Once in a while I accumulate a little pile of articles worth sharing, but which don’t fit with others. Here is the latest.
The oldest is from over a year ago, but still pertinent:
“Apps Are Helping to Gut the Restaurant Industry” (Greg Bensinger, The New
York Times, December 8th 2020).
The author related how the likes of DoorDash, UberEats, and Grubhub,
which bring restaurant food to customers, are charging those places “30 percent
or higher per order,” often too high for eatery profitability. Although this is a classic free-market
situation, where the app companies can charge what they want and their two sets
of customers can govern themselves accordingly, some cities and states have put
limits on fees. If this service is too
expensive, it will not be used, and, as it is hardly necessary to life or
prosperity, that is fine. Meanwhile, if
people are willing to pay, say, $10 to have a pizza brought to them, why should
they be denied?
When commentators call for more job training, they are often
vague about how it should work. In the
April 7th New York Times, Steve Lohr got more specific in
“Job Training That’s Free Until You’re Hired Is a Blueprint for Biden.” A good idea, and puts pressure on training
organizations to ensure what they offer can lead to actual opportunities, but
could get them too many students, so if so they would emerge with admission
requirements. The schools would be
forced to care, validating the article’s last four words: “They fight for
you.”
As well, and not contradictorily, per David Epstein in Slate
on April 27th, “General Education Has a Bad Rap.” In the late 1970s when I was in college there
was a great controversy on whether that should mainly be for mind-furnishing,
the choice I made, or for vocational preparation. Early in the next decade the careerists won,
accounting became the most popular undergraduate major, and since then the
names of some majors have looked like those for week-long corporate
classes. The conflict, though, seems too
timeless to go away forever, and it’s revisited here. Points in favor of learning less focused
subjects Epstein made include excessively early specialization, problems when
targeted careers end early or do not materialize at all, inflexibility, and
narrower life experiences. As someone
who took undergraduate courses in 15 different departments and eventually had
careers in a 16th and 17th, I am biased, but doubt that
was unique.
On October 8th in the New York Times,
Peter Coy told us that “Tech Jobs Are Everywhere Now.” His now-data-backed claim was that, with more
remote work, such positions are becoming less concentrated, with employees
“moving all over the place.” That trend
will not last forever, as the pendulum between home and office has moved back
and forth since Clinton was president, but it is good for potential employees
to know, as they are more likely to get started, from their hometowns, now.
We see far more material on how women are suffering, both
from the pandemic and for other reasons, so in a way it’s refreshing to learn
something about “How Men Burn Out” (Jonathan Malesic, The New York Times,
January 4th). While less burdened
by childcare, men are still under real pressure to be main or often only
breadwinners, “are much less likely than women to talk about it,” and still too
often buy in to career success as a proxy for personal worth. Extra-hours tasks and off-hours contacts make
that worse, and it is clear that employers, who pay a real tangible and
intangible price when their workers burn out, have choices to make here. That, if you include valuing less
career-focused education, ties these five pieces together.