Rambling on the US economy

This is a recent NYT article about the tough economic times faced by 20-somethings. As usual, the NYT illustrates this society-wide trend with the idiosyncratic, upper-crust example of Scott Nicholson that has drawn the ire of less-privileged readers. One blogger even seems to imply that the NYT intentionally focuses on such stories to create a sort of class spite that sells more newspapers. But beyond all this, I think that the article's central point is sound: those of us who graduated in the 2000s and beyond are not having an easy go of it in the job market. The NYT article follows a recent grad that turns down a job because it isn't in the line of his career plans. I can appreciate the people that point this out as the luxury of a comfortable, bourgeois, debt-free person, and I'm not too sympathetic to someone like Nicholson who wants to become a finance bigwig that siphons lots of money from the economy without creating real wealth. But the bottom line is that I know a lot of people in a similar situation of unfruitful job-searching. Not all have the luxury of turning down jobs that aren't quite right for them, but the issue for me isn't whether or not someone turns down a crappy job, but rather that the crappy jobs are mainly what's out there.

I have friends that work in dead-end office jobs, one friend working as a live-in nanny for an old money family, one buddy that was lucky enough to get a job as a building manager through his dad's Union. All of these people are college grads, and none is working in the field they studied and are interested in. My own post-college professional experience has involved working in bars, porn theaters, under-the-table business deals. The major job I had in my field of agronomy was working with a community group in a Chicago housing project, running an urban gardening program. This was an interesting position, but I earned so little that I was barely getting by, even though I was paying no rent because I lived between my folks' house and a friend's house in the housing project. All this is to say that I don't spite the kid profiled in the NYT article for not taking the first thing that comes his way. Many of my friends and I have spent upwards of six or seven years working dead-end jobs and are little better for it, and we're only now starting to do some worthwhile professional things.

In the first few years after graduating college I was frustrated at my professional impotence. I had been brought up to believe that if you did well in school and had a good work ethic, you could land a good job with a college degree. Even though I worked from the age of ten in my own small business, my professional parents and the surrounding culture made me think of this as an unofficial pastime. Sure, it was okay for making money, but it wasn't a long-term prospect. My travels and false starts, and especially my current life in the Third World, have taught me that perhaps part of the problem was this attitude from the old-school middle-class US. Here in Colombia or any other developing country, most people aren't aiming to land a big job, because there aren't many places hiring, and they don't pay well. No, the goal for many people, from the poorest street merchants to the high-end movers and shakers, is to start their own business, be in control of their own professional life. It's taken me a long time to arrive at this realization, and it's mainly because I've had the luck to get a bit outside of the box, to see the Third World way of doing things.

Here's a Tom Friedman editorial about how the US needs to favor startup companies. I don't know enough to discern if his recommendations (tax breaks for startups, etc.) are sound, but I agree with the general spirit of the article that we should be encouraging young people to create companies and wealth as opposed to working for others. Friedman's focus is almost always high-tech. I'm not a big fan of high-tech, because it's often junk that no one really needs (ever-smaller cellphones, things like that). Here's a NYT article profiling a supposedly innovative company that basically posts stupid photos to a number of blogs; I hope this isn't the future of innovation in the US!

But in another article, Friedman describes the genesis and odyssey of what seems like a useful, cool medical tech idea. I don't agree with his idealization of an apolitical, globe-hopping innovator class, because politics, local realities, and non-commercial things are an important part of a healthy society. And it worries me (as Friedman always does) that the business model praised in the article seems to have little role for workers and manufacturing. In the case of the Endostim product profiled in the article, the actual production process is almost an afterthought, contracted out to an Uruguayan company of which we learn nothing about the size or the compensation of its workforce. But all in all I find myself (as I rarely do) agreeing with Friedman on this issue.

On the same tack of what policymakers should do with respect to education in this recession, here's an article about the increasing enrollment in colleges (especially community colleges). But as the article points out, not everyone who enrolls finishes. I'm not sure exactly how this ties into the issues of innovation and startup companies that Friedman touches on, but I think there needs to be a relation between increasing access to education and increasing resources for educated people to start new businesses.