Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right/Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
- Stealer’s Wheel (1972)
Everybody’s nuts right now. Panicked, angry and confused – frayed to the edge of a shattering, lunatic breakdown… Like the man on the bridge in “The Scream,” a single shock – one corkscrew plunge in the Dow or notice of a temporary layoff – from jumping headfirst in the river. That or melting down in a rage, frothing like the crazed anchorman in Network.
The Edge – that point where a man understands he’s got absolutely nothing left to lose – grows closer everyday for a whole lot more of us than the rest of us would like to admit.
Is this the end of Western Domination? Curtains for the American Dream? Probably not (if you’re an eternal optimist like me). But unless you’ve shit for brains, this much is absolutely clear – we’re sitting in the eye of the hurricane, waiting for the second wall to level our Monopoly money recovery. And if the dominoes we all plainly see fall as it appears they will, well… stock up on canned goods. You’ll have a lot more to worry about than an oil spill inflating the cost of shrimp by this same time next year.
And that feeling it’s beyond our control – that we’re helpless, adrift and assuredly, cosmically fucked – has the finger-pointers out in droves. Bleeding hearts and madmen like Paul Krugman are screaming for a second stimulus, blaming the “rich” and their avoidance of taxes for our staggering fiscal deficit. “The wealthy use the GOP and armies of lawyers to shelter them from taxes!” On the other side, the Tea Party blames the poor – mythical “welfare mothers” and the safety net programs they claim, wrongly, keep those “freeloaders” in gilded subsistence. “The poor forty percent of this country pays no income tax at all!”
The warring factions’ only point of agreement is that the middle class is going to get screwed. That when the proverbial bill comes due – and it will, probably sooner than we think – the rich and poor won’t pay it. The tab’ll get handed to the Middle, the least deserving of the three.
This is where the dogma of the liberals and the Tea Party starts tripping my gag reflex. Anyone who’s worked in a corporation in this country knows, the existence of an entirely honest, entirely hard-working middle class is myth and nothing more. There are actually two middle classes – the Productive Middle and the “Fattened Middle.” One carries the other, and the Fattened Middle has earned every bad turn this rotten economy’s given it.
A very early draft of Happy Hour is for Amateurs contained an Atlas Shrugged-like rant about this “Fattened Middle.” It didn’t flow with the book’s comedic thrust, and its points were made more elegantly elsewhere in the text’s narrative. But I’ve always liked this rant, and every author everywhere has a secret urge to publish his own “Who is John Galt?” speech. So here’s mine. A riff on the Fattened Middle, and why they deserve no quarter.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
How do you describe these people – this “Fattened Middle” of America? In government they’re known as bureaucrats; in corporate America, middle management (the non-revenue producing kind)… A long line of Waylon Smitherses bringing zero added value to the table. Hiding in their cubicles and offices, bouncing e-mails back and forth, passing decisions up and down the chain of command. Doing exactly what they’re told and nothing more. No forethought, no going the extra lap. Their sole aim never Success, but avoidance of termination… of getting a pink slip and being left to scramble, rebuild themselves on their wits.
But the fault doesn’t lie with them alone. Our McEconomy’s their perfect petri dish… A world of Byzantine administrative temples, with endless shadowed spaces – places where a man who wants to hide can duck responsibility forever. You can’t finger a bureaucrat or a middle manager on anything. What do these creatures decide? Nothing. And they’ve stacks of emails to prove it. “Here it is. March 2004. I passed that request on to the Finance Committee. I told them it was beyond my authority, right there in my response. I save all my responses.”
Of course you do.
And no, you can’t fire all of these people. Technically, most provide some service, some function that justifies their position. That’s their insidious hook, what keeps them in The Organization – performance of some finite task for which it’s obvious they’re overpaid, but for which finding a cheap replacement would be annoying and time-consuming. And they’ve never had a first or second strike. Their personnel files are squeaky clean. Ten years of cost-of-living raises. An award for most organized filing. A string of B and B+ reviews. Then there’s that issue of morale. Who fires a little league coach or the neighborhood Boy Scout den leader? What would that jolly, jowly HR administrator do if he were cut loose on the street? What are his skills? Saying “Yes” or “I’ll have to look into it” quickly? Firing the poor bastard’s killing him.
And so the inefficiencies persist, cancers on the body commerce. So much wasted time. So much idiot procedure. So many dollars pissed away that ought to be pooled into bonuses for the twenty percent of workers who actually create value.
I know, I know… “We can’t all be productive, but we all need something to do. These people have salaries, and those salaries get spent on stuff, and the selling of that stuff keeps our economy afloat!”*
That’s true, and you know what else? Unsustainable.
This screed might sound mean, and it is. But if you’ve worked in a law firm, or any large organization… If you’ve played e-mail tennis with these legions of chair-warmers daily, You Understand. Here’s an example of your day, my day, representing corporations and agencies, and their middle-to-upper middle management functionaries, earning their middle-to-upper upper middle management salaries, pensions and health benefit packages:
SERVE:
RE: ACME Co. Release
From: _______@______.com (Me)
To: bcarter@_____.com
Bob,
Here’s the release in the ACME matter. Let me know if this is OK.
RETURN:
RE: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: bcarter@____.com
To: ________@_______.com
Has Tim Perkins OK’d this? He’s got final say on these matters.
VOLLEY:
FW: RE: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: ________@______.com
To: tperkins@____.com
Tim,
Bob tells me you have final say on the release in the ACME case. Tell me if this is OK. We are obligated under court order to finalize it by Monday.
Thanks,
_________
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -
RE: FW: RE: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: tperkins@_____.com
To: ________@________.com
Actually, this release involves possible tax issues. Best to run this past Katherine.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -
RE: RE: FW: RE: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: ________@_______.com
To: tperkins@____.com; bcarter@____.com
CC: korourke@_____.com
Tim/Bob,
I’ve already had this blessed by Katherine. So if its good with you two, its ready to go.
Let me know.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
RE: RE: RE: RE: FW: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: bcarter@____.com
To: _____@_____.com; tperkins@____.com; _______@______.com
Tim,
Are you good with this?
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
RE: RE: RE: RE: FW: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: tperkins@____.com
To: bcarter@_____.com; ______@_____.com; korourke@_____.com;
______@_______.com
I think we need to have a meeting on this. How’s everybody’s schedule Tuesday afternoon?
Ahhh, the Meeting… The nucleus of every bureaucrat and middle manager’s world. The place where those with no interest in actually solving a problem can ricochet criticisms around the room, looking sage-like for raising a variety of theoretical “strategic concerns”… Where they can appear important airing their complaints about policy, procedure and arcane hypothetical risks no effective thinker would ever burn brain cells considering.
The meeting is middle management’s driving range, where they can swing freely for the 300 yd markers, safe in the comfort of knowing they’ll never be asked to come up with a better idea than the one they’re assailing with meaningless broadsides and corporate-speak gibberish. “Well… I’m really concerned that maybe taking this position will hurt our perception with organized labor in this area.” “This needs to synergize better with long term labor policy, which is progressively oriented.” But then if asked to provide a serious answer as to how the company might actually, pragmatically address the concern they’ve raised, these otherwise omniscient wonks suddenly devolve into mutes, shrugging at each other like a collection of Marcel Marceaus.
And there’s no use in trying to make them accountable. No use in pressing them for constructive answers, demanding to know what value they’ve brought to the company in exchange for the past decade of Cadillac benefits and free donuts. The Fattened Middle lives in a haze, terminally disconnected from what causes the productive to produce, detached from any semblance of ambition or curiosity. Horatio Alger in reverse, shuffling from their Japanese sedans and minivans to their offices, believing that as long as they eat three square a day and avoid ever making a decision the “American Dream” – an insulated cheesecake “career” on the government or corporate dole – is birthright.
They’re wrong, of course. But it’s a whole lot worse than that. In their confounding, parasitic persistence, they’ve perverted and warped the American Dream – turned the damned thing on its ear. The Dream, the bargain, at least a I’ve understood it, wasn’t a trade of perpetual comfort for thirty years of risk avoidance and prolific paperwork creation. The concept, for those who weren’t born with a trust fund, was with a good bit of work and some luck, you’d get back multiples of your sweat equity in dollars. If you worked smart and shrewdly, there was a good chance you’d earn a solid living, possibly even get rich. But it was never enough to just bank hours, or punch out a certain number of emails reminding management You’re Essential.**
Still, that flawed expectation persists. From skyscrapers to factories to City Hall, the Fattened Middle is entrenched, their “I am, thus I deserve” mindset a widely accepted religion. No class plays the victim better, and no class protects itself more. Consider how the armies of non-revenue creating administrators in your office busy themselves… What the workers in the government agencies sending your company reams of forms to be filled out do with themselves each day… What the people in the Human Resources department three floors up are doing right now…***
- Insert image of monkey scratching its ass here -
Perhaps that’s a bit unfair. Some are actually doing something. The moderately ambitious of them are creating mazes of new rules and policies they alone can navigate, all with a singular objective – to justify their paycheck. You’ll never know these rule custodians exist, but the minute you have to get something done – finalize some important project or close a significant deal – They Will Appear. Like a lump of rotting food jammed in the drain of your sink, from inside the company or out, these bureaucrats and administrators and their laundry lists of concerns and requirements will hold up every transaction, constipate the simplest business process… All in deference to the pretext that every corporate or government decision, from purchasing office toilet paper to opening an overseas plant, is too important to be made quickly, or by any single individual.
Bankers work with money, chefs with food, tailors with cloth, etc… What do these middling middleists create? They don’t fly your plane, fix your plumbing, or stitch your suit. Don’t drive your cab, drill your teeth or do your taxes. Don’t fix your car, bag your groceries or manage your money. They’re not developing the office tower down the street, designing the next generation laptop or writing the great American novel… Not curing any diseases, writing a marketing plan or landing the next big sale… They’re not taking the angry calls from any irate clients, making the presentations or trading any stocks or bonds… To describe most of what they do is to simply say They Are. It’s been said in every office twenty percent of workers do one hundred percent of the work. We all know the Fattened Middle. They’re the other eighty percent – creating the appearance of consistent proficiency with toil no one can describe and the value of which is rarely, if ever, measured.
And by insulating themselves from the axe, these parasites have created a second world, a middle management reality – an intractable, institutionalized selfishness – that permeates and corrupts every corporate and government office. A protective bubble for those in it; for those outside, an endless, energy and profit sapping irritation… a never ending ticker tape of complexities and annoyances costing a fortune to address. Worse yet than all of that, the Fattened Middle steals from the needy, most of whom would work twice as hard as the average bureaucrat or middle manager.
All of this damage, this waste, this immense needless inefficiency so a complacent, unproductive sector of an otherwise noble class can cruise through life unmolested, collecting $75,000.00 and up paychecks.
Yeah, I know… Doesn’t sound like a lot of money. Until you consider the size of the Fattened Middle.
Look around your department, your office, your floor… Look around the streets at rush hour, or the corporate park you drive through every morning. Look at the immense facades of all the enormous government buildings downtown. How much of what’s going on in these places is superfluous, overpriced – terminally, congenitally redundant? And how many people are engaged in this monstrous circus of busywork? How many bodies soaking up resources to create what no one needs or what at best should be done by computer? And how many times today will one of them get in your way? Infect or disrupt what you’re doing with some niggling peripheral concern or inane policy mandate. How many times will you come in at 8:00, hoping to get out by 7:00, only to spend the morning hostage to an idiot email chain, answering all those questions nobody ever needs to ask.
They say offshoring of American jobs is a “giant sucking sound.” Maybe. Or maybe the real sucking sound is right here, all around us every day, sitting in the office next door, punching out a memorandum on last week’s strategy meeting. Maybe it’s so loud, been with us so long, we don’t even notice it anymore.
_________________________
*Until it doesn’t. Until we’ve nothing left but a society of administrators, and we can’t allow the natural creative destruction necessary for a healthy economy to take place because if we did, we’d realize there was no real economic activity underpinning the slop of corporate structures, government agencies and financial houses of cards comprising our society. It’s one thing for the rest of the world to whisper about the emperor’s lack of wardrobe, another to put him on stage nude before an audience of would-be bond vigilantes.
**If only wealth were awarded based on mere hours expended, no matter how intellectually untaxing the toil… How many years ago would I have renounced professional work and picked up a spade to hoe ditches for the township?
***The business of America isn’t business. That ship sailed long ago. The business of America today is red tape. We’re a giant DMV, creating McJobs and Whiffle Careers in impossibly complex corporate and governmental hierarchies, masturbating processes, policies and frameworks creating nothing but salaries from streams of revenue that look more and more frighteningly fictional. What’s the alchemy involved in turning procedure for procedure’s sake into money? Somebody, somewhere has to make something of actual value sufficient to sustain all that administration. That or it’s all just a huge, impenetrable Ponzi scheme.
The most frightening characteristic of the people you’ve described is their lack of critical thinking. Whereas your concern is for the bloat and waste they add to organizations, my concern is for their complacency vis-a-vis the system. By buying in so thoroughly, they empower the crooked endeavors of those above them.
The fattened middle constitutes the vast majority of suburban and Main Street America. These are the people who scoff at you when you try to talk about subjects like corporate media control or our unsustainable debt economy. Believe me, I’ve tried. They’re content with bread and circuses, the sad despicable bastards.
PL: Excellent look at the subject from a different angle.
Perfect example of over sized organization full of non-producers: NASA.
Back in 2004, SpaceShipOne nabbed the Ansari X Prize by making two manned spaceflights within a 2 week period (if I recall correctly, they did it within 10 days). I called my mom because I thought she would be excited about the news. She hadn’t heard anything about it. She is a deputy director at a NASA contractor and has worked on the International Space Station and the Ares/Constellation project. So, not only did she not care enough to follow the news, but apparently no one else in the office was talking about it either. She doesn’t know the word for a Chinese space explorer (Taikonaut) or what a Lyman-alpha blob is (the largest known thing in the universe).
The office she works in is filled with people who should be excited about their jobs. They’re working in one of the coolest, most exciting industries, but they’re completely disinterested in their jobs.
The Russian Soyuz program is much cheaper than the Space Shuttle, and if you mention it to anyone working at NASA (or for a contractor) they’ll explain that our space program is so expensive because of our rigorous safety standards. The Russians haven’t had a space fatality since 1971. Since the last Russian death, we’ve lost the Challenger and Columbia. We’re more concerned with running something through an appropriately named bureaucracy than results. I bet the Russian middle managers would talk your ear off about space exploration if given the chance.
I want to feel bad for the ~75% of NASA contractors who are losing their jobs. But really, we don’t need them, and maybe cutting the fat will mean we get to have rocket ships again. I watched a History Channel special where they discussed the dark ages, and how people were living among the ruins (arenas, aqueducts, roads, etc) of a greater empire, incapable of reproducing its technology or industriousness. That’s sort of what it feels like now in the US, especially when someone uses the cliche, “We can put a man on the moon but we can’t ______.” No, we can’t put a man on the moon. We used to be able to 40 years ago.
And, I laughed out loud at that e-mail conversation. I was lucky enough to never personally be part of one of those, but I probably read, literally, 100 or more conversations just like that one while doing document review on the Lehman bankruptcy.
PL: It all comes down to the one word no one in the general news media or government will ever openly discuss: Overcapacity. We all know we have too many bodies for the work necessary, at way too high a labor cost compared to developing nations, and with way too many expectations from years of being told by politicians “We can all have it all! And nobody has to pay!”
People talk about Keynesian policies like they’re a cure for creative destruction. You don’t need an economics degree to realize that’s preposterous. In theory, they’re short term loans to the next bubble. In a recession this severe, they’re palliative.
Every single thing you’ve ever written makes me want to just set fire to the whole damned facade and go live out my days in the woods somewhere. Thoreau had it right (partially) – life is about simplicity, whether that means camping out in a cabin and enjoying nature or drinking yourself silly every night just to squeeze a little bit more out of the pleasure neurons in your brain. We’ll all be gone soon one way or another – let the next generation deal with our mess. Responsibility is overrated (i.e., all of Thoreau’s postulation on civic responsibility was bullshit).
PL: “In the long run, we’re all dead.” – Keynes
This is only tangentially relevant to this particular post, but I hope you are self aware enough to realize that when white dudes who’ve been born to and spent their entire lives in upper-middle class start talking libertarianism everyone else just rolls their eyes.
PL: I am, but this isn’t a piece for the Young Republican set. This is aimed at any worker who’s looked around and thought, “Why is the payroll of this company so big? Why are Bob and Tom and Bill getting $330k together where Tom is basically doing the work of all three? Wouldn’t we be better off with Tom, one $70k assistant and a bonus pool for both of them? Wouldn’t that get the same work done, if not more, for around $200-220K?”
We are having debates right now in this country about whether teachers should receive tenure solely based on seniority. As we speak, govt workers who’ve been loading up on overtime like mad for five years before retirement to maximize the size of retirement pensions few, if any, private sector employees ever see are complaining about potential modest future cuts. In the old days, that was okay, because the private sector made a lot more than govt work. That’s not the case anymore. Today, that govt worker’s pay and benefits outpaces those of his private sector counterpart and still he’s gifted a pension and lifetime benefits the private sector worker would never receive. This isn’t an issue of ideology. This is an issue about numbers not working, about a warped system that’s brought to its knees as much by the middle as the poles. We could punitively tax Wall Street all day and rip away every social safety net we give to the poor and still those costs would never approach a fraction of the stealth theft half the middle class effects on business and govt every day.
If we’re going to blame the rich and the poor, we ought to be self aware enough to blame part of the middle as well. And that includes the upper middle class, where a major portion of the “Fattened Middle” exists. At least thirty percent of all lawyers fall into the sector.
You kind of overshot the mark with this one by forgetting something: These people allow the productive ones to be as productive as they are. Like you rightly pointed out, you can’t just fire these people. Why? Because in larger organizations they constitute perennial load offs by smoothing out the politics inherent in any big group of people working together and the influence issues that go with it. The main gripe you seem to have with these people is that they don’t produce anything tangible or concrete. I’d contend that’s never been their purpose. You can’t keep running a big organization the way you would a small one, it just doesn’t work. Idolizing the smaller company structure where everybody is on top of everything and thus become potentially more “productive” is insanely inefficient when you start hitting 100+ employees.
I work for a big insurance company and the reality you describe doesn’t really exist anymore in my experience. The big organizations are so slim and toned today that, as a rule, you will unapologetically be out on your ass within a few months of missing profitability requrements. And as for ways to measure this numerically the consultant hordes are always a phonecall away. The halcyon days of the seat-warmer has been gone for some time.
I’m not an idiot, i’m aware of the necessity for entertainment value in your writing. However, the main appeal of your writing lies in the Truth, delivered in a (sometimes overly) sardonic and dismissive way. Just avoid that tendency of letting your prose run away with you as I think it did in this piece. After all, it’s your ability to deliver the truth that makes the prose worthwhile in the first place.
PS: Spot on with the overcapacity remark.
PL: I don’t think so. I think this was a more of a bulls-eye than many things I’ve written. What I’ve described survives in large part because it is inscrutable. You know something’s siphoning the efficiency from our organizations, and you know them when you work around them, but nobody can ever fully, concisely describe them. This is about as succinctly as I could in the limited space given.
But I see your criticisms, and they’re well made. My only reply would be, your example is limited (one company’s efficiency, or even one industry’s, does not make a complete rebuttal). Additionally, having sued money from some folks in the insurance industry, I find it difficult to believe that one could ever be anything close to efficient. You could fire 75% of the claims side of an insurance company and replace them with a couple dozen smart PI lawyers. Yes, I’m serious. Lawyers are hired guns. Take a guy making a decent six figure buck doing Plaintiff’s work and incentivize him with a bonus pool that’ll net him seven figures if he saves a certain amount of money and you’ll see some truly effective approaches to minimizing lawsuit verdicts and settlement costs. Instead, you have thousands and thousands of adjusters following cookie cutter procedures and writing oversized checks to both defense counsel and the plaintiffs.
You don’t need to “smooth” anything. You simply need to:
1. Incentivize with real, serious pay (accrued from firing excess labor); and
2. Give people equity (a man with a stake in the outcome works; a man without one is a mercenary and will eventually get complacent).
People who need “smoothing” need firing. Why managers tolerate the “human” element baffles me. Most people who play politics do so in lieu of producing, and are inevitable problems. Get rid of them early and save yourself the later headache.
Dude…didn’t you used to write stories about boozing, eating mushrooms, and shooting the shit when you were 18? I understand times are rough, and that there should be discussion based on what’s going on. C’mon though, I deal with it everyday…your site used to be a time for me to get away and relive the times i had when I was younger. Twenty minutes during a long day that I could get an escape. Now, your posts are once a month, and usually political rants of some sort. Lets get back to the good times…help us working folk forget the bad times for awhile…
PL: I bounce back and forth. But I also write what I’m thinking, and frankly, I’m not thinking about that a lot right now. There’s some in the barrel, but lately, I’ve been more interested in pointing out things I find interesting… and the mainstream media seems to avoid like the fucking plague.
amen to all of that… I work in manufacturing, setting up production lines. A few years ago the company I was at had several rounds of restructuring. The result of that was my boss had a new boss and his boss had a new boss and his boss had a new boss. This left us with 3 out of 5 levels having no clue about the business we were running and everyone except me trying to justify their existence to someone new above them who A. knew nothing about what we were doing and B. was also trying to justify their existence to their new boss. The result of this was the whole rotten, worthless lot of them decided they had better produce Something. Which meant they all came down to the production floor to “help” me. It became fairly obvious at that point that none of them had anything of value to contribute to the company. I couldn’t handle the micro managing as well as having to trip over 3 levels of people making several times what i did so I left a.s.a.f.p. My boss and his boss were both let go a short time later (unfortunately my boss was the one other level who actually did know something about what was going on). Anyway, it was so much like a f-ing dilbert cartoon (or a PL column) I wanted to cry (I drank instead) They wondered why they couldn’t get their product cost down, they wondered where they could find more money to devote to R&D, Engineering and Quality…. absolutely terrifying to think that a good portion of American corporations operate that way. I did get some satisfaction in finding out that after everyone was fired they eventually did things how I had told them to in the first place. It’s been years and it still makes me want to punch every one of them in the face.
PL: More hands for the sake of more hands is breaking the fingers on the ones you’ve got.
PL, granting all of this, though— the fattened middle structure serves a societal purpose. The vast majority of people do not have sufficient ambition to give a flying cock about anything other than clocking in and clocking out. They lack the vision to create, the desire to maximize, and the raw intellect to enhance– it’s security they desire above all. In the earlier days, they filled out the factories of the industrial economy- literally clocking and clocking out, with no more. When we went post-industrial, the capitalist class made enormous gains, but the outsourcing of factory jobs to third world shitholes and losses to productivity gains tossed the Fattened Middle into the forest. Without the middling corporate america shit-work that grew immensely as the factories ramped down, these people would go absolutely apeshit. Witness the rage at 9.7% unemployment. Now double unemployment, and double the rage. The capitalist folks have it real good since we went post-industrial– real good. They do not need the useless fucks with nondescript bachelor degrees, middling tubby children, and resetting ARMS upsetting the apple cart with political demands to soak the rich and stop the mauling of the middle class. So up until very recently, the trade has been essentially a good one– come in, do meaningless red tape nonsense that would bore the most average brain, go home, rinse, repeat until social security kicks in. Stay able to just make your mortgage payments so you keep your fat mouth shut about the wrenching changes to the american economy that are enriching some and fucking others in the ass. The ironic thing is, until some of them actually caught the hard shaft in the stinkhole recently, they never realized that trading silence for security left them without the latter anyway.
PL: I want to argue with this or say something about it, but I can’t make its points any better or add to them and I’m hard-pressed to disagree.
Another problem these large bureaucracies create is that they become incredibly rigid when it comes to hiring. Hiring largely comes down to what your degree is in, how good the school is, and how many years you can claim to have worked in the right industry. And, large businesses don’t have the flexibility to craft jobs to fit the employees.
For instance, I’m not particularly well suited for legal research and memo writing. I’m not bad at it, but there are definitely people at my old firm who were much better. What I am good at is coordinating groups and getting them to finish their jobs on time and under budget. Pretty useful for a large law firm, but the actual value an employee can bring is ignored in favor of fitting them into a pre-defined role. Large projects at law firms don’t have someone assigned primarily as an expediter. Someone is in charge of the project, but their main purpose is still doing research and billing hours, and this leads to pretty crappy management. Hiring an expediter for $75k or $90k would mean you get better results, projects are completed faster, and fewer attorney hours spent doing non-billable work. But, that’s not the model law firms use, and so no one wants to deviate from it.
And, this is true across many industries. How many law schools are looking at hiring professors to teach formal deductive reasoning? Probably none. Really useful skill, there are tons of philosophy PhDs out there looking for jobs, but since it’s not already part of normal law school curricula, it’s doubtful a dean would ever seriously consider adding it. I doubt there are any companies who put out job ads that just say “Here’s what we do, and if you’re smart and talented and motivated, and think you can contribute to our organization, we want to hear your pitch.”
Anyways, back to stockpiling gasoline and frozen concentrated orange juice so I’ll be ready when the revolution comes. (They’re both good supplies on their own, or you can combine them to make a quick napalm.)
Btw, if you haven’t seen it yet, this is a pretty interesting video on motivation and job performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc It doesn’t give many details about the research, but it seems in line with all the behavioral econ stuff I’ve read.
PL: The “brand” meritocracy in this country is a disaster. It puts legions of wind-up dolls with no practical ability in all sorts of positions to make total fucking messes and run companies and firms into the ground. Corporations do a horrible job of discovering and nurturing talent, and they recoil with suspicion from any suggestion that cuts against their orthodoxies regarding labor development. You hit the nail on the head.
A good start would be wholesale firing of every HR department. Those people are almost always the most criminally stupid individuals in any organization, and a total waste of dollars.
This one is also good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo&NR=1
PL: I’ve read an Ehrenreich article (I think it was a blurb from a book) on the subject a few months back. She nails our penchant for self-delusion quite nicely. But you know what? Her audience will always be a small slice of skeptics and curiosity seekers… Why? Because eternal belief in the positive sells, and people want to hear it. They want to believe things are going to be better.
Now, of course, if you read Ehrenreich carefully, she’s saying exactly that: “Things will get better… If you just learn where you’re being manipulated, or deluding yourself, and take the time to avoid falling into the trap. You’ll succeed in that instance while others collapse, and thus, you’ll be ahead of the game.” But no one wants to pay attention to that because that’s telling people, “You’re responsible. You have to think. The responsibility’s yours.” They want to hear someone explain to them how they can channel some amorphous force to cause good things to happen to them. Hence, The Secret has sold about 5,000,000 more copies than Ehrenreich’s last book.
Doing’s hard. People want to believe instead.
I don’t see why you are so sour on the tea parties. There are obviously a lot of idiots tied to the movement, but its general principles of less government spending, less regulation of businesses, and letting bloated corperations go bankrupt seems like the way to eliminate the fattened middle you talk about.
Also, Mazzini please elaborate.
PL: I’m thrilled that the Tea Parties are going to force Obama to hold the line on taxes. Utterly thrilled, and thankful. And I applaud wholeheartedly their efforts to pare down govt employee compensation, and the general size of govt. I think they’re wonderful in that regard and owe them a debt of gratitude for doing what I never would.
BUT, I think it’s tawdry to demand Medicare spend $300k to keep your 85 year old grandmother alive for a few more months with terminal cancer while calling yourself a “fiscal hawk.” I also think it’s beating on the weak to assail the welfare state. There are a lot of hard-working people screwed in this economy through no fault of their own, and unemployment insurance extensions and safety nets are a drip in the bucket compared to what we spend on so much other garbage we don’t need. Fire the govt employees and gut their pensions, Yes.* But at the same time, have the decency to admit we need to all agree to give up some benefits, starting with cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and don’t kick the weakest group when they’re down. Kick the government workers. Kick the crony capitalists. They can fight back, and that’s a battle we need to have. Leave the poor alone. They’re screwed enough already.
*They’re probably cheaper to maintain in unemployment than in their jobs.
Excellent article.
Oddly enough, it reminded me of an Economist article on the German “employment miracle”, or the fact that the German unemployment is only at 8.1% despite an enormous decrease in GDP. The German economy has the resiliency towards severe job loss that many in the U.S. desire, but that’s because of the nature of the relatively spry new Germany. Manufacturing and engineering are at the forefront, people work in well defined jobs or in specific professions and, most importantly, there is a massive welfare net for married couples with children. People who have jobs work, people who don’t have jobs take in a reasonable amount of money, and the people who do have jobs pay taxes through the nose to subsidize the system that allows them to be productive.
The two questions that arise from this: 1: Is it worth the ridiculous taxes to fund the giant safety net needed if the genuinely unproductive were to be fired? 2: Would you rather pay ridiculous taxes, or be in the middle of the economic insanity that is currently gripping the U.S.?
PL: In order… 1. Yes. The taxes would not be as high as assumed. Nothing puts the complacent in touch with their inner ambitious streak like necessity. A substantial percentage of those no longer allowed to hide in inefficient govt and private organizations would find productive ways to make a living. 2. See No. 1.
Scratch a cynic and you’ll find a closet idealist. I think people will naturally exploit any system that allows them to be lazy. Similarly, however, if that temptation is removed, I think a fair number of these people will put the conniving they currently engage in to avoid hard work toward entrepreneurial ventures, or toward the provision of value in smaller businesses, where they can’t hide.
I think you’re being a bit harsh about Krugman. Yeah, he’s a left wing highly partisan polemicist but all the stuff he’s saying related to the economic crashes is the same stuff he was saying back in the nineties when he was just a non-partisan centre left economist. You could swap some dates and names around with sections of ‘Depression Economics’, stick it in place of one of his columns and it would be pretty damn similar.
He only turned into the Great Shrill One after the Bush admin (in his eyes at least) refused to back up their tax cuts with economic models of any kind; on the basis that Reagan and Clinton would at least attempt to use economic models even if some people thought they were wrong.
His nineties work actually makes some of the best primers on layman’s econ you could hope for, especially if you’re buying for people who seem to be teetering dangerously on the left edge of the cliff into hippyville. They explain that no, labour saving improvements do not decrease employment, that sweatshops are often preferable to scavenging off a rubbish dump, that globalisation won’t cost everyone their job and that people who think Keynesianism means never cutting government spending, ever, are tools. Because of his left of centre credentials, he can go to China and convince people who would otherwise write off such things as propaganda.
‘Pop Internationalism’ was one of those books you read and think ‘not only was 95% of what I knew about this subject wrong, but 95% of what experts in the news say about this subject is utter bollocks’. You’ll get the urge to slap most people who talk about the need for America to be competitive after you read it, but it’s still well worth a read.
As for stimulus, I think his basic thrust isn’t that we’re in this mess because the rich refuse to pay taxes but that we’re in this mess because you just had a recession and unemployment is nearly 10%. Also too, healthcare costs. You’re paying 3x as much as us crazy pinko lefties in blighty per capita and getting marginally worse healthcare out of it. If you want to talk about cutting the fat middle class, I’d turn your eyes to hospitals, pharmaceuticals and insurance companies first and foremost.
PL: I specifically used “madman” as opposed to “fool” because I have great respect and admiration for Krugman. I’ve read him for as long as he’s been writing and think he’s brilliant. But a second stimulus package right now is insanity. The Congress cannot be given a check because they will not allocate the funds in any manner expect that which benefits their limited political self-interests. The better course is to continue to allow the Fed to do stealth stimulus (watch it drive down the repo rates in the next few months, and prepare to see a second tax credit for home buyers).
I agree on his Nineties work. He’s an excellent writer and has a fantastic ability to simplify and explain economics (it really is a simple subject, made difficult primarily by a lot of dumb industry-speak used to describe simple concepts) in short, crisp columns.
He didn’t say we’re where we are because the rich don’t pay taxes, but he has been quite shrill in screaming for tax increases on the rich to make up the slack. That’s regressive, silly, ’70s Democrat thinking, and he knows better. He’s read Arthur Laffer, and he’s acutely aware all that will do is send the money overseas.
On your last point, I agree. We need to address end-of-life care and find ways to incentivize people to avoid preventable chronic disease like diabetes, which balloons health care costs. A good start someone mentioned to me over the weekend? Ending our preposterous subsidies to farmers to grow corn, the dregs of which can then be turned into high fructose corn syrup and create a new generation of diabetics among the clueless masses who don’t know how to properly feed themselves. And God yes – if we’re to have any mass firings, may they start with health care insurance administrators. Nothing could could be more wasteful.
On pharma, well… We’re all on so many drugs over here that’ll never, ever, happen. But I’m with you on dreaming of it.
I was under the impression that you guys would find it impossible to get rid of just about any farming subsidy, since the vast majority of the subsidies are pretty much handouts to rich constituents in exchange for kickbacks; and because so many state politicians benefit from these kickbacks you’d never be able to get a vote to end one because your confederacy of dunces would close arms to protect each other. Good luck with it either way.
PL: Perhaps, but the illogic there is so staggering somebody somewhere in the media is going to start demanding an explanation for that imbecilic subsidy. We’d be better off subsidizing tobacco. Cigarettes take most people out early. They get a heart attack young or lung cancer, which has a 16% survival rate. Both work quickly and, on a macro scale, probably provide savings to Social Security and Medicare over the long haul. Diabetes goes on forever at ever-growing costs. Thanks, Archer Daniels Midland!
Oh and speaking of John Galt speeches, I found these two a few days ago and love them both:
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2010/02/monsters-sweet-perfume.html
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2009/08/view-from-my-recession.html
PL: Thanks. I’ll take a look.
I looked over your post again and realized we agree on the Truly Unproductive. My point was that some of those that seem to do nothing actually contribute some value in intangible ways. You were talking about the ones that Produce Absolutely Nothing, and we are in agreement on those.
In the end, I see the attitudes of the Truly Unproductive Middle as symptoms of a larger ill, one that goes beyond their annoying effects in the here and now. Our discontent with them should come not from envying their supposed leisure in providing insulated Mcservices, but through pity and concern. These are not happy, vivacious and “alive” people. They are casualties, poster children for inner desperation. Not necessarily dumb, just robbed of any semblance of a clue about what to do with their lives aside from collecting paychecks in the least stressful manner.
If you’ve ever wondered about that curious psychological phenomenon where seemingly respectable people go to shrinks due to their constant fear of being “found out”, i’d wager a lot of them fall in this category.
Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a quick fix. The rot in the mechanics of society that allows these attitudes to come about probably runs pretty deep.
PL: I’m talking about the ones who, when viewed generally, over time, cost more than they’re worth, on an individual and organizational basis.
I hear your point, but I’ve got little pity for what gets in the way of decent, hard-working people get more for their efforts. A business isn’t a charity. They’ve got psychiatrists, or whiskey, to deal with their personal issues. Collecting salary dollars riding other people’s work is inexcusable.
Of course, if you can get away with it, I don’t besmirch you. I see no reason a man shouldn’t bleed what he can from a system if that’s his aim. But when he’s busted – when the system runs low on money and it looks to winnow inefficiencies and he gives him the axe – nobody owes him pity.
Another great post. Glad to read in the comments section that you mention the necessity of cuts to the entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare) but believe me when I say that what you call the “mythical ‘welfare mother’” is not a myth. I work for a private company dealing with government entitlement programs, and while there are certainly people out there in sincere need of the assistance the government programs offer, there are probably an equal number of people who have been taught and coached in ways to manipulate the system (usually from friends and relatives who are already receiving the same assistance) to, in essence, get something for nothing. Unfortunately, it’s not my job to try to make that distinction between the two groups. I leave that up to the highly qualified (ahem) workers in the various State and Federal agencies. What really gets to me is the fact that my output and productivity is directly related to increasing the number of people receiving benefits from these entitlement programs. In order for me to feel successful and productive, I’m increasing the size of the cut on an already lethal laceration, which is being paid for by the taxes taken out of my paycheck, and the check of every other person out there trying to be a productive member of society. I started to do the math one day, adding up the amount of money that I was seeing paid out from these entitlement programs in just one state for a given month, then I started thinking about multiplying that 49 more times as the same programs are running and paying out in every state in the country. I had to stop. It was just too depressing and I’d really like to be able to come to work and do my job well without feeling like I had completely sold my soul. But this is a subject and problem that we’ll never hear brought up by our lawmakers on either side of the aisle, because to raise the issue and offer any viable solutions would be political suicide.
PL: There’ll be thieves in any system, but on their worst day, the welfare grifters don’t receive $50k, a pension and lifetime healthcare benefits. We have people in this country earning $50-100k protesting and picketing their employers’ demands that they pay a $20 co-pay for medical visits. You can’t buy a fucking case of beer anymore for $20.
We’ll never discuss this subject because it touches three volatile nerves the media tries to avoid:
1. Overcapacity;
2. Unreal expectations of the average American; and
3. The fact that the uber-rich, poor and political classes are not the only ones filled with cynical manipulators.
Nobody in the mainstream media points the gun at Joe Sixpack. Even now, it’s always the Wall Street bankers, or the poor, dumb subprime borrowers.
It is, in part. But in just as large part it’s the average American, opportunistically riding where he ought to be innovating, leaving someone else to do the heavy lifting – ubiquitous, but woven in the fabric of our bloated corporations so deeply he could never be extracted, segregated from the rest and criticized. The best anyone can do is describe him loosely as I attempted here.
Sound like something you’ve heard of before? I think I have the word: Cancer.
I think the solution to the fattened middle is not to reform these giant, wasteful companies. It would be like trying to force someone to swallow the red pill. You can put information like this out there, but most people just like to read things that confirm their world view.
Change will come through competition. We don’t have free international calling now because someone in AT&T figured out how to offer a better service to their customers. We have it because a few random Estonians were playing around with technology and built Skype. Richard Branson didn’t go over to NASA and try to become a subcontractor on Ares/Constellation, he just went out and started Virgin Galactic. Bloggers have put a major dent into traditional news media by getting information out faster, and often times providing better commentary. I don’t Jimbo Wales tried to reform Encarta from the inside before starting Wikipedia.
As more resources become cheap or free, more people will be able to opt out of the bloated system and say “I can do this better and faster, haha, fuck you, and fuck your stock value.”
Let me know if you need a director of legal writing when you open Contrarian School of Law.
PL: You’d be surprised how far some of this shit goes. Ideas can spread like mad, and we’re in a tinder box environment. Perhaps the corporate and govt agency Darwinism I’m advocating is impossible, but if an idea like this – an observation – can spread into the right hands… I one of the several thousand who’ve read this since yesterday should put it in the hands of someone who write speeches for some politician… Well, hell – who knows what could happen? Someone might try to fix the universally recognized malady I’ve described here.
I’m as suited for the esoteric nonsense of law school as you. They’d do as well to make us both hairdressers, or Chinese calligraphers.
The element not being discussed is that the system builds the fattened middle through education. The public school system is a joke (I’ve both attended and worked in them). You don’t learn to problem solve, innovate, or make decisions. You learn to memorize, take orders, and follow protocol. This goes for universities as well. Is it any surprise when you find adults with the characteristics you’ve described?
The situation is only getting worse, tying school funding and success to standardized test scores. These tests can never measure the unique profile of the individual. It’s about fitting the person to the system, not fitting the system to the person. The powers-that-be want domesticated, weak-minded drones. Either that, or their policies are woefully misguided.
PL: Fixation on standardized testing is one of the chief reasons we have such an inflexible, uncreative workforce in this country. But it’s not the mere act of testing that’s the problem. In itself, there is nothing wrong with administering and weighing a person’s ability to work with certain concepts to determine if he is right for a job. The problem is the outsized emphasis put on the results of such testing. Why do schools and companies place so much emphasis on it? I’d say because they’re too big and automated to focus on people in anything but a cursory fashion. And in fairness, even for a small organization, the process of weeding out bad applicants on a person by person basis would be impossible.
I have interviewed people, and I have worked against and with people of low academic pedigree and people of high academic pedigree. A person’s schooling is mildly instructive as to his abilities, emphasis on “mildly.” I find a lot of guys who went to the good schools and aced all the standardized tests will understand the complicated words, write proficient, technically solid briefs. But their emphasis isn’t so much on winning as it is on preserving a brand. They’d rather lose an argument than submit papers the boss would assail for containing one or two flawed constructions or typos. They’re narrow careerists. They’ve learned to excel at what’s given to them, in a fashion a professor would reward with an A. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s entirely rational given the corporate systems in which we work. But these are people with great intellectual horsepower, and it seems an insane waste for them to focus so much energy on playing the game rather than on getting results.
You didn’t address some other big issues with these types. The first is that they have already fucked up the system so severely that instead of going to the productive economy, many intelligent and hard working people now attempt to become the alpha-fat middle. The trader who finds the loophole in the code and makes bank off regulatory arbitrage, the clever attorney who manipulates the inconsistancies in the law, the politician who can use key words that trigger the defense mechanisms in this class that has been habituated to not think- all of these characters could have been the Cornelius Vanderbilts or Andrew Carnegies of the past. Instead, they are just a more effective version of the member of the fat middle.
A second issue I introduced above- these people love to vote and are easy as shit to manipulate by politicians. When you live your life as inoffensively as possible, it is crucial that you know enough to blend in, but little enough to not be tempted to make real decisions or resent your own existence. This makes them so easy to manipulate. They forward e-mails about how George Bush blew up the WTC and Obama is from Kenya. Spitting focus-grouped words at them at the right rate wins you a seat. Opposing the fat middle loses it for you (unless you are in a heavily politically biased seat, e.g. Vermont, Oklahoma) David Cameroun saying, “Every pound we waste is one pound we can’t use on the most vulnerable” is refreshing to the ear, but even with 5 years of reasonably free reign I don’t see anything being done.
The third issue is these people are hateful fuckers. They are scared shitless of talent, and will often try to torpedo you if you do things well. I applied for a lot of jobs in consulting and legal fields, and I always kind of felt like a character in a horror movie- the only way to keep the zombies from eating your brains was to walk around like one of them. Because so many of the talented have become dependent on the fat middle as described in my first paragraph, and because the political system rewards the stupidity as discussed in the second, it is very difficult to work outside of their structure. And inertia is a bitch.
PL: I don’t take issue with the people who can work the system to create profits. The trader playing regulatory arbitrage doesn’t bother me because he’s piling money into the organization. He’s paying for himself. The slug writing up a stack of HR policies isn’t paying for himself. He’s pulling money out of the organization and giving nothing back.
Your third point is excellent. Everyone should read that last paragraph. There is nothing more pathetic than a low man who wishes to see those above him fail.
One real problem with the modern economy and modern workplaces is the prevalent idea that you can never be told what to do by someone who makes less money than you.
Sometimes management takes less scarce skill than highly specialized client work. The manager should probably be payed less in this case than the person who works for the client.
Pay level does not imply authority over someone in all cases where I work, and it does wonders for both morale and productivity. The hiring is done to compliment existing skills, and if the guy who makes $20k a year less than you (he is me) tells you to do something based on his area of expertise, you do it, he shoulders the risk. You don’t pass the buck, and he gets to do something creative. Does this mean everyone’s ass is on the line all of the time? Sure. And that is why it works.
We have a payroll accountant but no HR staff. As if you didn’t already know that.
PL: I was asked by a managing partner a couple times to police a partner above me. Small organization, though, and man, was that bizarre. I couldn’t really push the guy. All I could do was nag. It was like someone was paying me to be a whiny housewife. “Did you finish that thing yet? Is it done? We really, really need it done.”
Your description of the individuals who exist in government solely to exist in government (as well as the many spectrum’s of those agencies) was a very apt description of the U.S. military. Impossibly over funded, ridiculously under managed on a broad scale and micro managed on a smaller scale, the entire organization sustains itself on promotions based less on ability and more on time served. I cannot describe how often our daily tasks were driven by the need to look busy, and how any complaints to that effect were responded with shrugs or claims that we were being disrespectful and insubordinate. But no solutions were ever given, or made.
PL: The problem there is the perverse “government grant” incentive. State agencies that receive grants spend profligately because they know if they come in under budget, next year’s grant of federal or state money will be smaller. That the same phenomenon is taking place in the military is uniquely troubling in that there are soldiers in harm’s way the money siphoned out through inefficiencies you describe could be used to better aid and protect.
As to tenure, it’s an outdated concept that needs to have been jettisoned decades ago. Academia offers the argument that without it, professors couldn’t speak their mind openly, and there is some merit to that. But that argument disappears the minute one steps off campus. No high school teacher, no partner, no employee of any sort is entitled to that kind of job protection. It’s madness. A better incentive to laziness is unimaginable. And to base it on seniority is even worse. Every corporate or governmental “Mr. Chips” should be awarded a huge pension and top benefits for life because he managed to last longer than those around him? In what bizarro universe is that jackass system logical?
“The organization is inefficient, ineffective and grossly over budget… What should we do?”
“We should reward those who stick with it longest!”
[...] Link Love Thanks to the Philadelphia Lawyer for recommending me to his Twitter followers. Be sure to check out his newest piece, The Giant Sucking Sound. [...]
Golly, people are so phelsosphical on this website. Where are the douches from bitterlawyer?
PL: To what whiskey shall I credit that mangled misspelling?
If only I could disclose the shenanigans I have seen in the last week. Now who wants to go to the clerk’s office?
PL: You can’t set that up and then not deliver.
I get what your saying, but I can’t entirely agree. Until life is lived entirely based on meritocracy & individual production, nothing will ever change and even then, you’d have to continually reassess year-over-year (see baseball players who have career years, sign a fat contract and then suck the following year). Besides, too many people feel compassion to fully agree with your assessment. And the fat middle helps to reduce volatility by anchoring the economy. And my last point, you can find value in almost any person if you simply change your point of view. Obviously easier said than done, but the cutting out the fat middle isn’t like cutting out an appendix or tonsil, you cut out the fat middle and you kill the beast.
PL: I see no reason to reduce volatility. Volatility cleanses the system. It allows people who’d otherwise be priced out to get into the game. Maintenance of the status quo is far more damaging over time.
Compassion for able-bodied people who don’t want to compete is unwarranted. To compel those who do get in the fight every day to pay for those who won’t is a staggering lack of compassion for the productive.
[...] That’s right, I was just an intern. It feels so funny to say this now, because I always felt above the deprecating title. I suppose this was how they wanted you to feel, even as an intern: delusionally elevated. [...]
Another reason to get rid of the 80% dead weight in offices is that they are as bland and uninteresting as the fluorescent lights they sit under all day.
Cloistered away in my nerd cave / server room of the building beavering away on the file server and such, I’m all too familiar with those friggin’ email chains you referenced in this piece. It’s motherfuckers like you and your buddies who remind us there are actual human beings with a sense of humour using our network amongst these wind-up toys.
Naturally, middle management would have us believe that’s -all- you’re doing on company time and would have us squeal on your extra-vocational shenanigans. I think their accusations of you wasting your time spent on dicking around after getting real work done projects how very little they do each day.
Rat on the only interesting people in the building? Yeah, right. More like a ‘glitch’ in the server ends up sending dinner.avi from Bob’s email to the typing pool.
PL: We’d all work a lot better if people would more openly admit it’s Just a Game, and none of it really matters. You make better decisions when you’re loose. You also realize that true “freedom” has little to do with money or what we’ve been bullshitted into thinking of as success… That most of it is in how you think, and whether you allow the stressbags to control you.
The treadmill’s a fiction. You can skip 7 out of 10 of the “urgent” projects thrown at you and in 48 hours, they’ll have resolved themselves. Often, the best way to deal with some idiot annoying you with a non-essential bag of demands is to simply ignore him to the point where he gets frustrated enough to think for himself and solve the problem on his own (which he was usually supposed to be doing in the first place).
Wow crazy coincidence! I was directed to this from google when I was looking for some clips of Evan Stone and Sasha Grey from “This is Not the Cosbys – XXX”!
PL: You should see the links I get from searches for “Don Rickles nude.”
Oh, and as a follow on to that… I want to add that I COMPLETELY disagree with everything anybody has ever said. In total. PIZZA! PIZZA!
PL: Negative Absolute Dadaism, a/k/a Reflexive Rejectionism, went out with Bill Ray Cyrus.
Yes, hurray for Krugman!! With a government spending GDP multiplier less than 1, more stimulus is surely the answer. Heaven forbid spending is cut. But that won’t happen because the fat bastard security guards at the airport who tell you to “move along” or “you can’t park here” (even when you explain you are picking someone up and you can see said person walking towards you) vote. But no, we need to fund jobs that annoy the hell out of the rest of society or we’ll have AL Sharpton pulling out the rug from under re-election campaigns, complaining the incumbent doesn’t support job opportunities. This entitlement society has become so used to high paying government jobs that even a slight reduction is seen as an attack. We’ve backed ourselves into a corner psychologically.
PL: Those slugs at the airport have no transferrable skill set. They can’t do anything but menial labor jobs the need for which is shrinking daily, and they won’t do any work for less than $30 a hour and union benefit plans. They’ve backed themselves into a corner, I’d say. They just don’t know it yet.
Are you going to write a book about this stuff? I mean, I loved the themes in HHIFA, but….you need to write a fucking book about this man.
PL: Yeah, I have to comprise all these articles into a book. But what the fuck would I call it?
@ Van Wagner
I’m not a giant fan of tenure, but it can serve a purpose even in public school education. I have heard of horror stories from teachers who would lose their jobs if they taught the story of Galileo because of its criticism of the catholic church. I think this can be solved in other ways (better principals, for one) but there is still a need for some sort of protection for teachers who run up against unruly parents. Disclaimer: I am not defending those who have learned to not care about their students because there is no consequence for their own failure as teachers.
PL: Parents who want to inflict their moral code on the rest of the school should be invited to home school their children. If they make a fuss after that choice has been offered, they should be introduced to security and escorted from campus.
You are right in making a comparison of the effect in having the attitude at hand to that of cancer. Right now i’m a college student working at a low level job in a big corp. Many of the policies and the training in place (which the comp loves to say was developed by those who were Harvard and Cornell educated) are indequate… That is to say, a poorly educated beast (I consider myself a beast) could have written them, and since someone at the top approved of it, all the little robots adhere to these policies/whatever’s in place. People are not taught to think for themselves, or perhaps they lack that ability, and so they are pretty obedient in as much as it benefits them (whatever allows them to be lazy and have a paycheck). This stems from the entitlement issue you mentioned, and entitlement seems to know no socio economic bounds. Whether they are rich, poor, or in between, these people are unproductive, and still, they want more. They do not understand what cost is, what it can entail, and they are too self absorbed to even give it consideration. Therein lies the problem. It is cultural. You can bicker about taxes or oil spills, but in the end, if the cultural root is not addressed, then the fight turns into a crazy orgy of misguided ideals. Isn’t that what we see in politics and on tv? Things that are supposed to practical are suddenly linked to what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil’, what we can ‘accept’ and what we cannot tolerate. The system is broken, but like you said, it is entirely rational for what we have here in America. How do we move away from that, from those unreal expectations? We need to have different standards, higher standards. We need honesty. From my reading, it’s said that my generation is supposed to be idealistic (wanting to save the world, what ambition!), but most kids… so many kids… are not realistic about this. How can we have ideals that do not match up to what happens in reality? Isn’t that known as delusion?? Such delusion is what propels society right now (it manifests itself in many ways)… and the entitlement that has caused our ruin… I don’t know if this really adds to anything you’ve said, but I just wanted to tell that I started reading your blog about two weeks ago, and I absolutely love it. You are honest, and I appreciate that.
PL: I think some philosopher said that in order to govern, government had to be wrapped in a “noble lie.” The lie was that those in it were more honorable and smarter than the rest. That notion’s clearly been shot for a long time… probably since Watergate, maybe Tammany Hall days… The new noble lie is the delusion that things can continue to run as they are. It’s true the world isn’t going to end because our govt has no confidence among any voters and that we’ve spent ourselves into a dead end. Life will go on. But the delusion will get harder and harder to hold. We’ll soon have to admit openly that the emperor has no clothes, that our economy can’t sustain the obligations we’ve laid on it. I think it’s going to be hugely amusing to see people grapple with a reality they’ve avoided by immersing themselves in US Weekly and American Idol. They’re going to shit their pants when the effects of the Big Corrections start in the next few years.
Coming from a completely middle-class family, I immediately cringed when I read the title. I grinned a bit when I saw you quote Stealers Wheel (and, obviously, thought of Reservoir Dogs, but who wouldn’t?). Then I got into the piece. Going through the hiring process for a good amount of time, I think you’ve nailed the serious problems with HR departments of most companies. Yet, what I like most is what you say about upper-middle class folks (albeit only for a couple of sentences)–the executive vice presidents, scores upon scores of them producing very little, continually getting additional adjectives added to their titles to justify bogus salary increases. What irks me most, I think, is that some middle-class workers, perhaps the 20% (I’d be a little more generous than Ayn Rand on this one, but that, like anything else, is open to debate.) you speak of that actually contribute meaningful work, are laid off in order to free up money to pay these upper-management salaries. Where my dad worked, there were a host of these bozos, making $350k per year, and running the company into the ground. When it came time for cuts, the upper-management people kept their jobs; the people, the creative ones who sneered at words like synergy (perhaps my least favorite word of all time) who did most of the work all got canned.
I was truly prepared to despise this entry, but what you say here really makes sense. The message is surprisingly evenhanded because you defend nearly as many people as you skewer. Toward the end, when you talk about the people that “stitch your suit” or “drive your cab,” the argument reaches a great conclusion. Those people don’t spend times in cramped conference rooms bullshit about logistics, but simply go out and do a job and do it competently (or incredibly well).
The worst part about a rough economy is that I’ve seen friends, bright people who speak Spanish/French/German/Arabic fluently or have exceptionally dynamic personalities, jump into dogshit career paths just because they’re glad to make a paycheck. The first crap job comes down the pike, and they’ll snap at it just for a chance to pull in an entry-level salary of $35,472.00/yr. and brag to friends on their Facebook statuses that they’re “EMPLOYED!!!”
On a side note, what inspired this piece? Did you feel that when you practiced law you were part of this “fattened middle”?
Finally, kudos on the Network reference. One of my favorite movies of all time–Faye Dunaway is simply stunning in that. Remarkable how she never ever looked bad in a single pic.
PL: This piece was inspired by several annoying instances in which I had to jump through dozens of pointless hoops to get one corporate lackey who’d sign off on a goddamned settlement agreement. I’ve represented corporations and govt entities and it’s always the same – nobody wants his name attached to anything making a final decision. Fucking maddening.
What you’ve described is called the “White Collar Welfare Economy.” Kids with degrees like me, getting paid to administer and navigate layers of needless procedures created by other overpaid middle and upper class corporate and governmental “institutionalists.” An endless circle jerk where nothing of value gets created – a structure providing nothing more than a transfer of cash into the hands of people with all those silly titles you describe, so they can spend it on day care for their dogs, home theatre systems and private schools for rotten, goofy kids like I was.
[...] recently wrote this excellent piece about the Fattened Middle. The Fattened Middle are generally middle and upper-middle class white collar workers (with a few [...]
PL: If you’re reading this comment, go read the above linked piece. Now.
One of the serious problems with the fattened middle is that it’s self perpetuating. Say you have a software company, and it decides to expand by hiring 20 new junior programmers and 2 new middle managers to oversee them. That increase means you’re going to need probably two new secretaries for the middle managers, maybe a “team lead” above them, a secretary for that guy, a new person in HR, and a new person in payroll, and now that those departments are bigger, probably a supervisor for HR and payroll, and secretaries for each of them, and with the new supervisors and their secretaries, you might need yet another person in HR and payroll to handle the increased number of employees.
Then, you’re going to need a bigger space to put the new HR and payroll people, which might mean getting hiring an assistant facilities manager to help the current facilities manager, a larger custodial staff, another guy in the mail room, and maybe even a mail room supervisor to oversee things, and of course, more HR to handle those new people, and a HR training specialist to train all your new HR people, and a secretary for that specialist, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
Max Barry has an interesting book called Company, about a corporation where every department does nothing but service other departments. No actual products are ever made. It’s not a big leap from what we have today.
Lawyers have a similar fattening going on. We’ve nearly tripled the number of lawyers per capita we had in the early 1960s, but of course, we haven’t tripled the number of criminal trials per capital, or wills per capita, or the normal, natural things lawyers do. Instead, they mostly deal with regulatory matters, either for the government, or for private companies being regulated. They’re not actually producing anything, but are just an artificially created added cost of doing business. Not to say those regulations are necessarily bad (some are, some aren’t), but an increase in highly paid professionals needed to deal with the regulations is a negative side effect. And, with those lawyers come secretaries, professional development coordinators, HR, records department, payroll, training, etc…
If you do write a book on this, I think The Fattened Middle is pretty catchy.
PL: It’s called Overcapacity, and its why the legal profession is fucked… Why, as you and I know well, the unit price of the service is and will continue for the indefinite future to drop like a fucking stone.
I called this in 2005. It was hardly a unique or shrewd prediction. I think every lawyer in the country realized the hyper-leveraged monster firm business model was a house of cards. We just didn’t want to say it out loud. I mean, as the salaries kept climbing, and the trickle down effect enriched everyone at every level, why would anyone point out the 800 lb. gorilla in the corner?
I wrote in 2006 that lawyers should demand $190k as a starting salary. My thinking’s always been, “This thing’s fucked… This industry’s a goddamned joke trading a service at 10X its reasonable value… There’s gravity in everything, and the clients will inevitably demand value in a retraction. Young lawyers should get as much as you can as quickly as you can, because it’s all going to shit…”
I was right about law. What I didn’t expect was that the whole goddamned economy would go in the same direction at such an outrageous clip.
This is not dik, man.
PL: I should hope not…
“Yeah, I have to comprise all these articles into a book. But what the fuck would I call it?”
Employers are Just Not That Into You
Skinny Bitch/Skinny Bastard – The New Diet Revolution of Not Being Able to Afford to Eat
How to Win Friends and Influence Your Local Warlord
Poor Richard’s Almanac
Misery
Don’t know if anyone else caught this: “We are obligated under court order to finalize it by Monday.” And then, “How’s everybody’s schedule Tuesday afternoon?”
That leads to the Productive person staying late on Tuesday night only to get the widget out to the customer/court/whomever on essentially Wednesday – two days after they wanted it. Of course, it’s the Productive person – typically younger than the Fattened Middle that cockblocked his ability to meet the deadline – who has to explain why the deadline was missed and deal with the negative emotional fallout. When this happens several times a month, it just grinds down on him and makes the Productive person considering switching his ambition from Big Swinging Dick to Lay Low, Be Left Alone.
The subtext of the comments, “the Fattened Middle will get their ass in gear if there are incentives” assumes they are capable of being Productive. The tragedy of this article is that many in the Fattened Middle were once Productive, but the Fattened Middle from decades ago ground them into one of them.
“We’ll never discuss this subject because it touches three volatile nerves the media tries to avoid:
2. Unreal expectations of the average American”
It’s going to be really interesting to watch the draw down in many Americans standard of living as the anvil of Reality lands on them hard. This has to be reconciled with the fact that being a middle class American is expensive.
Look at how hard it’s going to be for individual families and the millions in aggregate to downgrade their lifestyles over the next few years. They’ll need to buy a car one day, but every car has a CD player and other extra options that have to come with it and that’s built into a higher price than what they need. They’ll want to keep their cell phones, but can they give up the email and internet capabilities that increase the monthly charges just enough that they can’t afford it? That’s going to drive them crazy if they were used to surfing the web or checking email while waiting. Cable used to be 50 extra channels and a clearer signal for the broadcast networks, now a more fiscally restrained family has to either go without it and give an antenna a handjob several times a night or buy the most basic cable package of 500 channels and a high-speed internet connection for bundled pricing. Do they even make tube TV’s anymore? Isn’t it all HD if they need to buy one? And you need the $130 per-year DVR because if they thought waiting around without being able to surf the web on their cell phone was bad, then they’re really not going to like sitting through all the commercials every night. Adjusted for inflation, the base price of the American middle class lifestyle is a lot more than it was the last time we went through similar economic shit in the late 1970’s.
I have a ton more to say, but I just have a feeling we’ll be talking about this here in future posts.
PL: I think smart Americans can adjust their lifestyles and find happiness without all the shit they’ve been accustomed to thinking they need. I think they will find a depth a lot of us have lost. They might start reading things that are longer than 500 words. They might start watching movies, instead of the Kardashians. They might start their own businesses and find themselves so immersed in the toil of building a new life that they won’t have the time to consider that their new car doesn’t have a 32 speaker system and 4 zone air conditioner like the old one.
I think a lot of us will develop into better, more interesting, stronger people as a result of this contraction. I really do. I think also, however, a lot of us won’t be able to cope. We’ll collapse as things continue to stagnate. We crumble and fade off the grid. And I think that’s a good thing. We could do without a lot of the people who drag on our society.
For the rest, see Schumpeter’s thoughts on creative destruction.
I’ve already seen enough of this nonsense… at age 21. I have no idea what I’ll do if I have future jobs like the one I just quit from for the rest of my life.
I work in the conference services department for my university. 60 student staff summer workers under our Executive Director and two Managers. The student staff is split into four intra-department groups, each with their own managers. I was the manager of the largest staff (20 people) – the front desk/concierge.
A university is as bad as any large organization. I need keys for a new building we’re adding on for the rest of the summer? Email the director of the building. Get a response “Oh, I’m not aware. Let me check with my superiors.” Same woman who earlier in the summer said “This is my building, take care of it (some of our staff lives in it).”
Then since we’re the largest staff, I have two assistant managers. Each are included in everything I am, there’s no difference to our knowledge or power. But since I get paid a whopping $0.50/hr more and have a fancier title, they are just utter wastes of space. They, along with the other 17 members of my staff, are the least assertive people I’ve ever met. Any issue? Run to me/another superior. From day one I’ve tried to instill the message of self assertion and have failed somehow. It’s just amazing to me that so few people can stand up for themselves and make a damn decision.
I’m actually a pretty quite and introverted person all things considered, but I know when shit needs to get done. I don’t hesitate to act. I always think, “If one of my superiors comes and asks me why I did what I did, what will I say?” So when I get a phone call with my disgruntled manager bitching about a refund I issued giving our FY10 deficit, I can say “Look, the woman had to go to the ER and wasn’t able to stay here. Clearly she didn’t use our resources and deserves a refund.” The same thing goes when I screw up. I handle a bi-weekly schedule for 20 people. 20 different preferred days, 20 different summer class/commitment schedules. I’ve had a great track record, but one girl’s vacation I missed and didn’t give her off. I was able to lay it out straight and say, “Look, I screwed up your schedule, I know. Can I give you the entire next week off instead? I’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.” That’s another thing lacking in day to day business – accountability.
I can rant about the lack of assertion, accountability, and follow through all day long from my former 50 hour/week waste of my time job. Luckily I had enough cash stored up where I no longer needed their bi-weekly check and was able to tell my manager to screw herself and walked away. PL – love when you do pieces like this. Read your site whenever there’s an update and try to spread the word to my friends. Keep it up
PL: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The only thing less popular in American society than child molestation is personal responsibility. Look at the goddamned FinReg bill… If you want to borrow money, you accept the risks in the contract, one of which is that the bank will provide you with totally unfair terms. It’s called a “bargain.” Don’t like it? Can’t understand it? Don’t borrow the money. Nobody made you buy that house…
Hans Rosling has a new ten minute TED talk on Population Growth (and stopping it)
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html
PL: Good luck. Reproducing’s sport among the uneducated, uber-religious and low incomed. The only people not having kids are those who ought to be doing so. I’d never have more than two. Society’s going to be so brutally stratified between the haves and have nots in the future that I want to ensure we’re in a position to give ours every leg up imaginable. It’s only rational.
Hi PL,
I really liked the piece, enough so that I IMed it to several people and brought it up in conversation with people even more. I agree with what someone else said that seeing this kind of stuff in a book would be beautiful. I had two questions for you: 1) What’s your take on IT with regards to the Fattened Middle? 2) Is Computer Science a dying field?
I ask because I’m getting set to graduate and have heard and seen all sorts of mixed things. Do programmers/IT folks in general constitute an overpaid group that needs to be brought back to reality?
Thanks.
PL: IT’s getting an oversized margin because luddites between 40 and 65 think IT work is impossibly complex, and being intelligent, IT folks do nothing to disabuse them of this perception. As the workforce gets younger with boomers retiring, IT will get cheaper at an increasingly fast clip. IT should milk the moment for all its worth. As that myth fades, so will the premium for their skill. So yes, short term they’re overpaid. Long term, however, it’ll all even out.
[...] produce anything and are pretty much just busy work. PhilaLawyer puts it more eloquently in The Giant Sucking Sound, and you can read about similar corporate waste in the legal industry in my earlier post, The [...]
“PL: Yeah, I have to comprise all these articles into a book. But what the fuck would I call it?”
Atlas Fucked: An Economic Handbook for the Inebriated
PL: None of Us Really Know Anything (And We’re All Full of Shit)
Hi, I write software now. I’ve been around the site. I think it’s been a while since i been back around these woods, but u know, this has to be said, I’m never disappointed, just as I come around, expecting to see things start to suck like with everything else, u just blow me out of the water.
I’m glad I became a programmer for this very same reason: I don’t get to experience this, though I am aware of its existence and get to look down on it from my hill of professional abilities, interest in what I do and being good at my job.
I hope the finality of all this nonsense is that the UNIX/Linux (it really is that now) OS goes on to do great things for man kind (like running a spaceship), and I hope I am on the wagon having helped to build or contribute to that piece of software, even if marginally. In the meantime, I’ll be on the trenches, programming away the technological drivers that fuel this convoluted, weird and crazy business model we call “the economy.”
In the mean time, I have advice for everyone that might read this comment. If you want out of the nonsense, just find out what you love and do it. Or study math, study science and music. Eventually it’ll come to you. Just try and really become interested in everything that’s awesome and you will find the path.
Good luck. For sure expect this: whoever you are, where-ever you are, as a species we are heading into something new and unchartered, all of you can feel the electricity. The next months and years should be very interesting indeed. Pack tuna and whatever has omega3 and take lots of vitamins. Shit really is about to hit the fan.
PL: To borrow a line from Hitchens, “I find this [quite] persuasive.” I tip one to you.
Let’s go back and talk about teachers and tenure for a second (n.b. this discussion ONLY applies to primary and secondary school teachers, Universities are a whole other matter):
Tenure is a myth
Diane Ravitch argued this in her book Death and Life of the Great American School System. Sure, tenure is arcane and probably doesn’t need to exist, but it doesn’t protect teachers. I live and work in a state where we have no tenure and our teachers unions are pitifully weak, and guess what? Incompetent teachers still exist and aren’t fired. If anything the tenure discussion is to distract people from SCHOOL ADMINISTRATIONS! SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS HAVE NO TENURE YET THEY RARELY IF EVER LOSE THEIR JOBS BEFORE TEACHERS AND MANY SERVE NO PURPOSE.
Have you ever been to a public school’s administration building? It is very similar to what philalawyer has described in this article. Many people running around trying to justify their jobs. We have coordinators for every subject. The Math coordinator is required to do two things:
1) Get teachers to create multiple choice tests for students in every school in the district to take for each level of math. Yes, that’s right, the teachers create the tests. The Coordinator just OKs them.
2) Send “items of interest” in math to the math teachers. These people rarely are seen in the actual school. They just exist to lead others into churning out binders full of “curriculum” and rules. This is true for all subjects, from English to Foreign Language. Gosh, there’s 100k in salary that could just be cut and no one would see a difference.
Ok, back to teachers. There is a popular myth perpetuated by EVERY politician that teachers are lazy and don’t do anything and that poor student performance is our fault. Yes, there are some teachers who suck at life, but in an industry where your starting salary is on average 36k a year and you can expect to spend 10 years at your job before getting a 10k raise, do you really expect to be getting the cream of the American workforce? This issue is compounded in the inner-city. Inner-city teaching is fucking hard. It is exhausting. It is 50 or 60 times more difficult and draining than teaching in the suburbs. So why is it that the compensation for this thankless job is about 20% less with worse benefits? Because property taxes fund the school systems in most states and the inner-cities have low property taxes compared to the wealthy suburbs. So why should anyone stay and teach in the inner-city when they could be making more money, have a better future and more benefits at the end of their career? There’s no reason whatsoever. I recently made this jump from the inner-city to a job that paid 20% more, gives me better benefits and I teach FEWER classes.
You talk about production, teachers produce quite a bit. Most teachers really are motivated and do expend a large amount of time and energy preparing for and executing 6 hours a day of meaningful and interesting teaching. And there is never a slow day for a teacher. There is never a day you can ignore the students and be pissed off at the world. It’s one of the few careers that forces you to deal with people. This is why having the summers off seems like a pretty good trade-off: there’s never a slow day for those 180 days we do work.
Ok, let’s talk about the evils of tenure some more. Sure some people are leeching the system. But something I recently realized is that the teacher one student might find lazy and incompetent, could be someone another student really connects with. If we all think back to our High School days, I’m sure there’s a teacher or two we could think of that “phoned it in”. Having worked at a bunch of different schools, I’d say that either:
a) That teacher was doing something for some student, it just wasn’t you
or
b) That teacher was 3 years from retirement and was just exhausted
Which brings us to teacher retirement. 30 years is a long time to be a teacher if you work in a school district that isn’t very nice. This is hardly an excuse for all teachers, but teaching is EXHAUSTING. In the military, you retire after 20 years and get benefits and money every month for the rest of your life. People can get out at 41 on officer retirement and take on a second career. 30 years teaching in a high-stress high-intensity environment can practically kill some people. I think if retirement age were lowered and teaching were seen more like a military service that a lot of these teachers who have given up from the stress of the job would go down.
A lot of it also has to do with principals. Good principals can make sure teachers aren’t lazy. Unfortunately, most principals are twice as lazy as any teacher and won’t be caught dead actually making sure teachers are doing their jobs. I taught for an entire year and had a principal come into my classroom once (despite the fact that I should’ve been formally observed multiple times BY LAW). I can’t say that I cared, because I knew I was working my ass off to do a good job, but what does that tell you for how often a principal would enter a “seasoned verteran’s” classroom if they only entered my room (a first year teacher) once?
To sum up, there is a lot of blame on teachers and tenure, but I dare you, go to a school’s main administration building and try to figure out what half those workers do besides taking 2 hour lunches. Politicians use teachers as a smoke screen for deeper societal problems because we’re easy targets. The majority of teachers work hard, perform their duties with professionalism and aplomb and care about how educated their students are.
And for the earlier poster, yes multiple choice tests are a problem, but there are many of us that DO teach critical thinking and problem solving skills. A lot of the time, however,–and this might be hard for many to hear–some students are not capable of problem solving and critical thinking. That’s another issue entirely, but we have to start realizing that just as some students are natural athletes, others are natural problems solvers and critical thinkers. We can teach the skill to an extent, but there’s only so much we as teachers can do. So, STOP BLAMING US FOR ALL YOUR PROBLEMS.
sum, ergo mereo (I am, therefore I deserve) A fitting motto for the fattened middle-class and their children alike.
PL: I wouldn’t know where to start commenting on something of this length, so I’ll leave it at this: You make some excellent points.
The entry is spot on.
Now, please, provide “Part II: The Roadmap to Worth.”
For every drone passing the buck for the sake of job security, there are ten in training. I sometimes wake up on a cold sweat, dreading the potential reality that I’m one of “them.” My response is counter-productive, to say the least–bucking the traditional route of the law student, enjoying my 2L Summer as if I wasn’t fast-approaching my third year, having no relevant work experience to sell at the on-campus interviews, and experiencing an almost disingenuous anxiety because I won’t be able to land a job that I didn’t want in the first place…but that I “need” for the salary.
I need some anti-inspiration. Ehrenreich is a great start, but that won’t suffice to fully deprogram me…us. Lead the way, please. The stink of my own desperation is starting to make me nauseated.
PL: I can’t lead. That’s the criticism that has filled my email box over the years. It’s comical, really:
“You’re so negative!” No, you’ve a tin ear for comedy, and no appreciation for nuance.
“If you were so smart, you’d be doing something, not writing.” Who says I’m not?
“You just criticize everything. You’re a dick.” It’s all subjective. What can I do but draw the pictures and let people make the decisions for themselves?
Long time, no read. Glad it popped into my head today to check this site. I sometimes (not often – it’s painfully boring) imagine what it’d be like to float over the average cubicle cut-out for a day, watch the routine. Coffee, email, txt, ESPN, refresh button, bathroom, repeat. Plenty of conversations, bulk quantity “deliverables” devoid of value.
All our ills boil down to an overpopulation issue. It’s time to make some sacrifices at the altar. I think most people – even if unconsciously – know it. But the ubiquitous response is “hey, as long as that mushroom cloud doesn’t touch me.” Which is natural, I suppose.
PL: The dumb and moneyless tend to reproduce the most, for obvious reasons (impulsiveness, drug use, lack of care for consequences, lack of hope, adherence to religious dogma, etc…). I see very little chance of that self-correcting, even if we were to make birth control free for every American for life.
And the chainsaw that’s racing toward those cubicles dwellers in terms of increased layoffs is only going to make our problems more acute. Wall Street is betting right now that a large number of corporations can survive without middle class consumption – growing revenues with a mix of enhanced technology, increased productivity and exports. This will ultimately fail. There is a snapback coming where the companies will no longer be able to mine profits in this fashion. The problem is, it will not occur for a few more quarters, and in that interim, many more will have been laid off, and consumer sentiment will have fallen precipitously. Deflation will take hold and the Japanese “Slow Death” scenario will unfold. Just as companies will begin to think, “Hey, we need to focus on domestic revenue growth,” they’ll realize demand is all but totally absent. And all but impossible to resurrect.
In this regard, the market is driving the economy off a cliff. It’s transferring wealth from younger workers (and robbing them of years in the workforce in which they should be accruing career skills) to older investors, none of whom will be spending out of fear of tax increases and running out of retirement savings. Corporate management and the financial industry’s obsession with the short term is setting us up for a disaster in the long term. It’s obvious, everyone knows its happening, and no one is doing jack shit about it for exactly the reason you note… Everyone thinks he’ll be the winner at musical chairs – the guy who rides this fool’s rally to the peak and jumps out just shy of the critical moment where it all starts falling back to earth.