a few of them, like providing traffic information to news outlets about roads we are already driving on at rush hour or being paid by a social media platform whenever we encourage the conversation there. I also mentioned the current backlash from the banking industry to the rise of on-line exchanges that will facilitate these payments. Part of it is an old guy-new guy turf war.

Over the past week, I’ve come upon some additional information about the hurdle that stands in the way of more seamless payments for a succession of small and big jobs. David Galbraith is a partner at Anthemis, a company seeking creative opportunities between the start-ups and financial institutions that are dedicated to reinventing financial services for the digital marketplace. In a recent interview, Galbraith remarked on the fundamental differences between on-line platforms that cater to consumers in America and their counterpart platforms in China.

In America, digital platforms like Google and Facebook are supported by advertising revenues while in China a platform’s revenue streams come directly from consumers when they buy something they’ve seen there. In other words, the payments process in China is simplified by removing advertising from the business model. Another difference is that Chinese consumers pay for consumer goods with their bank account balances, while American platforms interpose financial intermediaries like PayPal or bank-owned credit card companies that stand between the tech platforms and consumers. As Galbraith observes, the transactions costs are lower in China, “friction is taken out of the system,” and purchases are completed in a “fundamentally more fluid fashion” on the smartphones of Chinese consumers without prompting by a blizzard of ads.

When the inefficiencies imposed by banks and an advertising-based model are removed from the digital “payments system” in America, payments to gig economy workers for big and small increments of work will also be facilitated—making these new jobs more robust. At the most basic level, these changes in how we get paid will support the ways that many of us are working now and even more of us will be working tomorrow.

2. Anxiety About Retirement

When it comes to re-bundling benefits and protections around workers, none may be more significant than retirement security.

A recent article called “Why Work Has Failed Us: Because No One Can Afford to Retire Anymore” provides statistics that indicate how much the “shift in risk” from pensions to “figure out your own retirement” has impacted American workers:

66% of millennials have nothing saved for retirement. Among the working-age families that have retirement savings, the median balance is $5,000, according to the most recent data available from the Economic Policy Institute. For families approaching retirement, the median savings is $21,000–after taxes, on its own, enough to last a couple a little more than a year living at the federal poverty line.

At the same time, the enormity of these unfunded liabilities—how will all of these people with limited retirement savings support themselves?—presents a corresponding opportunity for entrepreneurs who want to help workers regain at least some of their retirement-related security. In the same interview where he discussed digital payment innovations, David Galbraith also considered the enormity of the opportunity for the new fin-tech companies that are trying to meet this need.

[R]etirement is the biggest [risk] shift anyone can possibly imagine. To put a number on it — the committed pension liability shortfalls in developing nations are 450 trillion dollars. That’s half a quadrillion dollars. So when people talk about billion dollar market opportunities — this is a half a quadrillion dollar shift in money.

Of course, no one has found a feasible way to fill the deficit for those who have nothing to retire on today, but there is opportunity in providing expertise to workers who have at least some retirement savings.

Most of us don’t know how to take what we have today and marshal it to cover uncertainties like how much income we’ll need to live after we retire, how long we’re likely to live, what Social Security elections we should make, and how much medical care we’ll need along the way. This is where a new company like Kindur comes in, according to Galbraith.

Kindur helps workers create retirement portfolios that minimize their tax burdens while ensuring that the money they do have for retirement lasts as long as possible. Unlike investment advisors who charge commissions to maximize your savings, Kindur utilizes its on-line platform and need assessment programming to help individuals design their future income. There has never been a web-based service like this before. As the company’s tagline says: “It’s like fuel efficiency for your retirement.”

Kindur isn’t the only fin-tech company that is aiming to provide more comfort (or bundling) around worker retirement. This article from the New York Times last December discusses some of the others.

For a rising gig-economy workforce and the traditional workers who are seeking supplemental income and greater autonomy in the gig economy, the empowerment of acting in more entrepreneurial ways is easily undermined by retirement anxieties. Today, both traditional advocates and new companies are finding other ways to calm those anxieties too.

3. Additional Protections and Benefits for Today’s Workforce

With the exception of supporting teachers in several high-profile confrontations with school districts and state funders recently, labor unions’ ability to protect workers in “union shops” seem to have lost much of their influence over economic decision-makers. They’ve also had a spotty record protecting their members’ bundled benefits and protections over the past 35 years. But while continuing to be the obvious champions for workers pitted against corporate profit taking, as the ways we work evolve, organized labor has other important roles to play in benefiting its changing membership.

Workers no longer stay in one locality with one employer for the course of their careers like they once did. Moreover, the average worker today takes on several different kinds of jobs. In this new world of work, services to meet these realities are desperately needed by the rank-and-file.

For example, unions could help their memberships “vote with their feet” when unbundled jobs no longer support them while providing assistance with “reskilling” when needed, help in finding new work, and housing in the new communities. Moreover, if unions were already providing these services in a tight labor market like we have today, their negotiating power with employers who are reluctant to lose workers would be enhanced significantly.

As Nicholas Colin writes in his thoughtful new book about the future of work called Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age:

[I]t’s time we imagine unions that support workers as they switch jobs, unions that would provide their members with all of the resources necessary to find inspiration (“What should I do?”), train (“How can I acquire new skills?”), find a new employer (“When do I start?”), relocate (“I need an affordable house close to my new workplace”).

Labor unions should be key contributors to a re-bundled workforce in traditional companies as well as in the new gig-economy as free-lancers, for example, unionize to protect themselves.

The tremendous need among workers that has been created by the unbundling of jobs has also spelled opportunity for new service providers beyond the need for a more secure retirement. Take a company like Portify that aims to help independent workers in the gig economy who are unable to obtain affordable credit without “a regular salary” and an employment contract.

Portify is currently in the beta-phase of providing financing to independent workers whose only source today is a payday loan charging an exorbitant interest rate. With access to information about its customers’ cash flows and bank accounts, Portify is able to understand what its customers can afford to borrow and to make loans at a substantially lower rate than payday lenders. By doing so, it will provide gig economy workers with the ability to finance growth opportunities so that a succession of smaller jobs can eventually add up to a sustainable and profitable business.

Another promising start-up is Dublin-based Trezeo, which is “an income-smoothing service” for self-employed people. The company calculates its clients’ average weekly income. If that income dips because a client takes a day off or someone doesn’t pay them for their work, Trezeo “tops them up to” their average income with the understanding that it will be paid back when the client is paid again. A service like Trezeo’s allows workers to maintain a steady quality of life–some of that bundling again–despite the ups and downs of gig-economy work.

Finally, Zego is a new company that provides gig economy workers with flexible insurance. For example, if you occasionally drive for Uber, you may not earn enough to afford the additional monthly or annual car insurance coverage that you should have.

To meet this problem, Zego sells insurance by the hour. For drivers, it utilizes an app to collect data about how often they are working and where they are driving that helps it to assess their insurance risks and issue coverage more affordably. Moreover, without a product like Zego’s, independent workers could be put out of business by a single workplace loss that they are unable to cover. A start-up company like this bundles these workers in greater risk protections than were available before.

+ + +

The upside of entrepreneurial, gig-economy jobs is that they promise greater autonomy, flexibility and self-fulfillment, but these work rewards can never be realized when the jobs themselves are laced with insecurity.

The bundling of benefits and protections around these new jobs (and their re-bundling around traditional jobs) promises to reduce more of that insecurity for millions of workers.

Instead of giving up in the face of growing income inequality and job-killing automation, there are thinkers, writers and entrepreneurs who are more hopeful about the future of work because they acknowledge their own and other people’s agency to build a future where workers, their families and communities can flourish again.

Slowly but surely, that hopeful future is being built by the re-bundlers of work today.

This post was adapted from my May 26, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

An Enabling Perspective for Our Wounded World

April 7, 2019 By David Griesing 2 Comments

What is most exceptional about Barry Lopez is his perspective and how he manages to involve us in it.

The remarkable prologue to his new book “Horizons,” finds him in the last place we expect to find him. For an author who has brought us with him to the most remote corners on earth—the iron mines of Aboriginal Australia, the unfathomable expanses of Antarctica, an archeological site on Skraeling Island, Banda Aceh after the tsunami, Cape Foulweather’s “ghosted landscape”—Lopez is reclining on a beach chair at a Hawaiian resort, playing with his grandson in the shallow waves, swimming off shore to show him the sunken battleship Arizona, remembering an odd encounter with John Steinbeck when he too was young and thinking about writing, watching “the pool water shatter into translucent gems” after a tourist’s spontaneous, arcing dive. They’re the reveries of a summer day. And then this, as he looks out from the dreamlike circle of his life and family:

I want to wish each stranger I see in the chairs and lounges around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.

Until now, Barry Lopez’ most acclaimed book was “Arctic Dreams.” It is part travelogue and part meditation on the fragility and resilience of a particular landscape, along with its wildlife and people. Since it came out in 1986, he has written hundreds of articles, along with fiction and essays, but “Horizons” is “Arctic Dream’s” non-fiction companion and successor. It took him more than 30 years to recast what he had to say back then in the face of the profound impacts humanity has had on the earth in those ensuing years.

Robert MacFarlane remarked recently about the strangeness of calling what Lopez does in both of these books non-fiction, thereby defining them by “their negative and restricting relation to fiction.” Lopez breaks open the possibilities of non-fiction for me in the ways that he does for MacFarlane: with often gorgeous prose that is “stylistic adventure,” “ethical address,” and “secular spirituality” where land, wildlife and the traditional knowledge of ancient people are “tutelary presences.” Lopez is the medium that gives them voice when we can’t hear them for ourselves.

In his own writing, MacFarlane lets us feel the land, its wildlife and people too, using “the particular words” that conjure their essences and interactions most evocatively in an age when we’re losing “the language” that we once used to talk about them and therefore “the descriptions” that helped us to connect more deeply to the world around us. Out of MacFarlane’s concern about the loss of these words and memories over the same 30 years, he sees Barry Lopez’ own “life journey” as one “from hope to doubt.”

What I found most fascinating about “Horizon” are the contours of Lopez’ doubt today and how he involves us in the only outcome that seems possible given the uncertainties.

How can you warn us on our lounge chairs without disabling, through a sense of hopelessness, those you are trying so hard to engage?

1. Thirty Years Ago – 1986

The Lopez of “Arctic Dreams,” and much of what he recalls about his observations since, come from his being a fieldworker, meaning that his approach to the places he has visited are those of “attention and interpretation.” This is what MacFarlane has to say about Lopez’ well-honed conjuring tricks in his review of “Horizon”:

In one of the few even faintly comic moments in the book, Lopez recounts how the Inuit hunters refer to him as naajavaarsuk, the ivory gull, a species distinguished by its habit of “standing on the perimeter of the action, darting in to snatch something when there’s an opening”. One might add – though Lopez does not – that he is also an isumataq, a storyteller who “creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself”. The achievement of Lopez’s work has always been ontological before it is political; a “redreaming”, to use his verb, of the possibilities of human life.

Lopez always seems to have believed that if he describes what he’s experienced well enough, his readers and listeners can experience it too, trusting them to draw their own conclusions and to decide on how they’ll respond. In other words, Lopez invites a state of mind where decision-making becomes possible.

The last time I wrote about Lopez here, he talked about one way that he’s thought about it.

I gave a talk once at the Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island, and I asked the man who was my host, what is it that Emerson and all of these people did on a Sunday afternoon at the Athenaeum? Did they talk about politics, or did they talk about science, or did they talk about sports? What was it that made these talks so much a part of cultural memory for us? And he said they just elevated — they brought the level of the conversation up. And I reflected on that and thought, well, that’s what I want [to do].

On his own page, Lopez describes the conversation partners he’s after in unusually intimate terms: my “family, friends, mentors, professional colleagues—to whom I feel most beholden.” They are “people with whom I imagine I share a common fate.” For them, as he elaborates in “Horizon”: “You feel while you are witnessing such things that you must carry some of this home, that what you’ve found are not your things but our things.” It’s deeply personal sharing–like you’d do around a campfire–while reimagining the possibilities that are ahead of you together.

As the younger man of “Arctic Dreams,” Lopez was concerned about the environmental destruction and loss of habitat that he saw on his travels but challenged those who feared extinction was inevitable, believing that we had enough courage to reverse our course, even if our actions might not bear fruit in our lifetimes. Some of it may have been trusting too much that the conversation he had elevated would spur all those others to follow through. As he writes in “Horizon”:

Looking back, I see that this ideal—to imagine myself in service to the reader—had me balanced on the edge of self-delusion. But it was at the time my way of working. It didn’t occur to me that taking life [my role?] so seriously might cause a loss of perspective. How else, I would ask, could you take it?

The long road that Lopez took to “Horizon” involved going back to many of the places he had visited over the years to see what he had missed and to discover how the hope of “Arctic Dreams” could evolve into something sharper, with greater urgency and far less certainty.

2. Today

Lopez talked about this 30-year journey at the Free Library here on Tuesday, and during the hour and a half that he filled with his stories, I tried to track the emotions underneath them and how they have changed his role as an observer, interpreter and catalyst for those who are listening.

At the Free Library of Philadelphia on Tuesday night

I didn’t think that I’d ever get the chance.

As recently as a year ago, I’d heard that Lopez was gravely ill with a particularly aggressive cancer so I never thought I’d see him read from his work or sit in the same room with him. In addition to being something of a miracle, his appearance here this week was also a statement about his own resilience, the personification of survival in the face of his body’s self-destructiveness. He never talked about his illness, but his message was more intertwined with his own survival now and you could feel it.

Lopez is a tough old bird who’s been a relentless wanderer, a describer of all the shades of purple that the light reveals in a remote canyon, a professional diver, a chronicler of “the shock wave” of the Middle East, and the pilgrim who made his Pashtun guides take him to the empty niches at Bamyan where monumental statues of the Buddha carved from the living rock 1600 years ago had been blasted into oblivion by the Taliban–why?–because their voids called out to him. Voids like this are far more fixed in his vision today than they were 30 years ago.

It’s why MacFarlane describes “Horizon” as “a deeply wounded book” about “the throttled Earth.” Lopez seems less certain that he can reach the tourists in their lounge chairs around the pool and more reliant on networks of wisdom that still includes his “family, friends, mentors and professional colleagues” but now depends at least as much on the wisdom of traditional cultures that have found ways to survive in the face of war, environmental destruction and natural disaster. Unlike citizens of the developed world who act like children looking for heroes to save them, for thousands of years adults who know how to make decisions to care for everyone and ensure that no one gets left behind have guided “heroic communities” of indigenous people across the world. Today, Lopez tries to counter his doubts by imagining networks comprised of all the different communities that depend on adults with the knowledge to survive so that we can claim our uncertain future together.

When you face your own death and the death of the world you have lovingly observed and interpreted, there is far greater urgency in your message. From MacFarlane again:

The event horizon of climate change is swiftly narrowing its noose. Lopez’s writing throughout this book is pulled taut between his need to register the extreme urgency of the environmental crisis, and his long-held belief in time, patience and the careful observation of other cultures as the basis for a fix: “As time grows short, [writes Lopez,] the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative.’

At the Free Library, Lopez talked repeatedly about the centuries of practical wisdom that enable traditional societies to repair themselves, to “go on,” whatever knocks them down. Instead of our Western view of progress—the confidence that things will always get better—he counters that the health of the world is following a very different path and that our only hope rests with those who already have (or are willing to nurture) the ability to start over again, to survive, even when they find themselves in the darkest places.

As I listened I found myself wondering: when is the last time that anyone I know had to figure out a way to survive from one day to the next?

And as with MacFarlane’s lost “words” and “descriptions of nature”: how much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly “throttled” world?

There were glimmers of anger, impatience and disgust in Lopez’ uncertainty on Tuesday night, but only briefly and they quickly disappeared behind his refusal to despair. In a recent interview, Lopez acknowledged these judgmental tendencies when he talked about why it took him so long to follow up on “Arctic Dreams”:

I think I had a greater tendency when I was younger to judge, to maintain states of anger. I had impatience. And I had to bleed all that off before I wrote ‘Horizon.’

In their place, this new book and his coming out to talk about it is more like one of the prophet Jeremiah’s Old Testament lamentations. Particularly in his fifth lamentation, Jeremiah tells of how the people of God lived through the destruction of Jerusalem but in the end stubbornly refuse to abandon their hope despite a deep uncertainty about their deliverance.

Lopez sounded like an Old Testament prophet when he said of himself a couple of years ago: “It is necessary to have people out on the edge calling back to us about what’s coming.”

Like others who have cried out to be heard from the wilderness, his perspective today is forged by his own survival, his willingness to look at the voids that chronicle our race towards destruction, his urgent recognition that we have limited time to turn the tide, and his refusal to despair because so many of those he has encountered as he’s wandered this earth have also found dignified ways to survive.

Without hectoring or drama, the prophetic perspective in Lopez’ current stories invites us to re-imagine the future in ways that—quite frankly–seem impossible for us to ignore.

This post is adapted from my April 7, 2019 Newsletter. You can subscribe here and receive it in you inbox every Sunday morning

New Starting Blocks for the Future of Work

March 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a challenging future rushes towards us, I often wonder whether our democratic values will continue to provide a sound enough foundation for our lives and work.

In many ways, this “white-water world” is already here. As framed by John Seely Brown in a post last summer, it confronts us with knowledge that’s simply “too big to know” and a globe-spanning web of interconnections that seems to constantly alter what’s in front of us, like the shifting views of a kaleidoscope.

It’s a brave new world that:

– makes a fool out of the concept of mastery in all areas except our ability–or inability–to navigate [its] turbulent waters successfully;

– requires that we work in more playful and less pre-determined ways in an effort to keep up with the pace of change and harness it for a good purpose;

– demands workplaces where the process of learning allows the tinkerer in all of us “to feel safe” from getting it wrong until we begin to get it right;

– calls on us to treat technology as a toolbox for serving human needs as opposed to the needs of states and corporations alone; and finally,

– requires us to set aside time for reflection “outside of the flux” so that we can consider the right and wrong of where we’re headed, commit to what we value, and return to declare those values in the rough and tumble of our work tomorrow.

In the face of these demands, the most straightforward question is whether we will be able to safeguard our personal wellbeing and continue to enjoy a prosperous way of life. Unfortunately, neither of these objectives seems as readily attainable as they once did.

When our democratic values (such as freedom and championing individual rights) no longer ensure our wellbeing and prosperity, those values get questioned and eventually challenged in our politics.

Last week, I wrote here about the dangerous risks—like addiction and behavioral modification—that our kids and others confront by spending too much screen time playing on-line games like Fortnite. Despite a crescendo of anecdotal evidence about the harms to boys in particular, the freedom-loving (and endlessly distracted) West seems stymied when it comes to deciding what to do about it. On the other hand, China easily moved from identifying the harm to its collective wellbeing to implementing time restrictions on the amount of on-line play. It was the Great Firewall’s ability to intervene quickly that prompted one observer to wonder how those of us in the so-called “first world” will respond to “the spectacle of a civilisation founded [like China’s] on a very different package of values — but one that can legitimately claim to promote human flourishing more vigorously than their own”?

Meanwhile, in a Wall Street Journal essay last weekend, its authors documented the ability of authoritarian countries with capitalist economies to raise the level of prosperity enjoyed by their citizens in recent years. Not so long ago, the allure of West to the “second” and “third worlds” was that prosperity seemed to go hand-in-hand with democratic values and institutions. That conclusion is far less clear today. With rising prosperity in authoritarian nations like China and Vietnam—and the likelihood that there will soon be far more prosperous citizens in these countries than outside of them—the authors fretted that:

It isn’t clear how well democracy, without every material advantage on its side, will fare in the competition [between our very different value systems.]

With growing uncertainty about whether Western values and institutions can produce sufficient benefits for its citizens, and with “the white-water world” where we live and work challenging our navigational skills, it seems a good time to return to some questions that we’ve chewed on here before about “how we can best get ready for the challenges ahead of us.”

Can the ways that we educate our kids (and retrain ourselves) enable us to proclaim our humanity, secure our self-worth, and continue to find a valued place for ourselves in the increasingly complex world of work?

Can championing new teaching methods strengthen democratic values and deliver more of their promise to us in terms of wellbeing and prosperity than it seems we can count on today?

Are new and different classrooms the keys to our futures?

1. You Treasure What You Measure

Until this week, I never considered that widely administered education tests would provide any of these answers—but I probably should have—because in a very real way, we treasure the aptitudes and skills, indeed everything that we take the time to measure. Gross national product, budget and trade deficits, unemployment rates, the 1% versus everyone else: what is most important to us is endlessly calculated, publicized and analyzed. We also value these measures because they help us decide what to do next, like stimulating the economy, cutting government programs, or implementing trade restrictions. Measures influence actions.

It’s much the same with the measures we obtain from the educational tests that we administer, and in this regard, no test today is more influential than the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA. PISA was first given in 2000 in 32 countries, the first time that national education systems were evaluated and could be compared with one another. The test measured 15-year-olds scholastic performance in mathematics, science and reading. No doubt you’ve heard some of the results, including the United States’ disappointing placement in the middle of the international pack. The test is given every three years and in 2018, 79 countries and economies participated in the testing and data collection.

According to an article in on-line business journal Quartz this week, “the results…are studied by educators the way soccer fans obsess over the World Cup draw.”

No one thinks more about the power of the PISA test, the information that it generates, and what additional feats it might accomplish than Andreas Schleicher, a German data scientist who heads the education division of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which administers PISA worldwide.

Schleicher downplays the role that the PISA has played in shaming low performing countries, preferring the test’s role in mobilizing national leaders to care as much about teaching and learning as they do about economic measures like unemployment rates and workplace productivity. At the most basic level, PISA data has supported a range of conclusions, including that class size seems largely irrelevant to the learning experience and that what matters most in the classroom is “the quality of teachers, who need to be intellectually challenged, trusted, and have room for professional growth.”

Schleicher also views the PISA as a tool for liberating the world’s educational systems from their single-minded focus on subjects like science, reading and math and towards the kinds of “complex, interdisciplinary skills and mindsets” that are necessary for success in the future of work. We are afraid that human jobs will be automated but we are still teaching people to think like machines. “What we know is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach, and maybe easy to test, are precisely the kinds of things that are easy to digitize and to automate,” Schleicher says.

To help steer global education out of this rut, he has pushed for the design and administration of new, optional tests that complement the PISA. Change the parameters of the test, change the skills that are measured, and maybe the world’s education-based priorities will change too. Says Schleicher: “[t]he advent of AI [or artificial intelligence] should push us to think harder [about] what makes us human” and lead us to teach to those qualities, adding that if we are not careful, the world’s nations will be continue to educate “second-class robots and not first-class humans.”

Schleicher had this future-oriented focus years before the PISA was initially administered.

In 1997, Schleicher convened a group of representatives from OECD countries, not to discuss what could be tested, but what should be tested. The idea was to move beyond thinking about education as the driver of purely economic outcomes. In addition to wanting a country’s education system to provide a ready workforce, they also wondered whether they could nurture young people to help to make their societies more cohesive and democratic while reducing unfairness and inequality. According to Quartz:

The group identified three areas to explore: relational, or how we get along with others; self, how we regulate our emotions and motivate ourselves, and content, what schools need to teach.

Instead of simply enabling students to respond to the demands of a challenging world, Schleicher and others in his group wanted national testing to encourage the kinds of skill building that would enable young people to change the world they’d be entering for the better.

Towards this end, Schleicher’s team began to develop assessments for independent thinking and the kinds of personal skills that contribute to it. The technology around test administration enabled the testers to see how students solved problems in real time, not simply whether they get them right or wrong. They gathered and shared data that enabled national education systems to “help students learn better and teachers teach better and schools to become more effective.” Assessments of the skill sets around independent thinking encouraged countries to begin to see new possibilities and want to change how students learn in their classrooms. “If you don’t have a north star [like this], perhaps you limit your vision,” he says.

For the past twenty years, Schleicher’s north stars have also included students’ quest to find meaning in what they are doing and to exercise their agency in determining what and how they learn. He is convinced that people have the “capacity to imagine and build things of intrinsic positive worth.” We have skills that robots cannot replace, like managing between black and white, integrating knowledge, and applying knowledge in unique situations. All of those skills can be tested (and encouraged), along with the skill that is most unique about human beings, namely:

our capacity to take responsibility, to mobilize our cognitive and social and emotional resources to do something that is of benefit to society.

What Schleicher and his testing visionaries began to imagine in 1997 have been gradually introduced as optional tests that focus on problem-solving, collaborative problem-solving, and most recently, so-called “global competencies” like open-mindedness and the desire to improve the world. In 2021, another optional test will assess flexibility in thinking and habits of creativity, like being inquisitive and persistent.

One knowledgeable observer of these initiatives, Douglas Archibald, credits Schleicher with “dramatically elevating” the discussion about the future of education. “There is no one else bringing together people in charge of these educational systems to seriously think about how their systems [can be] future proofed,” says Archibald. But he and others also see a hard road ahead for Schleicher, with plenty of resistance from within the global education community.

Some claim that he is asking more from a test than he should. Others claim his emphasis is fostering an over-reliance on testing over other priorities. Regarding the “global competencies” assessment for example, 40 of the 79 participating countries opted not to administer it. But Schleicher, much like visionaries in other fields, remains undaunted. Nearly half of the countries are exercising their option to assess “global competencies” and even more are administering the other optional tests that Schleicher has helped develop. Maybe educators are slowly becoming convinced that the threat to human work in a white-water world is too serious to be ignored any longer.

A view from Kenneth Robinson’s presentation: “Changing Education Paradigms”

While Schleicher and his allies are in the vanguard of those who are using a test to prompt a revolution in education, they are hardly the only ones to challenge a teaching model that, for far too long, has only sought to produce a dependable, efficient and easily replaceable workforce. The slide above is from Sir Kenneth Robinson’s much-heralded (and well-worth your taking a look at) 2010 video called “Changing Education Paradigms.” In it, he also champions teaching that enables uniquely human contributions that no machine can ever replace.

Schleicher, Robinson and others envision education systems that prepare young people (or re-engineer older ones) for a complex and ever shifting world where no one has to be overwhelmed by the glut of information or the dynamics of shifting networks but can learn how to navigate today’s challenges productively. They highlight and, by doing so, champion teaching methods that help to prepare all of us for jobs that provide meaning and a sense of wellbeing while amplifying and valuing our uniquely human contributions.

Schleicher is also helping to modify our behavior by championing skills like curiosity about others and empathy that can make us more engaged members of our communities and commit us to improving them. Assessing these skills in national education tests says both loudly and clearly that these skills are important for human flourishing too. Indeed, this may be Schleicher’s and OECD’s most significant contribution. Their international testing is encouraging the skills and changes in behavior that can build better societies, whether they are based on the democratic values of the West or the more collective and less individual ones of the East.

That is no small thing. No small thing at all.

This post is adapted from my March 10, 2019 newsletter.

How Can We Hold Our Common Ground?

February 17, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Our relationships at work are harmed when we disagree with others and experience their convictions as an assault on what we believe is right and true.

Without basic trust—along with at least some beliefs and convictions that we hold in common—it becomes almost impossible to move forward with our co-workers productively, but:

– How can I be confident in somebody’s judgments at work when their judgments in politics are so offensive?

– How could I ever collaborate with, even be friends with, somebody I disagree with so fundamentally?

– If, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, the most productive meetings and collaborations are comprised of people with divergent opinions who are both willing and able to declare them, then how can the right people ever come together and accomplish anything worthwhile when (deep down) they distrust and often loathe what those who disagree with them stand for?

– What must members of a group share with one another in order to disagree deeply yet not fall into disarray while doing so?

– How can those who fall on different sides of the most divisive issues still be friends, collaborators, co-workers, or citizens who remain able to fight for the same future together?

– How small can their common ground be and still be enough?

These are the questions that two prominent teachers, who happen to stand on opposite ends of the political divide, have been asking when they come together.

A Conversation with Cornel West and Robert George on Friendship and Faith Across Political Differences – February 8, 2019

And it wasn’t just this joint appearance. Cornel West and Robert George have been on a road show talking about their friendship, their profound differences, and their common ground for several years now.

I overheard one of their conversations for the first time in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year. In it, they made a radical suggestion. In order to gain an ethical perspective on any issue, try to imagine (and then follow through on) whatever Martin Luther King would have done under the same circumstances. I was moved enough by it that it became the subject of a newsletter I called “Trying on a Hero’s Perspective.”

Well they were at it again at Duke a couple of Fridays ago, and a video of their hour-long talk (with another half-hour of follow-up questions) came on-line last week. If you’re interested in spending a fascinating hour, you can safely start the recording at the half hour-mark following their voluminous greetings—but make sure and stay tuned through the questions at the end.

I hope the following summary of their remarks peaks your interest in listening to what West and George actually said that night as they gestured towards the “thin” foundation of commonality we all share and need to preserve; the kind of person you’ll need to be in order to champion it; and some additional ways that you can go about doing so.

1. A Thin Foundation of Commonality

At the beginning of their conversation, George wonders:

How thin a basic set of shared values can you have and still share enough to have a relationship where you can disagree and still have a friendship?

Of course, his first answer was reflected in his longstanding friendship with Cornel West.

George then reminds us that America never became a nation because we had the same ethnicity or religion but because we shared “a political set of values,” as both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King reminded us during two of the most divisive periods in our history. George believes that we do share enough “to flourish in our pluralism,” but that there are serious dangers too, and we are seeing many of the warning signs today. We always “wrap emotions around our convictions to get things done”—and wouldn’t accomplish anything if we didn’t—but when those emotions are “wrapped too tightly” we become dogmatic, identifying too closely with our beliefs. We experience any challenge to our convictions “as a personal assault” which separates us from one another while creating hostility. Because of these tendencies, every pluralistic society rests on very thin ice.

It is not just America. George talks about the Hutus and Tutsis living together peacefully in Rwanda for many years until leaders enflamed local rivalries and friendly co-existence devolved into mass murder. George has a Syrian parent and visited his family’s home village in Syria a decade ago when Christians and Muslims were living and working together peacefully until it too turned into “a genocidal nightmare.” He reminds us that in democracies in particular, “civic friendship is very fragile,” and that whenever that friendship is lost, democracy tends to be replaced by tyranny.

Cornel West picked up the theme by rejecting both Plato’s and Dostoevsky’s views on society in favor of a vision that was championed by America’s Founding Fathers. Plato argued that the public was too emotional and ignorant to sustain a more inclusive form of governance, while Dostoevsky was convinced that most individuals don’t want to be free, preferring “pied pipers” to lead them and “magic” to amuse them. Instead, America’s founders believed that citizens could rise to the occasion and govern themselves because of basic principles they shared, memorializing this common ground in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine also knew that “If you don’t renew the democratic possibilities, you are going to lose them.”

In their conversation at Duke, neither George nor West describe the foundation that needs continuous renewal beyond their reference to America’s founding, but they do address key aspects of it elsewhere. “Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression-A Statement by Robert P. George and Cornel West” is a statement of principles which they published (and asked other concerned Americans to sign onto) in March of 2017. It is a key part of their joint effort to renew our democratic possibilities so that there continues to be “enough” of a foundation to support our civic friendship. This is a link if you wish to add your signature to it. (Please drop me a line if you do!) And here is their statement in full:

The pursuit of knowledge and the maintenance of a free and democratic society require the cultivation and practice of the virtues of intellectual humility, openness of mind, and, above all, love of truth. These virtues will manifest themselves and be strengthened by one’s willingness to listen attentively and respectfully to intelligent people who challenge one’s beliefs and who represent causes one disagrees with and points of view one does not share.

That’s why all of us should seek respectfully to engage with people who challenge our views. And we should oppose efforts to silence those with whom we disagree—“especially on college and university campuses. As John Stuart Mill taught, a recognition of the possibility that we may be in error is a good reason to listen to and honestly consider—and not merely to tolerate grudgingly—points of view that we do not share, and even perspectives that we find shocking or scandalous. What’s more, as Mill noted, even if one happens to be right about this or that disputed matter, seriously and respectfully engaging people who disagree will deepen one’s understanding of the truth and sharpen one’s ability to defend it.

None of us is infallible. Whether you are a person of the left, the right, or the center, there are reasonable people of goodwill who do not share your fundamental convictions. This does not mean that all opinions are equally valid or that all speakers are equally worth listening to. It certainly does not mean that there is no truth to be discovered. Nor does it mean that you are necessarily wrong. But they are not necessarily wrong either. So someone who has not fallen into the idolatry of worshiping his or her own opinions and loving them above truth itself will want to listen to people who see things differently in order to learn what considerations—evidence, reasons, arguments—led them to a place different from where one happens, at least for now, to find oneself.

All of us should be willing—even eager—to engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence, and making arguments. The more important the subject under discussion, the more willing we should be to listen and engage—especially if the person with whom we are in conversation will challenge our deeply held—even our most cherished and identity-forming—beliefs.

It is all-too-common these days for people to try to immunize from criticism opinions that happen to be dominant in their particular communities. Sometimes this is done by questioning the motives and thus stigmatizing those who dissent from prevailing opinions; or by disrupting their presentations; or by demanding that they be excluded from campus or, if they have already been invited, disinvited. Sometimes students and faculty members turn their backs on speakers whose opinions they don’t like or simply walk out and refuse to listen to those whose convictions offend their values. Of course, the right to peacefully protest, including on campuses, is sacrosanct. But before exercising that right, each of us should ask: Might it not be better to listen respectfully and try to learn from a speaker with whom I disagree? Might it better serve the cause of truth-seeking to engage the speaker in frank civil discussion?

Our willingness to listen to and respectfully engage those with whom we disagree (especially about matters of profound importance) contributes vitally to the maintenance of a milieu in which people feel free to speak their minds, consider unpopular positions, and explore lines of argument that may undercut established ways of thinking. Such an ethos protects us against dogmatism and groupthink, both of which are toxic to the health of academic communities and to the functioning of democracies.

Once again, by regularly appearing together George and West are actually demonstrating the same civic friendship that they are championing in this statement.

2. The qualities we’ ll all need more of to help renew our democratic possibilities

Several of these qualities can be inferred from the statement above (such as intellectual modesty), but at Duke, George and West made several additional observations, particularly in the Q&A.

George begins with the importance of cultivating friendships with those who have different perspectives. But he also reminds us that when you do, you are leaving the conformity of those who are “most like you,” meaning that you will also need the courage of your free will to speak the truth as you see it. When you leave the comfort of your fellow travelers, it helps to have role models, including those whose courage has carried them to the point of martyrdom. He also acknowledges that you’ll need “a few others to hold you up” when you champion what you believe and encounter the hostility that is the most likely response.

For his part, West characterizes those with the necessary courage as being “more revolutionary,” noting that you must be “willing to bear your cross” which “signifies your quest to unarm truth and unapologetically love” those who vehemently disagree with you. He continues: “to be a polished professional usually means don’t get too close to that cross” because what is most important to you is wanting to conform to those who are most like you. But when you are willing to bear that cross and become a revolutionary, you need to know that you are also on your way to character assassination or (like Lincoln and King) literal assassination.

Embodying the courage, loneliness and pain that George and West were describing, one of the night’s three questioners was a Christian Palestinian woman from Israel whose involvement in the peace movement there has been regularly vilified by Christians, Muslims, Jews, Israelis and Palestinians. While George and West were embodying civic friendship, she embodied the pain that goes into finding it.

3. How to find a patch of green where civic friendship can grow

George and West give several examples, including these:

– When pursuing civic friendship with those who vehemently disagree with you, it is essential to decide which truths are negotiable for you and which are non-negotiable. For the Palestinian-Israeli peace activist, one non-negotiable truth is that every Palestinian baby deserves to live. When the ice is this thin, nothing is too basic to be left unsaid.

– Within Christianity, it is possible to harbor an intense hatred for a person’s sin while, at the same time, recognizing that his or her sins do not exhaust that sinner’s humanity. To similar effect, however odious a person’s convictions, they never rob that person of his or her essential dignity and integrity. Hate the sin but not the sinner. As West observed: we “must recognize the limitations but always hold out the possibility of transcending them” in the course of our civic conversations.

– To follow those possibilities even further, a person’s conviction always “lives” within a broader context or set of circumstances and is rarely either good or bad in spite of those circumstances. When you take the time to understand the context where another’s convictions arise, it is often possible to recognize how differences between you arose, agree to disagree, and step down from your mutual hostility. West illustrates this point by reference to our current divisions over “black face,” recalling that its original context suggests a kind of appropriation of black power by white slaveholders who wanted to have some of that power for themselves. In other words, “black face” was about attraction and not merely ridicule and oppression. Where there might be some “overlap” between positions within a particular context—that is, a more hopeful ground between those who are for and against a particular issue—there exists the possibility for civic conversation and even friendship.

I think you’ll enjoy the Robert George-Cornel West conversation at Duke when you get to hear it. I’d also recommend that you follow their road show as it winds its way across an America that is likely to grow even more divided as another presidential election approaches.

The unfortunate truth is that our divisions are never confined to the realm of politics. As hostility intensifies, it infects our work and leaches into our home lives.

The best way to champion common ground is by acting with the courageous belief that common ground is possible, that democracy is worth renewing, and that its renewal won’t begin with somebody else.

This post is adapted from my February 17, 2019 newsletter.

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.

An Enabling Perspective for Our Wounded World

New Starting Blocks for the Future of Work

How Can We Hold Our Common Ground?

A Winter of Work Needs More Color

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