Follow the Fundamentals
By DAVID BROOKS
Beijing
Lou Dobbs is winning. He’s not winning personally. He’s not going to start winning presidential awards or elite respect. But his message is winning. Month by month the ideas that once prevailed on the angry fringe enter the mainstream and turn into conventional wisdom.
Once there was a majority in favor of liberal immigration policies, but apparently that’s not true anymore, at least if you judge by campaign rhetoric. Once there was a bipartisan consensus behind free trade, but that’s not true anymore, either. Even Republicans, by a two-to-one majority, believe free trade is bad for America, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll.
Once upon a time, the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world are rising out of poverty would have been a source of pride and optimism. But if you listen to the presidential candidates, improvements in the developing world are menacing. Their speeches constitute a symphony of woe about lead-painted toys, manipulated currencies and stolen jobs.
And if Dobbsianism is winning when times are good, you can imagine how attractive it’s going to seem if we enter the serious recession that Larry Summers convincingly and terrifyingly forecasts in yesterday’s Financial Times. If the economy dips as seriously as that, the political climate could shift in ugly ways.
So it’s worth pointing out now more than ever that Dobbsianism is fundamentally wrong. It plays on legitimate anxieties, but it rests at heart on a more existential fear — the fear that America is under assault and is fundamentally fragile. It rests on fears that the America we once knew is bleeding away.
And that’s just not true. In the first place, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, the United States still possesses the most potent economy on earth. Recently the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development produced global competitiveness indexes, and once again they both ranked the United States first in the world.
In the World Economic Forum survey, the U.S. comes in just ahead of Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany (China is 34th). The U.S. gets poor marks for macroeconomic stability (the long-term federal debt), for its tax structure and for the low savings rate. But it leads the world in a range of categories: higher education and training, labor market flexibility, the ability to attract global talent, the availability of venture capital, the quality of corporate management and the capacity to innovate.
William W. Lewis of McKinsey surveyed global competitive in dozens of business sectors a few years ago, and concluded, “The United States is the productivity leader in virtually every industry.”
Second, America’s fundamental economic strength is rooted in the most stable of assets — its values. The U.S. is still an astonishing assimilation machine. It has successfully absorbed more than 20 million legal immigrants over the past quarter-century, an extraordinary influx of human capital. Americans are remarkably fertile. Birthrates are relatively high, meaning that in 2050, the average American will be under 40, while the average European, Chinese and Japanese will be more than a decade older.
The American economy benefits from low levels of corruption. American culture still transmits some ineffable spirit of adventure. American students can’t compete with, say, Singaporean students on standardized tests, but they are innovative and creative throughout their lives. The U.S. standard of living first surpassed the rest of the world’s in about 1740, and despite dozens of cycles of declinist foreboding, the country has resolutely refused to decay.
Third, not every economic dislocation has been caused by trade and the Chinese. Between 1991 and 2007, the U.S. trade deficit exploded to $818 billion from $31 billion. Yet as Robert Samuelson has pointed out, during that time the U.S. created 28 million jobs and the unemployment rate dipped to 4.6 percent from 6.8 percent.
That’s because, as Robert Lawrence of Harvard and Martin Baily of McKinsey have calculated, 90 percent of manufacturing job losses are due to domestic forces. As companies become more technologically advanced, they shed workers (the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs between 1994 and 2004).
Meanwhile, the number of jobs actually lost to outsourcing is small, and recent reports suggest the outsourcing trend is slowing down. They are swamped by the general churn of creative destruction. Every quarter the U.S. loses somewhere around seven million jobs, and creates a bit more than seven million more. That double-edged process is the essence of a dynamic economy.
I’m writing this column from Beijing. I can look out the window and see the explosive growth. But as the Chinese will be the first to tell you, their dazzling prosperity is built on fragile foundations. In the United States, the situation is the reverse. We have obvious problems. But the foundations of American prosperity are strong. The U.S. still has much more to gain than to lose from openness, trade and globalization.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Friday, November 23, 2007
From Author, Help for White-Collar Workers
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
On a recent book tour, Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of “Nickel and Dimed,” was nearly brought to tears when an information technology marketer told her of growing so desperate after being laid off that she took a job as a janitor.
At another reading, a woman complained of an economy so volatile that she did not think of jobs anymore, but of intermittent income streams from tasks like house-sitting and designing Web sites.
Inspired by such tales, Ms. Ehrenreich has started an organization called United Professionals to help white-collar workers, be they unemployed, uninsured, downsized, stressed out or merely anxious.
“I thought, Isn’t there some way that people in this situation can come together, and the model I had in the back of my head was the early women’s movement in the 1970’s,” said Ms. Ehrenreich, whose “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” published in 2001, sold more than one million copies. “Just the fact of coming together and exchanging stories was very empowering, making you feel you’re not alone, and taking you out of that feeling of shame that whatever happened to you must be your fault.”
Based in Washington, the group has received $100,000 in seed money from the Service Employees International Union.
Bill Holland, the chairman of United Professionals and a former human resources executive at Accenture, the consulting firm, sees the group having chapters in half the 50 states within a year. But some co-founders say the group will grow fastest through the Internet.
If and when the group achieves critical mass, Ms. Ehrenreich sees it lobbying Congress just as AARP does, probably for universal health insurance and for requiring companies to provide severance when they lay off workers.
“Our employer-based health insurance system doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “It may have made sense years ago to have health insurance attached to one’s job, but nowadays one’s job is not attached to you. So when you lose your job, there goes your health insurance.”
United Professionals may seem a bit like a group of writers eager to promote their books.
The group’s directors and advisers include Mr. Holland, author of “Are There any Good Jobs Left?”; Jared Bernstein, author of “All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy”; and Tamara Draut, author of “Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead.”
The authors said they shared Ms. Ehrenreich’s frustrations about not being able to steer white-collar readers to a group that could help them.
With this new group, Ms. Ehrenreich is changing her focus from “Nickel and Dimed,” her first-person account of working as a waitress, hotel maid and Wal-Mart sales clerk.
Her newest offering, “Bait and Switch,” focused on the tribulations of white-collar workers and on the consultants — she likened many to snake oil salesmen — who advise laid-off workers how to get back on their feet. “Bait and Switch” helped give her the idea of creating a white-collar movement.
United Professionals plans to charge dues of 10 cents a day, $36.50 a year. Beyond mutual support and lobbying, the group hopes to find ways to provide members with legal and financial advice and affordable health insurance.
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
On a recent book tour, Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of “Nickel and Dimed,” was nearly brought to tears when an information technology marketer told her of growing so desperate after being laid off that she took a job as a janitor.
At another reading, a woman complained of an economy so volatile that she did not think of jobs anymore, but of intermittent income streams from tasks like house-sitting and designing Web sites.
Inspired by such tales, Ms. Ehrenreich has started an organization called United Professionals to help white-collar workers, be they unemployed, uninsured, downsized, stressed out or merely anxious.
“I thought, Isn’t there some way that people in this situation can come together, and the model I had in the back of my head was the early women’s movement in the 1970’s,” said Ms. Ehrenreich, whose “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” published in 2001, sold more than one million copies. “Just the fact of coming together and exchanging stories was very empowering, making you feel you’re not alone, and taking you out of that feeling of shame that whatever happened to you must be your fault.”
Based in Washington, the group has received $100,000 in seed money from the Service Employees International Union.
Bill Holland, the chairman of United Professionals and a former human resources executive at Accenture, the consulting firm, sees the group having chapters in half the 50 states within a year. But some co-founders say the group will grow fastest through the Internet.
If and when the group achieves critical mass, Ms. Ehrenreich sees it lobbying Congress just as AARP does, probably for universal health insurance and for requiring companies to provide severance when they lay off workers.
“Our employer-based health insurance system doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “It may have made sense years ago to have health insurance attached to one’s job, but nowadays one’s job is not attached to you. So when you lose your job, there goes your health insurance.”
United Professionals may seem a bit like a group of writers eager to promote their books.
The group’s directors and advisers include Mr. Holland, author of “Are There any Good Jobs Left?”; Jared Bernstein, author of “All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy”; and Tamara Draut, author of “Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead.”
The authors said they shared Ms. Ehrenreich’s frustrations about not being able to steer white-collar readers to a group that could help them.
With this new group, Ms. Ehrenreich is changing her focus from “Nickel and Dimed,” her first-person account of working as a waitress, hotel maid and Wal-Mart sales clerk.
Her newest offering, “Bait and Switch,” focused on the tribulations of white-collar workers and on the consultants — she likened many to snake oil salesmen — who advise laid-off workers how to get back on their feet. “Bait and Switch” helped give her the idea of creating a white-collar movement.
United Professionals plans to charge dues of 10 cents a day, $36.50 a year. Beyond mutual support and lobbying, the group hopes to find ways to provide members with legal and financial advice and affordable health insurance.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The Segmented Society
By DAVID BROOKS
On Feb. 9, 1964, the Beatles played on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Or as Steven Van Zandt remembers the moment: “It was the beginning of my life.”
Van Zandt fell for the Beatles and discovered the blues and early rock music that inspired them. He played in a series of bands on the Jersey shore, and when a friend wanted to draw on his encyclopedic blues knowledge for a song called “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” Van Zandt wound up as a guitarist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
The 1970s were a great moment for musical integration. Artists like the Rolling Stones and Springsteen drew on a range of musical influences and produced songs that might be country-influenced, soul-influenced, blues-influenced or a combination of all three. These mega-groups attracted gigantic followings and can still fill huge arenas.
But cultural history has pivot moments, and at some point toward the end of the 1970s or the early 1980s, the era of integration gave way to the era of fragmentation. There are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock. There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2.
People have been writing about the fragmentation of American music for decades. Back in the Feb. 18, 1982, issue of Time, Jay Cocks wrote that American music was in splinters. But year after year, the segmentation builds.
Last month, for example, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an essay in The New Yorker noting that indie rock is now almost completely white, lacking even the motifs of African-American popular music. Carl Wilson countered in Slate that indie rock’s real wall is social; it’s the genre for the liberal-arts-college upper-middle class.
Technology drives some of the fragmentation. Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds. Top 40 radio no longer serves as the gateway for the listening public. Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices.
But other causes flow from the temper of the times. It’s considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles. And there’s the rise of the mass educated class.
People who have built up cultural capital and pride themselves on their superior discernment are naturally going to cultivate ever more obscure musical tastes. I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special.
Van Zandt grew up in one era and now thrives in the other, but how long can mega-groups like the E Street Band still tour?
“This could be the last time,” he says.
He argues that if the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn’t be able to get mass airtime because there is no broadcast vehicle for all-purpose rock. And he says that most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs.
As a result, much of their music (and here I’m bowdlerizing his language) stinks.
He describes a musical culture that has lost touch with its common roots. And as he speaks, I hear the echoes of thousands of other interviews concerning dozens of other spheres.
It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.
If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.
Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.
And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.
Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.
By DAVID BROOKS
On Feb. 9, 1964, the Beatles played on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Or as Steven Van Zandt remembers the moment: “It was the beginning of my life.”
Van Zandt fell for the Beatles and discovered the blues and early rock music that inspired them. He played in a series of bands on the Jersey shore, and when a friend wanted to draw on his encyclopedic blues knowledge for a song called “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” Van Zandt wound up as a guitarist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
The 1970s were a great moment for musical integration. Artists like the Rolling Stones and Springsteen drew on a range of musical influences and produced songs that might be country-influenced, soul-influenced, blues-influenced or a combination of all three. These mega-groups attracted gigantic followings and can still fill huge arenas.
But cultural history has pivot moments, and at some point toward the end of the 1970s or the early 1980s, the era of integration gave way to the era of fragmentation. There are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock. There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2.
People have been writing about the fragmentation of American music for decades. Back in the Feb. 18, 1982, issue of Time, Jay Cocks wrote that American music was in splinters. But year after year, the segmentation builds.
Last month, for example, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an essay in The New Yorker noting that indie rock is now almost completely white, lacking even the motifs of African-American popular music. Carl Wilson countered in Slate that indie rock’s real wall is social; it’s the genre for the liberal-arts-college upper-middle class.
Technology drives some of the fragmentation. Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds. Top 40 radio no longer serves as the gateway for the listening public. Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices.
But other causes flow from the temper of the times. It’s considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles. And there’s the rise of the mass educated class.
People who have built up cultural capital and pride themselves on their superior discernment are naturally going to cultivate ever more obscure musical tastes. I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special.
Van Zandt grew up in one era and now thrives in the other, but how long can mega-groups like the E Street Band still tour?
“This could be the last time,” he says.
He argues that if the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn’t be able to get mass airtime because there is no broadcast vehicle for all-purpose rock. And he says that most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs.
As a result, much of their music (and here I’m bowdlerizing his language) stinks.
He describes a musical culture that has lost touch with its common roots. And as he speaks, I hear the echoes of thousands of other interviews concerning dozens of other spheres.
It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.
If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.
Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.
And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.
Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.
Monday, November 19, 2007
‘... And the Pursuit of Happiness’
To the Editor:
“All They Are Saying Is Give Happiness a Chance,” by Eduardo Porter (Editorial Observer, Nov. 12), made me smile. Despite the fact that I have few of the trappings of success, I am happy.
While I have a human desire for financial gain, fulfilling romantic relationships and international accolades for my brilliance, I do not have (or reasonably expect) any of those things. And yet, I am happy. I struggle to pay my bills, wonder if those are old-lady wrinkles sneaking onto my face and gesture obscenely at other drivers when they cut me off. Still, I am happy.
What I can offer to Mr. Porter is support for his theory that time is worth more than money. I have a job and a life that gives me the time and space to read, play with my dog, dine with my friends, stare into space and generally get plenty of happiness-sustaining mental candy.
I’m glad that the world is full of people who need to do and to be and to know — relentlessly and aggressively. They create the noise and pressure that typify modern life, and they give me something to look at when the leaves stop spinning in the wind.
Maureen DevlinCambridge, Mass., Nov. 13, 2007
To the Editor:
“All They Are Saying Is Give Happiness a Chance,” by Eduardo Porter (Editorial Observer, Nov. 12), made me smile. Despite the fact that I have few of the trappings of success, I am happy.
While I have a human desire for financial gain, fulfilling romantic relationships and international accolades for my brilliance, I do not have (or reasonably expect) any of those things. And yet, I am happy. I struggle to pay my bills, wonder if those are old-lady wrinkles sneaking onto my face and gesture obscenely at other drivers when they cut me off. Still, I am happy.
What I can offer to Mr. Porter is support for his theory that time is worth more than money. I have a job and a life that gives me the time and space to read, play with my dog, dine with my friends, stare into space and generally get plenty of happiness-sustaining mental candy.
I’m glad that the world is full of people who need to do and to be and to know — relentlessly and aggressively. They create the noise and pressure that typify modern life, and they give me something to look at when the leaves stop spinning in the wind.
Maureen DevlinCambridge, Mass., Nov. 13, 2007
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