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.

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.

PL: If you’re reading this comment, go read the above linked piece. Now.

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.

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.

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.

PL: Yeah, I have to comprise all these articles into a book. But what the fuck would I call it?

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.

PL: Negative Absolute Dadaism, a/k/a Reflexive Rejectionism, went out with Bill Ray Cyrus.

PL: You should see the links I get from searches for “Don Rickles nude.”