Just Like Employees, Not All Articles on Jobs Are Successful

This past week offered me, on the surface, several opportunities to write a post from one published piece.  It didn’t work out that way.  Why not?

Most with potential were in the February 24^th New York Times Magazine, subtitled “The Future of Work Issue,” and were even more irritating to me than its font with lines connecting “s” and “t” and other letter pairs.  The first, Charles Duhigg’s “Wealthy, Successful and Miserable,” chronicled how many Harvard M.B.A. graduates were just that, in high-pressure, long-hours positions providing little in deep meaning, sense of purpose, self-direction, and so on.  None of this is anything new, and people have long chosen to leave such positions after getting financially set for life but long before retirement age.  It’s a choice they made, and decades later when they’re teaching kindergarten or some such, plenty will be happy to have taken that enviably remunerative path. 

After a piece impossible to argue with on basic labor rights for household workers, we have Emily Bazelon’s “A Seat at the Head of the Table,” complaining about not enough women in top corporate roles, which has had staggering progress in my lifetime alone but as long as more women than men choose slower career paths will go on to some extent forever.  Then on to Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “The Rise of the WeWork Class,” worthwhile only if you haven’t seen the January 27^th front-page business section’s piece I wrote about three weeks ago documenting the rising business fad of super-workaholism and spineless companies using office space provider WeWork as culture-instilling attack dogs.  The feature on people doing the same jobs for 50 years or more was interesting, if again not a fresh idea, followed by Matthew Desmond’s hackneyed “Dollars on the Margins” which trumpeted the advantages of a $15 per hour minimum wage apparently for everyone, with consideration to neither its downside nor its inability to assure financial solvency, let alone prosperity.  There is a sufficient set of fascinating things to say about where employment is going, but it wasn’t represented here. 

On then to The Atlantic, and Derek Thompson’s attempt to justify its “Ideas” categorization, “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.”  A more honest title would have been “Workism Has Long Made Many of Those Americans Who Let Themselves Get Roped Into It Miserable,” but overstatement is its tone throughout.  One of these pieces full of controversial declarations which themselves could be spun into articles of their own (e.g. “everybody worships something,” “the best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want…,” “the religion of work isn’t just a cultist feature of America’s elite.  It’s also the law”), it maintained a frantic tone about a part of our culture with roots before the Revolution, in its current form since the 1950s, and resurgent in the 1980s.  It laughed at a 1957 prediction that “our identity would be defined by our hobbies, or our family life,” actually written around the time when jobs-as-self-definers peaked, and called “quaint” the idea that some people “preferred careers that gave them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies,” a choice now made by maybe one-third of employment-age women and not a few men.  Yet even if Thompson was caught flatfooted by the Protestant work ethic, he acknowledged that average American work-years have shortened, and correctly pointed out that seeking passion in what is only one component of people’s lives is not automatically optimal.

 

The best I saw was Joe Pinsker’s “The ‘Hidden Mechanisms’ That Help Those Born Rich to Excel in Elite Jobs,” also in the February Atlantic.  It should be clear to all that financial advantages are significant to career outcomes in a variety of ways, and now we have a book documenting that:  Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman’s The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged.  If it hasn’t occurred to you that those altruistic trips to Guatemala by 15-year-olds impressing college admissions officers simply perpetuate familial financial strength, or that 20-something professionals who can draw from “the bank of Mom and Dad” are more likely to stick it out and ultimately succeed in the likes of New York City, you should at least read this author-interview article.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be disappointed with these efforts.  They all came out in one week.  There will be more, and whether good, bad, or indifferent I will keep you up with them.