The New York Times is unquestionably the best newspaper in the United States, certainly leagues better than my own local rag, the Washington Post. And yet, the amount of arrant nonsense that gets printed on its Op-Ed pages is pretty astounding. There's BoBo Brooks, Ross "Chunky Bobo" Douthat, Maureen Dowd, all of whom lower the level of national debate with their own peculiar combinations of intellectual dishonesty, superficial thinking, and personal sexual hangups. And then there is the bullshit artist supreme, Thomas Friedman, mangler of language, spouter of his own self-promoting jargon, and a truly mediocre thinker who has somehow been led to believe he is a sage of some kind.
I will have to deal with his most recent crap fest in my next post, but am still fuming over this bit of nonsense from last Tuesday, entitled "The Start Up of You." The premise of the article is that our "kids will not so much have to find their next job as to invent their next job." They are going to all have to be "entrepreneurs" about their careers and we are told that "for entrepreneurs it's differentiate or die -- that now goes for all of us." Friedman cites to the accumulated wisdom of some of the driving forces behind recent Silicon Valley ephemera like Groupon, Linked-in, Zynga, and Twitter, as though those companies really suggest the model by which a country of over 300 million people are going to live their lives.
This seems really obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs to be said. The vast majority of people in this country are not going to be working in Silicon Valley or like enterprises. They are going to continue doing the jobs that have been staples of the economy for a long time -- nurses, teachers, health care aids, building tradesman, truck drivers, firefighters, cops, sanitation workers, hair dressers, grocery store clerks, etc. These people don't need to differentiate themselves -- they need to be paid a fucking living wage by a society that credits them with some human worth. The notion that people want to -- or will be able to -- continuously reinvent themselves as workers is just nonsensical. It devalues the concept of experience, it belittles the value of stability in people's lives, and it is, ultimately, a way to glamorize what in fact is an ugly world view of perpetual worker vulnerability and lack of value in a world in which free floating capital continuously undermines any hope that the vast majority will experience anything like a decent and secure life.
Friedman has no sense whatsoever of the implications of the world that he is endorsing. Moreover, his technological triumphalism strikes me as absurd for someone who lived through the late 90s tech bubble that brought us AOL and Pets.com. The durability and economic viability of these social networking sites strikes me as dubious in the extreme.
I read Charles Blow's column today, talking about what actually people in the country do for a living, to be an implicit rebuff to Friedman. Yeah, Blow lays on the ordinary Americans working hard in the deep South bit a little thick, but the overall message is quite clear -- jobs are expanding in lots of low wage, hard laboring kind of work, a hug quantity of which takes no advanced degrees or fancy entrepreneurial spirit. I note that among these jobs, there are a couple -- registered nurses and carpenters among them -- that are listed as high wage. But these jobs are high wage jobs largely because of unionization -- yes, the people who ply these trades have undeniable skills, but in the end it is collective bargaining that has made them reasonably lucrative careers for people -- not "branding" or "differentiating" or entrepreneurial this or that, but good old fashioned trade unionism.
If the United States is going to flourish, we need to somehow assure that all who work and contribute in these unglamorous, but highly necessary jobs (really think about the value of the home health aid versus some clown who allows you to get coupons online), can make a decent wage with health care coverage and an adequate retirement so that they too can share, however modestly, in the bounty of the world's richest country.
