What's a Résumé?

David Brooks complains that kids today, at least those coming out of elite colleges, are too perfect. A big part of his lecture to prospective employers is about their résumés and cover letters:

If you work in a white-collar sector that attracts highly educated job applicants, you’ve probably been flooded with résumés from people who are not so much human beings as perfect avatars of success....

When you read these résumés, you have two thoughts. First, this applicant is awesome. Second, there’s something completely flavorless here. This person has followed the cookie-cutter formula for what it means to be successful and you actually have no clue what the person is really like except for a high talent for social conformity....

Reward cover letter rebels. Job seeking is the second greatest arena of social pretense in modern life — after dating. But some people choose not to spin and exaggerate. They choose not to make each occasion seem more impressive than it really was. You want people who are radically straight, even with superiors.

I don't want to overstate the case, as traditional résumés and cover letters still play a role in a lot of hiring, but the trend is toward having an initial review of job applications performed not by a person but by a computer, and also toward LinkedIn, a site where employers and recruiters can look for people who may be interested in a position, see their experience, review endorsements, and look for connections who they might trust to give a candid appraisal of how the person is likely to perform on the job. And that's on top of the long-standing issue, "It's not what you know, it's who you know", with roughly 80% of jobs being obtained through connections.

As others have argued, one of the reasons why the graduates of elite colleges have résumés that are similar in documenting certain forms of high achievement is that the colleges have defined those classes of achievement as the path to admission. If colleges and employers change the criteria, applicants will conform to the new criteria.

Would you prefer that applicants have lower GPAs? Ask it, and those students will show up at your door. Do you want them to not have any global travel experience? Ask, and the next batch will assiduously avoid or hide it. If you control something incredibly valuable and name a price, don’t be surprised when those willing to pay show up at your door. Make “experienced a major life setback” a requirement for admission to Yale, and you can be sure that parents will get their kids hooked on meth so that their kids can explain how they struggled with and eventually overcame the problem. Businesses will set up summer meth camps to make it easy. The next David Brooks column will complain about applicants being uniformly perfect avatars of success in this newly defined way. “The I learned I lot from my meth habit” will become the new “I learned a lot from helping those people in Mozambique.”

Brooks also misses the primary reason why arbitrary criteria are used to distinguish between job applicants. Employers cannot interview everybody, so when swamped with applications they will find ways to narrow the applicant pool to a reasonable number of candidates. It may be that the criteria are in many ways arbitrary and unfair, that a job doesn't actually require a college degree or a high GPA to assure good performance, but if you're looking for a quick way to reduce a stack of applications setting a minimum education requirement or a minimum GPA is one way to do it, and may be better than the alternatives. Sure, that may mean that somebody who has overcome significant life obstacles is ruled out, even if he might be a perfect fit for the job, but how can you (or your keyword-scanning filter) identify such a candidate as a promising applicant from hundreds of other candidates applying for one job? Odds are, even if you were to look for it, that information won't even be present in the candidate's résumé or cover letter.

As Brooks has previously pointed out, there's another side to the coin -- the "perfect" résumé may indicate that the applicant is a good cultural match for a job. Now it may be true that getting some new blood, some different ideas, into a stiff and moneyed workplace could actually improve the workplace, that's not necessarily what employers want:

Smart high school students from rural Nebraska, small-town Ohio and urban Newark get to go to good universities. When they get there they often find a culture shock.

They’ve been raised in an atmosphere of social equality and now find themselves in a culture that emphasizes the relentless quest for distinction — to be more accomplished, more enlightened and more cutting edge. They may have been raised in a culture that emphasizes roots, but they go into a culture that emphasizes mobility — a multicultural cosmopolitanism that encourages you to go anywhere on your quest for self-fulfillment. They may have been raised among people who enter the rooms of the mighty with the nerves of a stranger, but they are now around people who enter the highest places with the confident sense they belong.

Back then, Brooks was describing this as the result of meritocracy, with students striving to distinguish themselves through their accomplishments. Now Brooks is arguing that the very same students are not distinguishing themselves, but are conforming to an arbitrary and often meaningless set of standards that may not mean much in the workplace. He may be correct about the standards, but it simply cannot be the case that the students are simultaneously distinguishing themselves and rendering themselves indistinguishable. As Brooks then noted, the brand name of the institution can be more important than the relative qualification of the graduate -- an arbitrary standard that Brooks does not touch in his new essay.

There's a message for employers within Brooks essay that is valuable, and I think it can be boiled down to this: Don't focus on arbitrary criteria instead of figuring out if you're hiring the right person. Particularly with college graduates, odds are you're hiring somebody who is going to grow into the job, who will have to do a lot of learning during his or her early years of employment to become a significant long-term asset to your company. If you focus on other factors, even those that seem objectively reasonable, you can end up with a highly qualified person who simply isn't a good fit with the job, the company, or both.

Law school graduates may appreciate this argument:

You could argue that you don’t actually want rich, full personalities for your company. You just want achievement drones who can perform specific tasks. I doubt that’s in your company’s long-term interests. But if you fear leaping out in this way, at least think of the effect you’re having on the deeper sensibilities of the next generation, the kind of souls you are incentivizing and thus fashioning, the legacy you will leave behind.

In many law firms, being able to document that you are an excellent drone is what gets you your first job, and large law firms require a constant inflow of new drones. You can worry about your soul if you make partner.

The "Three Million Available Jobs" Canard

I recently heard a guy, apparently the former star of a reality TV show about 'dirty job', purport that there are three million jobs with good wages waiting to be filled, and that they remain open due to a mismatch between job applicant skills and the needs of the employer. He suggested that the root of the problem was that people are turning up their noses at the skilled trades, and thus aren't even considering jobs that could pay them $40,000 - $120,000 per year. Needless to say, something about that claim carried the odor of an equine byproduct.

As it turns out, the "three million jobs" figure is tossed around with some regularity, and it represents a snapshot of the job market at any given time, and does not capture the even larger number of jobs that become available and that are filled each month. It's a bit like looking at a photo of kids playing musical chairs and observing how many open chairs there are - the snapshot tells us how many jobs are available, but many of those jobs are recent vacancies and most of them will be filled. So as it turns out, about 2.5 million of those jobs aren't at all difficult to fill, and the suggestion is that in manufacturing "there are as many as 500,000 jobs that aren't being filled because employers say they can't find qualified workers". Note, we're still a long way from "jobs that could pay $40,000 - $120,000 per year."

When Sixty Minutes explored this shortage of workers, it found that wages were stagnant and manufacturers were unwilling to train workers - that is, they wanted to hire people who were going to be fully productive from day one. They looked specifically at a company called "Click Bond", that has had difficulty getting workers with sufficient skill to run its machines. An executive helped form a partnership with local community colleges to train workers, and "As part of the training program, [participating] manufacturers are willing to pay students for two-day a week internships." The big money at the end of that training?

At the end of the 16 weeks of training, Click Bond offered Ryan Vre Non and Jamie Pacheco full time jobs at $12 an hour with benefits.

So if you complete the training and internship, and perform at the top of your class, you have the chance to earn $12/hour? Not only is that number far short of the great salary the "dirty jobs' guy was touting, it's difficult to believe that somebody who was capable of completing that program at the top of his class could not have found another program that would have resulted in a better-paying job. And really, if you're advertising a job at $12/hour for somebody who already possesses the skill set to be productive with minimal to no training, you're not offering enough to entice that person away from their current job.

Taking a close look at wage data in manufacturing, the Boston Consulting Group recently found that less than one percent of the manufacturing workforce, in a handful of labor market areas, is affected by a skills gap. In its survey of employers, Manpower finds that, among U.S. employers having difficulty filling jobs, 54% report that the reason positions are difficult to fill is that workers are looking for more pay than is offered and 44% report that applicants lack experience.

But such reasons cast doubt on the idea of a skills mismatch, as it is not unreasonable to expect employers to pay the going rate for the skills they need, or to provide opportunities for workers to gain experience doing the jobs they need done. So the driver of current high rates of unemployment certainly does not seem to be the inadequate skills of the American workforce.

Seriously, if the message is "train yourself at your own expense" (or taxpayer expense), or even "train yourself at your own expense, but with the possibility of a part-time, paid internship", students are not going to clamor for those $12/hour opportunities.

In exchange for these math and computer programming skills, which for most people would most likely require some measure of secondary education, Click Bond is willing to pay newly hired employees $12 per hour. In Nevada, the average hourly wage covered by unemployment in 2011 was $20.13.

Pitts also talked with Klaus Kleinfeld, German-born CEO of Alcoa in Whitehall, Michigan. Alcoa employs 2,200 people working three shifts a day, seven days a week, producing parts to make jet engines 50 percent more fuel efficient.... The Alcoa plant currently has 27 job openings, but Kleinfeld says that Alcoa absolutely has no problem with a skills gap, but it sure would be a lot easier if people would “get an education.”...

While there may very well be 500,000 job openings in manufacturing facilities across the nation, these jobs require a specialized skill set that wasn’t required even a decade ago. Kleinfeld implied it, but Hutter made it perfectly clear – employers are not willing to pay to train employees anymore.

When you start looking for the more highly paid jobs where there is a "skills gap", the word "engineer" seems to come up a lot, but not so much "machine operator". If an experienced worker is worth $12/hour, we're not talking about a job with a meaningful career path.

Moving back to "dirty jobs", I personally have no problem with encouraging students to pursue jobs in the skilled trades. I respect that some people are concerned that when you start doing so in high school, you end up tracking students who are more likely to be poor or minority into trade-oriented 'tracks' rather than academic tracks, but the effort doesn't have to occur in high school. We, as a society, can simply accept that the skilled trades are important, can potentially pay as much or better than many white collar jobs, and that it's acceptable and in some cases optimal to pursue a career in the trades instead of seeking a college degree.

That said, some of the jobs we're talking about aren't just dirty, but are dangerous. A friend who owns a small factory described the toll on his body from his years of running industrial machines. He has severe degeneration of his back and knees - and he's the boss. Talk to some retired pipefitters about their aches and pains. Talk to some auto mechanics about the injuries they or their peers have suffered on the job.

We can't pretend either that everybody is capable of working those jobs, or even that some of the people who aren't applying for those jobs are declining the opportunity because they enjoy being unemployed. Somebody who has become unemployed after a couple of decades of working one job that wore out his body is not necessarily going to be capable of entering another job that carries a similar physical toll - even for $12/hour plus benefits. And for the theoretical job that starts at $40K and could pay $120K with an employer that purports itself to be willing to train, if they can't get enough applicants it's not because there's a shortage of skilled workers - it's because of what the prospective employer and his pitchmen aren't telling you - such as the level of physical danger, travel time and isolation.

The Perils of Being Overqualified

Paul Campos notes that employers are perhaps more diligent than ever in weeding out overqualified candidates:

I see this all the time in the legal world: people find that getting a JD actually hurts their job prospects, not just because they can’t get jobs as lawyers (48% of the national class of 2012 didn’t have real legal jobs nine months after graduation), but because, despite self-serving claims of legal academic administrators and faculty that a law degree is “versatile,” most non-legal employers consider a law degree either a negative or a flat disqualification for a job candidate. (Perhaps the most stark example of this is provided by paralegals who quit good jobs to go to law school, then discover that employers won’t hire people with JDs to do paralegal work).

The first time I heard about a candidate being rejected as overqualified was back in 1979, in the film Kramer vs. Kramer. I was young enough at the time to be puzzled by the idea, although I came to appreciate why employers would hesitate before hiring an employee they thought might jump ship as soon as something better came along.

But the J.D. problem isn't just one of overqualification - most employers outside of the field of law (or the music industry) don't see the J.D. as a qualification. So you're both overqualified, in that you have a graduate degree that in the view of many should result in your easily earning a six figure income, but underqualified, in that your degree is seen as having absolutely nothing to do with a position outside of the field of law. When you're trying to explain and argue how your degree relates to the job for which you're applying, the odds of getting the job will typically hover between "slim" and "none".

The Draft, National Service, and National Unity

A couple of days ago, Michael Gerson seemed to have one of those "the well is dry" moments when he had nothing much to say about contemporary events, and decided to join the ranks of those who believe that some form of "national service" would be a cure for some of our nation's (real or perceived) woes. Gerson draws inspiration from a book by the late William F. Buckley, Jr., in which Buckley waxes poetic about his WWII military service, which was served stateside.

The service movement has always had an element of nostalgia for the shared, unifying burdens of World War II, the United States’ epic of citizenship. In his slim, weighty volume, “Gratitude,” William F. Buckley recalled how his war experience has been a reminder of the “pulsation of consanguinity” that united the “Laramie cowboy” and the “Litterateur in Greenwich Village.” National service, he argued, can “ever so slightly elevate us from the trough of self-concern and self-devotion.”

I can't help but wonder if Buckley's perception might have been different had he, the "Litterateur in Greenwich Village", not graduated from Officer Candidate School, and had served as an enlisted man taking orders from his proverbial "Laramie cowboy", if he had been ordered to storm Omaha Beach, or if he had served in the Vietnam era. But at least he was speaking from the perspective of somebody who actually performed military service.

Gerson attempts some poeticism of his own,

The natural centrifugal forces of democracy have been augmented by geographical mobility and technologies that allow for the complete customization of little societies.

How then does a democracy cultivate civic responsibility and shared identity? Taxation allows us to fund common purposes, but it does not provide common experiences. A rite of passage in which young people — rich and poor, liberal and conservative, of every racial background — work side by side to address public problems would create, at least, a vivid, lifelong memory of shared national purpose.

Basically, Gerson sees changes in society as a bad thing, not surprising given that conservatism is inherently resistant to change and Gerson's conservatism seems primarily social in its nature, and fantasizes about a public service "melting pot" in which young people can forge bonds and embrace some sort of "national purpose". It seems fair to note that Gerson's resort to WWII, in which the military and parts of American society remained deeply segregated, and his avoidance of addressing the Vietnam experience, by which time the military and in large part American society were integrated, casts a shadow over his assumptions. Could it be that society as a whole coalesced around WWII and the common purpose of defeating Germany and Japan, while society's reaction to the Vietnam war created some significant social rifts? That in neither case was military / national service the driving force behind unity and disunity? Shouldn't we also acknowledge that different people draw different lessons from similar experiences? Or that some people forced into military service have very bad experiences that alienate them from their country or from certain groups of their fellow countrymen? Is that reality too dark to be allowed to interfere with such a happy dream?

Note also, Gerson's proposal cannot reasonably be described as involving shared experience:

Instead of giving 18-year-old males a meaningless (to them) Selective Service number, why not also give all 18-year-old men and women information on the five branches of the armed forces, along with the option of serving a year or more in a civilian service program? National service, while not legally mandatory, would be socially expected.

How many 18-year-olds are unaware of the armed forces, or of how they might enlist? How would "the option of serving a year or more in a civilian service program" represent some form of shared experience with members of the military? We're talking about roughly 4 million 18-year-olds per year, with the armed forces accepting roughly 180,000 enlisted personnel and 20,000 officers each year - while Gerson's plan might in theory result in a slightly larger pool of applicants, the military is exceeding its recruiting goals, so the net effect on society of providing "information on the five branches of the armed forces" is likely to be de minimis.

For the 3.8 million or so young people who Gerson wants to see pressured into performing civilian public service, what sort of work would his civilian programs perform? How would participants be housed, fed and otherwise supported during this program? How would we make the program more unifying than any other civilian job an 18-year-old might be able to get? How would we train and supervise participants? What sort of value could we reasonably expect to obtain from a year of service, with participants completing the program right around the time they might achieve some level of mastery of whatever it is they're assigned to do - or do we spend the hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to implement this experiment without concerning ourselves about whether the work performed benefits society in any way other than the anticipated cultivation of civic responsibility?

It's also fair to ask, how does Gerson explain his own commitment to civic responsibility, given that he has never performed anything approaching public service. When he argues that public service is necessary for today's young people, even if completely unnecessary for him, does he include his own children among those who won't form an adequate commitment to American society unless they join the military or perform a year of "public service" as part of this new, mammoth government program, or is he worried about other people's children? For that matter, does he want his children to participate in a "public service" program through which they learn and adopt the culture and beliefs of others, or does he anticipate that they'll be the good influences who help impress civic responsibility upon society's riff raff?

I don't want to sound unsympathetic to Gerson's concerns about society and social cohesion, although I expect that we have considerably different views in relation to what level of conformity is desirable in a society and about the identity of the populations where we should focus our efforts on improving social cohesion and conduct. I have a different concern than Gerson about college-aged kids - that many feel pushed into college, or to pick a career path, when they would benefit from taking a year or two between high school and college to learn more about themselves, what careers they might want to pursue, and ultimately whether college is the right choice for them.

I am not one to embrace the notion that there's something wrong with "kids these days", or to ignore the fact that the "kids these days" who are going to ruin society invariably grow up to be the next generation of workers and parents who share similar sentiments about the next generation of kids. The factions that most concern me are the ones I first met when I entered legal practice - the defendants who, after a night in jail, are yukking it up as they wait for their criminal cases to be called. The parent who can't understand why anybody would object to the "good old fashioned whupping" they gave to a small child, who was left with a massive bruise extending from the small of his back to the bottom of his thighs. The grown men who argue that they should not be incarcerated for statutory rape because their twelve-year-old victim "looked at least fourteen". The mother who, given a choice between losing custody of her children and staying with an abusive boyfriend, picks the boyfriend.

It's easy for somebody like Gerson to go through life blissfully unaware that this type of population exists, read paragraphs like this one and imagining that he understands what I'm talking about, or sidestepping the question of what groups most need help and how to help them by adding his "kids these days"/"national service will cure (most or) all that ails society" argument to the enormous stack of essays and editorials that say more or less the same thing. Never mind that history offers plenty of examples of the military draft and national service programs in dysfunctional nations, it's a much easier argument to make than to take a serious look at the actual rifts within our society and what might work to reduce them.

Here's an interesting alternative: How about the government creates a program that will provide two years of work at a reasonable wage, coupled with relocation to the job location, vocational training and tutoring to help any participant who has not graduated from high school achieve a GED, and effectively guarantee a job to any 18-year-old who does not want to attend college, or who would just as soon defer college but has not found a better employment alternative? If you want, you can move kids around the country so that they experience something different from the community in which they were raised, while also helping kids who want to escape an impoverished area the tools they need to get out and stay out. Given the realities of the job market, you won't need social pressure to get young people to sign up. Call the program "national service" so that conservatives like David Brooks and Gerson can get behind it without complaining about its cost.... Perhaps even better, start up a private "public service" venture, get some of the nation's billionaires to fund it, and run the experiment on private money.

I'm not sure that such a program would be workable, but if you want to push in that direction it seems much more likely to return the benefits Gerson hopes to achieve than the poorly defined concept he shares in his column.

Rick Snyder's Missing "C"

Gov. Snyder believes that the state needs to make an effort to attract talented workers to Michigan:

"There are three 'Cs' that are critically important. Collaboration, creation and connection. Collaboration is about working with the private sector to say 'what are your needs today and tomorrow?' The second 'C' is about creating talent, that's the education sector, about giving people the tools to be successful. Finally, connecting those tools."

First and foremost, in terms of attracting and keeping talent, Snyder is missing the most important "C" - compensation. Instead he substitutes determining the needs of the private sector - which I expect translates roughly into, "Getting whatever workers we need for the lowest possible compensation," the opposite of what attracts and retains talented workers. He draws on Econ 101, picturing the job of government as changing the point at which the supply curve (workers) crosses the demand curve (what employers want) - but doesn't really explain what he would do to change the point at which the two lines intersect beyond mentioning a state-run jobs bulletin board. I'm no economist, but here's a nice refresher course on supply, demand and market equilibrium, and the importance of price in eliminating a market shortfall.

Snyder comments on the jobs board, "we have over 60,000 open jobs... and these are good jobs". Not that it's a scientific test, but here's what I just found on that board:

Asparagus Harvester
Todd Greiner Farms Packing, Llc

Job Code Number: 4015674

Job Description: Involves hand-harvesting the asparagus crop while riding a self-propelled personnel carrier. Employer needs 5-7 workers per group. Asparagus harvest will begin around May 1st, and will continue through approximately mid-to-late June. Hours vary between 45-55 hours per week (based on weather and other occurrences beyond employers control). Wages: Piece rate= $0.14 p/lb. for processing and $0.16 p/lb for fresh market. Employer guarantees Michigan minimum wage or $7.40 p/hr. Some licensed housing is available depending on group size. No bonus.

Here's the thing: I didn't go searching through the jobs board for the worst job listed at the worst pay.¹ That job was featured on the front page of the website, the very first job listing under the heading "Featured Jobs".

Other featured jobs include driving a truck for an apple orchard, working as a quality inspector (high school diploma or GED required) with no corresponding job listed through the opportunities section of the company's website, working contracts through a staffing company that sends workers to companies throughout the nation, working as a project manner for a technology company that has a broken job search function on its own website.... I ran a few searches, attempting to filter for the better jobs, but didn't see much that hinted at Michigan's future, let alone a large number of job openings that are unlikely to be filled if the employer is willing to pay the compensation the market demands.

Snyder came out of Gateway computers, so he should have a pretty good sense that even with the best "account management" or "collaboration", no government can save a company from itself. No doubt, Gateway could have used better talent in its later years - but in management, not on the assembly line. Snyder continued to serve on the Gateway board during its final decade of decline, prior to its acquisition by Acer, and briefly served as interim CEO during that period, so he should have a pretty good idea of what a poor job even talented, motivated managers and bean counters can do in terms of anticipating a company's future needs and turning around a declining company. When we talk about running government like a business I'm not sure what business we have in mind, but it's not Gateway.

It's also fair to ask, what can the state actually do in terms of boosting the education sector. Under Synder's tenure the primary "education" focus of the legislature has appeared to be, "How to weaken teacher's unions, reduce their compensation and benefits, and boost for-profit charter schools," which to me doesn't appear to reflect deep concern for the quality of public education. State colleges continue to feel a budget squeeze. If I look at his actions, the governor appears to share the philosophy of the state legislature. How will Michigan's present education policies create talent and, to the extent that it does, why would that talent want to stay in the state? Even if they can find a job on the job search board, many talented graduates going to do what Snyder did - chase the best job, even if it means moving to another state.

Snynder has not fully unveiled his plans, but he did say this:

“We have a number of action items that we’re still putting together and will be rolled out soon. Particularly we’re looking at working within regions at talent connection and making sure that skilled trades are an emphasis.”

That suggests to me that Snyder seeks Michigan's future as involving lower-paid factory jobs. That interpretation seems consistent with the actions of Snyder and the legislature, from its treatment of schools and teachers to the legislative shenanigans behind making Michigan a "right to work" state, but it's the sort of emphasis that seems likely to keep Michigan's most talented graduates looking for jobs in other states, and will keep the best-paying jobs in those other states.
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1. Before you accuse me of cherry picking, I'll note - that job is listed as well, and it also guarantees no more than minimum wage. If you want me to cherry pick, we need to move up to the type of salary John McCain once suggested.

Résumés? What's a Résumé?

Touching on the job-seeking post from a couple of days ago...

We've learned more details about Apple's new 'GPU Design Center' in Orlando, Florida, following our reporting from earlier this week.

Sources told MacRumors that the engineers Apple hired recently were not laid off from AMD, but were instead actively recruited -- largely via their LinkedIn profiles. Apple is said to have learned that many of AMD's 3D graphics patents were issued from its Orlando offices and targeted this area specifically. AMD has job listings for its Orlando offices to fill several of these recently vacated positions.

They probably didn't even know they were looking for jobs before the recruiter called.

The End of Job Applications As We Know Them

First, a word in defense of Thomas Friedman (and his taxi drivers). Although he has the human tendency to seek points of view that reaffirm his own, at least he's sticking his head outside of the bubble and listening to somebody other than like-minded talking heads or agenda-driven "confidential sources". I also agree with Friedman's general conception that the job market is changing, as are the means by which people will find jobs and maintain their positions (or should I say, salaries) over their working lives. That said, in his column about a new website that tests the skills of job applicants... I think he's a bit too credulous toward the creators of the site he touts in his zeal to endorse a new era of employment.

The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies, like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then HireArt culls through the results and offers up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them.

The problem I see with that is that designing tests isn't a one-off. If you want tests that are measurably effective at assessing worker's skills, you have to do a lot more than create a test for a given job. You need to test the test. Further, let's say you create a test with "the right questions" - how do you grade the answers? If we were talking about tests of math skills, that could be automated. But we're not - at least as highlighted in the column, these are subjective tests:

HireArt asks candidates to do tasks that mimic the work they would do on the job. If it is for a Web analytics job, HireArt might ask: “You are hired as the marketing manager at an e-commerce company and asked to set up a Web site analytics system. What are the key performance indicators you would measure? How would you measure them?”...

Sample question: “Kanye West just released a new fashion collection. You can see it here. Imagine you had to write a tweet promoting this collection. What would your tweet be?” Someone applying for a sales job would have to record a sales pitch over video.

Really, more than a test, that's more like creating a standardized set of interview questions and giving applicants time to think through the answers. In essence, rather than just submitting résumés, the applicants would be interviewing in writing. But who would review the answers, and based upon what criteria? Enter the human element. Or perhaps even the computer element - if you get 500 people applying for each job, odds are that the initial "scoring" is going to be a computerized process, or performed by somebody associated with the website as opposed to a person who would actually be making a hiring decision. If you were hiring a salesperson, how valuable would the pre-recorded pitch be, as opposed to tasking a candidate to make a pitch during the interview and seeing how they respond to you in the role of customer? How much time would you save, reviewing perhaps hundreds of videos from applicants as opposed to interviewing leading prospects?

So what does she advise? Sharef pointed to one applicant, a Detroit woman who had worked as a cashier at Borders. She realized that that had no future, so she taught herself Excel. “We gave her a very rigorous test, and she outscored people who had gone to Stanford and Harvard. She ended up as a top applicant for a job that, on paper, she was completely unqualified for.”

From which I infer, she didn't get the job.

For some of us, the idea of somehow being tested before applying for a job is old hat. I can't recall the last job I applied for that did not want multiple writing samples, a sample document of some sort relating to the work I would be doing, or something else that would suggest qualification (or lack thereof) before I was selected for an interview. And I haven't applied for a job in a very long time. Perhaps outsourcing that sort of pre-screening will work for some employers.

However, I think the future lies in a somewhat different direction. While large employers may well continue to reach out to new college grads through sites like the one Friedman describes, more and more jobs are going to be filled through personal connections and networking. A commonly recited statistic is that 80% of job openings are never advertised. I see a future in which that rises well over 90%, as people rely more and more on sites like LinkedIn to find and check references on people who may not even be aware that they're being considered for a job offer. The test will in no small part be your actual accomplishments, as documented on your profile and as verified by trusted people in your extended network.

Actually, It's Not So Easy to Teach Yourself New Tricks....

An afterthought on Thomas Friedman's column,

But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.)

Well, quite clearly, college isn't cheaper than ever before. Quite the opposite. Even if, recognizing that your skills have become a bit rusty, you're inclined to go back.

I expect that Friedman is referencing the growing availability of online courses, free and paid, on a wide range of subjects. If you can put together an appropriate collection of such courses, you can approximate what you might learn in certain more expensive, formal educational programs. The first problem with that is curation - you generally won't know if a course is any good or how much you'll learn until you complete the course. The same is true to a degree with college courses, but the college has an incentive to curate the content and to try to ensure that courses are of reasonable quality. Similarly, colleges put together curricula to help students pick "majors" and "minors" and, ideally, take an appropriate set of courses to obtain an appropriate level of knowledge to justify being granted a degree. When you're putting together your own set of courses on the Internet, it can be difficult to know where that process begins and ends. If you are acting out of mere personal interest, sure, it's cheap and easy. If you're trying to teach yourself cutting edge job skills in your spare time, it's not easy and (assuming the material is available online) isn't necessarily cheap.

I have seen interesting programs that promise, somewhat convincingly, to take people from the beginner level to "competent and employable" in a block of time comparable to a college semester. For example, this program to teach Ruby on Rails. I think colleges should do a lot more to create and implement that type of program. But such a program is neither cheap nor easy. Sure, you can quit your job and with some decent guidance and luck in finding good resources, as well as a lot of motivation and sufficient aptitude, achieve reasonable mastery of Ruby on Rails in, say, twelve weeks. But... that's a luxury few people have.

Perhaps Friedman is thinking back to the days when he typed his columns and learned to use a word processor, but if we're serious about "inventing" jobs through a demonstration of skill sets and achievements not broadly shared by a larger pool of job applicants, for most workers I think things are getting harder. Not only are skills of that type increasingly complex, they become obsolete much more quickly than the important skills of the past. Picking the right skills to master, finding the time, finding the resources, and keeping current or moving on to the next thing? Easy? Come on.

Jobs Will Exist in the Future, But Résumés Might Not....

When I read Friedman's piece on "inventing jobs", I had hoped that he would be speaking to a future in which workers were more entrepreneurial - whether in terms of finding ways to work for themselves, or to position themselves to be more secure or more competitive when seeking or holding jobs. The forces that inspired Friedman's column, essentially the decline of the middle class crossed with the reduced possibility of completing your education before embarking on what we once might have called a career, are real.

But have you actually looked at the job market lately? Have you tried to get a job?

First, for a lot of employers the traditional résumé is something to be scanned and algorithmically processed. If you don't have the right keywords, it's possible that the only person who knows you've applied for the job will be the person who opens your job application and feeds it into the scanner. And if you're submitting your application electronically, you don't even have that.

Second, it's easier than ever for employers to investigate the applicants that they are considering interviewing. People put an alarming amount of personal information on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and most neglect to limit access to at least some of their more embarrassing information. And while that information may disqualify you from a job, we're reaching a point at which your qualification for a job may be even more tightly related to your online profile.

Frankly, employers don't trust résumés. It's easy for employees to exaggerate, even fabricate qualifications. Some people are very good about bluffing their way through interviews. The employer ends up with a suboptimal employee, and a choice between terminating the worker and engaging in another job search or hoping the employee grows into the position. The gamble often works for the dishonest employee - and if it doesn't, they suffer no real harm.

How is that changing? I suspect that over the next ten years, the traditional job posting is going to go the way of the dinosaur. Connections will be more important than ever. But the connections of growing importance aren't going to be the traditional "who you know". Instead, prospective employers will look for prospective employees on sites like LinkedIn, examining their credentials, and then reaching out to their own networks to verify the prospective employee's claims and professed skills. Historically, finding a common connection between yourself and a prospective employee was difficult, at best hit-or-miss. Now an employer can cultivate a select set of references, people who are trusted to give honest recommendations and referrals, and rely upon those people to suggest or verify the qualifications of prospective employees.

Ten, fifteen years from now, I think the typical opening for a "good job" will involve an employer identifying prospects, verifying their credentials, and narrowing their list down to a small number of prospects before the prospective employee even knows that the opportunity exists. Headhunting on steroids.

My advice to anybody in college: Build your professional network on Google Plus and LinkedIn, stop tweeting about your social life and latest snack, and start documenting your actual accomplishments. (If you don't have any yet, start accomplishing - what can you do, right now, that might impress a future employer in your field?) And keep it honest. The more technology-oriented your field, the more you need to get started... yesterday.

You Won't Save Middle Class Jobs with Talk About Teaching Motivation

A few days ago, Thomas Friedman took a kernel of truth and attempted to run much too far with it. At this point there is immense downward pressure on middle class incomes and job security, and in many fields - particularly those likely to offer the best wages - it is more important than ever to maintain an up-to-date skill set if you want to remain employed. I'm all for teaching students at all levels to be more entrepreneurial and about the expectations they are likely to face in a future job market. I question the conceit,

Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever.

Specifically, what middle class jobs are being pulled up? Also, frankly, the correlation between wages and "skill" is far less precise than Friedman assumes. If you have unusual skills that happen to be in demand, you are much more likely to get a job and a decent wage than you are if you have far more developed skills that happen to be in low demand or aren't materially different from the skill set held by the larger applicant pool. Part of the problem with telling workers, "You're responsible for your own career development" is that it's much easier to evolve skills that ultimately become commonplace or obsolete than it is to identify and master new skills on your own time and your own dime that your employer may not presently value but will ultimately prove to have significant value in the marketplace.

Friedman seems excited by the notion that knowledge is becoming unimportant,

I tracked ["education specialist Tony] Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.

Frankly, hearing a statement like that from a self-described "education specialist" would leave me looking for a new expert. Let's use a simple example from early elementary school - math facts. It is very difficult to progress in mathematical knowledge and skills without a mastery of basic math facts, because if you can't do simple math problems quickly in your head you will not develop the speed necessary to keep up with the rest of the class as lessons become more complex. Sorry, no, "You can use a calculator instead", is not an answer. First, if you need a calculator for basic math facts it's still going to slow you down. Second, it's a highly unusual person who succeeds in math-dependent fields who cannot do basic math problems in her head, and quickly solve problems that would confound most of the rest of us (we might not even know what information to punch into a calculator or how to order the operations) with pen and paper.

Friedman might object, "But math is different." But it's really not. You're not going to be a good lawyer unless you have a decent understanding of the legal principles you encounter. You're not going to be a good doctor unless you quickly recognize medical conditions and symptoms within your field of practice, and know how to perform a physical examination. Friedman's perspective is probably colored by his profession - few pundits have any meaningful subject matter expertise, so they spend much of their time aggregating information and whittling it down to column length. To some degree you might be able to get away with that as an "education expert" - you're not likely to be called upon for instant answers, and to the extent that your primary focus is on research and publication you're going to be drawing upon a broad variety of sources to produce your next paper. But even in that latter context, you need enough knowledge of your subject matter to know what has come before, as you're not going to successfully publish papers that betray a fundamental ignorance of the research that has been done in the past - and you can't trust Wikipedia to bring you up to speed.

But more than that, if you want to become good at grappling with a particular set of ideas or concepts, you need to actually wrestle with the facts. You can't learn or be taught how to be a good thinker without a framework. There's a reason that traditional education typically begins with a survey course - to provide students with the necessary foundation to understand more complex concepts and ideas. As much fun as it might be to pretend otherwise, "They can look it up on the Internet" isn't a substitute. If you don't learn the basics, you're going to end up in over your head.

There's something of a tension in Friedman's assertion,

My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job.

As evidenced by his continued statement,

Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it.

First of all, there's no evidence that jobs are going away. No major employer is casting off its employees in favor of an all-independent contractor workforce. Nor is outsourcing key functions all it's cracked up to be - when Boeing attempted to minimize its in-house expertise and rely on contractors... disaster followed. One of Yahoo!'s recent steps to re-invigorate its corporate culture was to stop employees from working at home. If there's evidence that employers are moving away from the concept of "jobs" and "employees", it's well-hidden.

Second, Friedman's expansion upon his comment reveals what I previously suggested. The issue is much less, "There won't be jobs in the future," and much more, "If employers realize that your skills aren't special your earning capacity will flatten or decline, and if your employer decides that your skills are obsolete you'll probably be shown the door." More than that, while corporations might historically have helped employees update their skills or develop new skills, Friedman sees that cost and burden as being shifted to the employee. I think he's correct, but as with professionally managed pension funds vs. individual retirement accounts I think he's missing something important: the professionals have access to information and resources that allow them, on the whole, to better predict market trends and by scaling up their operations they can take advantage of efficiencies that should allow for better training at a lower cost. When you transform that into, "Every man for himself", no matter how well you try to prepare employees for their "self-managed" future you will see a great number of them flounder or drown.

Friedman continues by speaking of the importance of motivation, more specifically of "intrinsic motivation":

Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously.

That observation is, for lack of a better word platitudinous. Of course people who are intrinsically motivated to learn and expand their skills will do so. They always have and they always will. The problem is that the forces Friedman describes are extrinsic - they come from outside the worker. Fear of job loss can be a powerful motivator, but it's extrinsic. The statement only has significance if we can teach intrinsic motivation, but unfortunately that seems to be much more a component of personality than a product of a particular pedagogy.

Which is probably why, when asked how to produce more intrinsically motivated students, Friedman's expert may as well be clicking on a "mission statement generator":

“Teachers,” he said, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to innovate. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need ‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary. Selective use of high-quality tests, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment, is important. Finally, teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May. We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the new normal throughout the system.”

To me, that sounds a lot like doubling down on the status quo (although if student work is assessed through the year rather than through high-stakes standardized testing, that would be a positive step)... but with badges. (Pieces of flair?) What's missing? Anything concrete. If I were the type of boss Friedman predicts for our collective futures, and somebody handed that statement to me as a meaningful reform proposal, he would quickly find himself testing his ability to invent his own job.

Mitt Romney: "Government Does Not Create Jobs"

But wait a second, Governor Romney, you claimed that you were going to create 12 million jobs if elected President. Your so-called five-point plan. Now you say "Government does not create jobs"?

Well, your jobs plan - your statement that you will create 12 million jobs - was always pretty obviously a fraud, it's good of you to finally admit it.

Nice Salary if You Can Get It

The odd bimodal salary curve for new lawyers is looking stranger than ever.

Note, in terms of the diminishing number of jobs at the high end, I said "nice salary," not "nice job." It's possible to find joy and fulfillment, I suppose, as an associate in a big firm, pulling down a fantastic salary as you learn the basics of how to practice law. But day after day, year after year, with a lower chance than ever of making partner? Not appealing to me....

So, Mitt... What Should Government Be Doing?

Presidents do themselves no favors when they run for office on the conceit that the incumbent somehow directly controls the economy, and imply that there's a giant spigot hidden in the Oval Office labeled "jobs" and that all the President has to do is open up the valve and job opportunities will magically proliferate. They do it for two reasons: It resonates with the public, not only because the incumbent President does bear responsibility for his policies, but because they've heard about the implied "magic faucet" throughout their lives. Also, if the economy is faltering it's an easy point of attack, whether or not the attack is honest under the circumstances.

In a big picture sense it is fair to say that when one party controls policy over a four or eight year period, they bear some responsibility for the outcome of that policy. But, do I need to say it, there is no magic faucet, and Congress has far more control over the day-to-day economy than does the President.

Nobody would expect a person as habitually disingenuous as Mitt Romney to break the trend. To the contrary, we have every indication that if Romney believes a statement or position will help him win the Presidency he's going to run with it, and that truth and fairness aren't even part of his calculus. You can reply that he's acting the part of a "typical politician", and you may be right, but let's not pretend it's good for the country.

Romney's latest demagoguery on jobs:

“If there has ever been a president who has failed to give the middle class of America a fair shot, it is Barack Obama,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee he told a crowd of 500 supporters today in Stratham.

But here's the thing: Romney (as always) has failed to identify anything the President could have done. His most substantive response to the President's speech, it would seem, is that it was "very long".

It's not unusual for a political party to want to have things both ways - to argue for one position while pursuing another. But it's more than fair to ask Romney, "If the President has the power to turn the economy around, to make job opportunities plentiful, to increase middle class incomes, what exact steps can the President take to accomplish all of that? What exact steps do you plan to take once you're elected?"

Romney, of course, has no answers. The closest thing he has to an economic policy is his embrace of the Ryan plan - cut taxes for the rich, cut Social Security and Medicare for everybody else, run up the deficit, and... how is that not a repeat of the Bush debacle? Granted, Bush ran up the deficit by expanding Medicare, not cutting it, and his Social Security privatization plan died within his own party, but even with that in mind it's difficult to see how entitlement cuts are going to create jobs.

Really, any time Romney suggests that the President could do something to improve job opportunities for the middle class, he should be asked "Like what?" And he should be pressed until he gives a concrete answer - or concedes that he has no answers. (And if there's an equivalent issue on the other side, the same rule should apply to President Obama.)

Also, Romney should be directly challenged on the inherently contradictory notion that the government is standing in the way of jobs, but that the President could "do something" magical that will suddenly create millions of new jobs.

Regrettably, that's not how the nation's media operates.

Can You Keep Up With the New Economy?

Paul Krugman has done a good job refuting the notion that the rise in unemployment over the course of the latest recession reflects a structural change, and that lends credence to his argument that efforts to stimulate the economy and get people back into the workforce are a viable response to the slow rebound of the employment market. That said, and with due credit to his argument that the comments of self-described "structuralists" like David Brooks echo claims made in the 1930's that history has proved to be wrong, there are some significant differences between "now" and "then".

Krugman has noted that increases in worker productivity reflect a healthy economy, are to be expected, and thus don't support the thesis that we will never again need as many workers. But the increases in worker productivity over the past century have made it considerably more difficult to create work for large numbers of people. Thanks to significant improvement in technology, infrastructure projects that once would have employed hundreds or thousands usually can now be completed by relatively small crews. Also, a century ago, lower-skilled manufacturing jobs could not be outsourced to foreign nations, nor could phone banks, data centers, and other lower- and moderately skilled service jobs be similarly outsourced. Globalization is not the reason for the loss of jobs during the recession, but it may be part of why the return of jobs is so slow, and I think it is pretty clear that it plays a role in shrinking wages for low- and moderately-skilled workers, and for the general flattening of middle class incomes. That is, even if not the cause of the problem, globalization complicates recovery.

Further, as technological change accelerates, workers can find that if they aren't constantly updating their skills their talents can become obsolete. And even if they are updating their skills there's no guarantee that they will have an easy career path, that their skills will continue to be relevant as new technologies come online, or that their jobs won't be outsourced, Many of the workers who are part of the chronically unemployed during the present recession will not return to the workforce, or will never again enjoy the level of income that they enjoyed before losing their jobs. I think it's a valid concern that we'll see the same pattern occur in future recessions and, for that matter, in smaller numbers even during the "good times". I'm not arguing that this is a new phenomenon, but (while hoping I'm proved wrong) that worker obsolescence is occurring and likely to continue to occur on a larger scale than we've seen in the past.

When you look at the big numbers, I agree with Krugman that there is no structural reason why we could not return to a level of unemployment roughly the same as that which we saw before the recession began. But I think that there are structural reasons why middle class wages are stagnating, why it will become more and more difficult for lower-skilled workers to enjoy middle class lifestyles, for reduced mobility between socio-economic classes, and for the increased difficulty workers are likely to face maintaining their skills and wages over the course of a career.

I Know Exactly How Things Always Used to Be....

Because I've seen a few episodes of Ozzie and Harriet. Seriously, can we expect pundits to ever tire of cherry-picking a date from the late 1950's or early 1960's as the date that society was perfect, and acknowledge both that the period at issue was anything but perfect - particularly for non-whites - and is not representative of the rest of human history?

In 1957, 57 percent of those surveyed said that they believed that adults who preferred to be single were “immoral” or “neurotic.” But today, as Eric Klinenberg reminds us in his book, “Going Solo,” more than 50 percent of adults are single. Twenty-eight percent of households nationwide consist of just one person. There are more single-person households than there are married-with-children households. In cities like Denver, Washington and Atlanta, more than 40 percent of the households are one-person dwellings. In Manhattan, roughly half the households are solos.

In 1857, what percentage of people do you suppose would have argued that marriage should be based upon romantic love, and that the romantic feelings should last a lifetime? What percentage of people would argue that it is never acceptable for a husband to strike his wife? I've heard it argued that conservatism is predicated upon trying to identify and preserve the best elements of the past, while acknowledging and accepting change of the worst, but the Brooks-style argument is far more prevalent: Pick a point in history, most often when the commentator was a child, romanticize the era, ignore its bad points, ignore the social factors that contributed to the often historically brief high points of the era, and argue that everything would be perfect if only we could build some form of social engineering time machine and force society into the fictionalized mold of that era.

Brooks observes,

A few generations ago, most people affiliated with one of the major parties. But now more people consider themselves independent than either Republican or Democrat.

Um... so what? At one point it was Whigs versus Tories, right? Times change. More to the point, the fact that people call themselves "independent" does not mean that they in fact vote differently than people with stated party affiliations. If you follow up with "do you lean toward the Republican Party or the Democratic Party", you'll get an answer that his highly predictive of how an independent will vote.

A few generations ago, many people worked for large corporations and were members of a labor union. But now lifetime employment is down and union membership has plummeted.

An interesting observation, given that union jobs, stable employment and the ability to earn a solid, middle class salary as a blue collar worker factored into the middle class culture of the late 1950's that Brooks so adores, but I somehow doubt that Brooks is arguing for more unions, higher wages for factor jobs and job protections. It's like that song, Love and Marriage, which I believe was released in 1955 - you can't have one without the other. Except in relation to marriage you can, and for most historical marriages you did. What you can't have is a strong, economically stable blue collar middle class if you don't have job opportunities and labor laws that will support and sustain a strong, economically stable blue collar middle class - history teaches us that lesson, as well.

A few generations ago, teenagers went steady. But over the past decades, the dating relationship has been replaced by a more amorphous hook-up culture.

A few generations ago, boys were allowed to "sow their wild oats" while girls were to remain chaste and to marry, often at a very young age, the man their parents chose for them to marry. Brooks also later suggests that if teenagers hang out in groups instead of going steady, this is indicative society's evolution away from a time when "America was groupy". Um, yeah.... Needless to say, Brooks carries on for a while longer in that vein.

Brooks makes an interesting observation,

But if there is one theme that weaves through all the different causes, it is this: The maximization of talent. People want more space to develop their own individual talents. They want more flexibility to explore their own interests and develop their own identities, lifestyles and capacities. They are more impatient with situations that they find stifling.

Brooks overstates his case. As with his attempt to attribute major changes in society and culture to technologies that have only existed for the past ten to twenty years, he overstates both the role of talent in society and the extent to which talented individuals can carve out their own successful career paths. But there's a lot of truth to the fact that our society has evolved toward an expectation that people have the right to make their own choices, to "be happy", and to be fulfilled, even if we don't have a clear sense of what that means. In Brooks' "groupy" past, there were strong group pressures to tolerate miserable situations lest you lose your status within your groups. I don't consider it to be a bad thing that some of the groups that once dominated social behavior have lost their stranglehold, but at the same time we have evolved into a society in which people feel more free to pursue their individual wants and needs and that the freedom has had an impact on traditional groups and upon the institution of marriage. Like pretty much every process of social evolution, the result is a mixed bag.

Predictably, Brooks imagines that society is composed of two kinds of people:

Over all, we’ve made life richer for the people who have the social capital to create their own worlds. We’ve also made it harder for the people who don’t — especially poorer children.

If life is harder for children who are poor we're not actually talking about social capital, are we? Because poverty is an economic construct. Here Brooks appears to be trying to sustain his weak argument from recent columns in which he attempts to argue that the bottom thirty percent of wage earners have lost their moral bearings but that, even though he sees something close to a perfect correlation between economic trends and the changes in social behavior, their situation has nothing to do with economics. It's a bit like his allusion to union membership in this column - he can identify and track myriad economic factors that correlate with what he perceives to be a shift in values, but then turn on a time and argue without evidence that we're actually seeing some form of transformation of human nature. Correlation should not be confused with causation, but if the correlation holds for pretty much all of human history and you have no other evidence to support your claim....

Brooks concludes,

These trends are not going to reverse themselves. So maybe it’s time to acknowledge a core reality: People with skills can really thrive in this tenuous, networked society. People without those advantages would probably be better off if we could build new versions of the settled, stable and thick arrangements we’ve left behind.

It's a shame he couldn't find room in his column to suggest a means through which we can push the working poor through that social engineering time machine and recreate the world of Ozzie and Harriet. (Perhaps we could call that world Pleasantville.) But really, if Brooks breaks away from his standard cocktail circuit and explores the real world, he will likely find that people with the "skills" and opportunities necessary to create a wholly independent life are few in number, and that most people are pretty much embedded in a culture of jobs and paychecks. One might argue that if we lived in the meritocracy that Brooks imagines himself to be a part of, a better columnist would be composing a column in his place and would be acknowledging that reality.

David Brooks and the Class Divide

David Brooks has been reading Charles Murray, so it's time for another of his another "tenth grade quality book book reports".... Call it an oversimplification if you will, but having built his reputation (so to speak) on a sloppily reasoned book suggesting that African Americans struggle because they have low IQ's, Murray has a new book contending that poor white people struggle for sociological reasons. Brooks, of course, makes no mention of Murray's history, instead lavishing his new book with praise.

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricy, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today....

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Get that? Murray's limiting his data to white people allows him to be "at his best", lest "complicating factors" such as race and, um, "other" confuse his thesis. Perhaps by showing, for example, that The Bell Curve is every bit as bad as its critics contend.

Two things to note at this point: First, Murray's story is that of "white people", and second... why 1963? Did the world begin in 1963? Weren't there white people in American prior to 1963? Or did what Brooks describes as Murray's "incredible data" reveal to him that if he started his story in any other year it would be weaker or completely undermined. We could, for example, compare unemployment rates during the Great Depression to those of today, but that wouldn't work so well for Murray's thesis that white society has somehow grown apart. So, why not pick the peak year for the argument that America used to look somewhat like Ozzie and Harriet, and go from there.

Brooks, predictably, accepts Murray's arguments as proof of his own theories about the nation, and that social norms that emerge from a snapshot reflect the norm of human history up through the present era. Now... something is causing the country to "bifurcate[] into different social tribes" and the rich don't spend enough time associating with the poor. What's more, people tend to marry within their social and economic class. Shocking, really. Except that's the story of human history. To the extent that a couple of world wars flattened things out for a while, we've never lived in a country or world in which class and money didn't matter and didn't affect social relationships and behaviors.

Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

With the difference between now and the rest of history being the location of the enclaves? Does Brooks believe that "in the good old days" an Eton boy would go to Oxford, graduate, then marry a scullery maid and settle in Yorkshire? Does he believe that families with surnames like Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Delano, Carnegie and Astor are known for their humble abodes, modest lifestyles, and marriages with members of the working class?

Brooks overtly breaks from the right-wing dogma that "liberal elites" are ruining the country's morals.

Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

That assertion is consistent with my position that, on the whole, people who disfavor legislation of morality are better at moderating their own behaviors and impulses as compared to those who view it as a necessity, and don't want others peering into their bedrooms. The Republicans who want to legislate morality are speaking to a population that is more than happy to pretend that "liberals" are condescending to them, even when the opposite is at least as often the case, and feels, for whatever reason, that people cannot be trusted to behave in a socially acceptable manner unless they are placed at risk of serious consequence, most notably pregnancy or jail.

Brooks, as you might expect, overstates his case for the moral righteousness of the "cultural elite", as it's easier to get married, stay married, remarry after divorce, and remain within the confines of what Brooks would deem a "conservative, traditionalist" life if you are wealthy, or at least financially stable. Nonetheless, this is probably the most honest criticism I've seen Brooks offer of his party - that it's rhetoric about liberal elites is pure demagoguery.

In the name of false equivalence, what the left hand giveth the right hand must take away:

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent.

Funny, although you certainly do hear about the uppermost echelons of wealth these days, most economic analysis I see still looks at wealth quintiles. The "Occupy" movement gave additional attention to the top 1%, with the real story of being the 0.1%, but that's a different story than the one being spun by Brooks.

If Brooks wants to make the claim that "Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite", perhaps he could do us the favor of identifying the Democrats of whom he speaks. While there's definitely concern on the political left that tax policy favors the wealthiest Americans, that concern has the virtue of being true. While there's concern on the left that the last three decades have seen the wealthiest Americans siphon corporate profits for their own benefit while workers' wages have stagnated or declined, that also has the virtue of being true.

Perhaps Brooks believes what he is implying, that human nature has somehow changed such that economics are irrelevant, but it seems to me that he's offering a red herring. For most of human history there has been great disparity between the wealth of the rich and poor, and throughout that time there has been suggestion that many or most of the poor are undeserving, victims not of society but of their poor values. I suspect Brooks knows he's offering a canard, because he proceeds to acknowledge the role of economics in the present state of society:

The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

The central role being what? Brooks has already told us that the "cultural elites" stand as good role models for hard work and moral behavior. What's left but economics? The top 20% are faring quite well, thank you very much, even as other quintiles have struggled.

From this point, Brooks devolves into what might be called "claptrap":

Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

But Brooks told us earlier,

In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

How can Brooks argue both that "members of the lower tribe" as a class are simultaneously dropping out of the workforce and working hard? Surely it's one or the other.

Really, it seems fair to say that most people work hard, particularly those in menial jobs in which their bosses view them as expendable and easily replaced, but that the fundamental problem is a lack of jobs, and more notably a lack of jobs that people with less education and academic inclination can use as a stepping stone to the middle class. Brooks may want to pretend that this is a matter of sociology - that all we need to do is imbue the poor with the proper values and they'll be working hard and forming stable families - but you cannot honestly compare 1963 to the present without admitting that you're comparing a period of boom times for blue collar workers with a modern era in which anti-union measures, automation and outsourcing have decimated the blue collar middle class.

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years.

Yet another version of, “Even though I didn’t want to, didn’t have to, and personally did not do what I’m suggesting, in order for more people to grow up with my values I think all young people should have to spend years of their lives jumping through hoops I will now arbitrarily define.” Public service, national service, military service, menial jobs.

In other words, even though Brooks tells us that the problem is not an "underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites", the way to fix the problem is to force young people, rich and poor, to spend years of their lives performing some form of community service while living in some form of MTV-style "Real World" communal housing. That will surely fix everything.

Thomas Friedman's 'Lake Wobegon' America

Thomas Friedman trips over his own words with his claim, "Average is Over". He skips over the easiest ways to join the wealthiest Americans - being born rich - and the second best way, his personal method, marrying an exceptionally wealthy heir or heiress.

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

This is fair to a point. I do sense that unless you're firmly ensconced in the privileged class, a typical job of the future will demand a lot of you - continuously working to stay at the top of your field. Fewer and fewer jobs will let you coast, or allow you to be the person who knows the way things used to work.

But Friedman doesn't appear to understand the law of averages, or the joke of Lake Wobegon. Average is determined mathematically, so even if everybody improves there will remain an average. It's not possible for everybody in every field to find an "extra" that makes them above average. People who can distinguish themselves and prove their value will find it easier to earn a decent wage, and some will rise in wealth and position, but that won't eliminate either the average or the fact that our society includes a lot of dead-end jobs in which being above average simply means you work harder for the same or a slightly higher rate of pay.

Friedman is excited at the idea of going to a restaurant and ordering his food using a tablet rather than being served by a waiter. I expect he's excited for the rest of us, as it's difficult for me to imagine Friedman spending much time in a restaurant where his napkin is not recovered and folded neatly, awaiting his return from the restroom.¹ That is to say, Friedman is in a class of wealth that makes it unlikely that he wants to play with a tablet computer to learn what's on the menu, or where he would have to tap the equivalent of a call button to get his water glass refilled.

I think a tablet could be an effective tool at restaurants where people presently queue to place their orders. Rather than waiting in line, trying to decide what you want, you can sit down, take your time, and not have the person behind you sighing loudly at your lack of familiarity with the menu.

There's something else that Friedman is missing in his excitement over iWaiters. The fact that they're not actually a labor saving device - they're a labor shifting device. Perhaps that's why I see them falling into place in a restaurant that doesn't have waiters. In those restaurants you're already used to having what was once the restaurant's job shifted to you - collecting your food at the counter, carrying it to your table, filling your own drink, throwing away the trash at the end of your meal. Banks use ATMs and online banking, grocery stores have self-serve checkout, bag your own groceries. In most states it's rare to find a full-service gas pump. The need for labor hasn't disappeared - it has just been shifted from the provider to the customer.

Friedman is also excited at the idea that a Chinese factory can retool on a moment's notice, and can pull its thousands of workers out of their dormitories to be retrained for the new system. "Sorry for waking you up - here's a biscuit and a cup of tea." No American plant can match that? Well, yeah. But for those of us who don't fetishize China, it would not be such a big deal if workers were trained on a more human schedule when they came to work from their homes, where they live with their families. As excited as Friedman gets about the idea that China is turning all of its workers into highly educated high performers, his anecdote belies that idea - he's describing a society of drones. Where does the reward of not being average fit into that world? "Good for you, you were 3% more efficient than your peers in fitting screens into frames. You get another biscuit."

Friedman is also excited about Siri, the voice interface to the latest iPhone. He quotes an executive of the company that developed the software, gushing about how good it is.

“Siri is the beginning of a huge transformation in how we interact with banks, insurance companies, retail stores, health care providers, information retrieval services and product services.”

Well, yeah, I guess I can see how Siri and similar programs going to take over the world's voice mail systems, perhaps reducing the frustration of the absurd menus most companies impose on consumers by allowing you to have a "conversation" with a computer. But we're not even to that point of the revolution. And many people, particularly those with more complex problems, will still prefer to talk to a human being.

I can imagine the frustration, also, of having a computer keep redirecting you from real answers to your issues, a'la Comcast, because the last thing they want to do is actually help you resolve a problem that should involve their crediting your account. Siri may become smart enough to understand what you're asking, but I can see her being programmed to give you a partial or inaccurate answer, anyway.

Friedman states that, as we enter an era in which "average is officially over,... nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education." Friedman should take a hard look at China, or at least his perceptions of China, as if he thinks about what is happening in that country he should be able to see that they are not trying to turn everybody into an "above average" performer. They'll help the children of the wealthy and of party elites through special schools and opportunities, and will identify some students by talent and nurture that talent, but in large part they understand that they need a lot of drones and, ultimately, their system collapses if their drones become too few or too expensive.

By G.I. Bill, does Friedman actually mean a G.I. bill? Join the military, get a college education? It seems not - I think he means a "G.I. bill" that does not actually require being a G.I. I agree with the sentiment that every American should have access to college, and will take it a step further and state that they should also have access to a K-12 education that gives them a chance to succeed in college. But I think Friedman falls into the class of people who believe that school makes you smarter, and that everybody is or can be college material. We will do better for our society by recognizing that some people aren't cut out for college, or should do something else first, than by trying to push everybody into college without regard for interest or aptitude. We do our nation no favors by pretending that everybody can be above average, or that everybody needs to be. We're a long way from being a true meritocracy.
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1. In fairness, perhaps Friedman believes the iWaiter tablet will have an app that refolds his napkin.

Class and Income Rigidity in the United States

I don't want to pick on Megan McArdle, as I think her heart's in the right place on this one, but.... In an effort to explore inequality, some time back, Megan McArdle argued,

The old aristocracy was, I think, at least dimly aware that it wasn't quite fair for them to have what they had by mere virtue of being born to the right parents. But in the new aristocracy, it is rarely enough to just get born to the right parents; you also have to work very hard. (Higher earning men are now more likely to work more than 50 hours a week than are men in lower earnings quintiles.)

Has McArdle ever worked at a job that paid by the hour?

When Eric Erickson made a fool of himself by arguing that he worked three jobs, it wasn't just his white T-shirt that was intended to send the message, "I'm just a working guy". It's typically those who work in hourly jobs who can legitimately claim to be working multiple jobs. Why? Because their employers have only so many hours of work to offer, and when the schedule fills up you can only get more hours by changing jobs or moonlighting. If your a non-exempt employee, such that you're entitled to overtime, your employer also has a strong incentive to cap your work week at 40 hours, leaving you with more time to find and work a second job - not that you would find that to be an ideal use of your time, were you in that position, but if you need the income that's how you'll get it.

When the economy is booming, a lot of the workers that McArdle suggests aren't "work[ing] very hard" in fact put in ridiculous hours. I know some people in the construction trades who were working seventy or more hours per week during the boom. Some now have difficulty finding full-time employment, and an even harder time finding employers who are willing to pay overtime. They didn't get lazy - the economy changed.

As for those hard-working white collar types, one of the big reasons why they work more than forty hours is that they are exempt and thus their employers can require them to work more hours without paying them any additional money. Yes, some people who are chained to their desks do work very hard. Others put in a lot of face time. Others do work that's pretty mundane and could easily be distributed to other workers, but for the fact that hiring additional help would increase the employer's costs. (Perhaps McArdle has forgotten the Bush Administrations expansion of jobs that could be classified as exempt, and has overlooked the frequency with which employers are accused of cheating workers out of overtime pay - it's a big deal.)

In speaking of poverty and income inequality, McArdle argues,

I don't care about income inequality. I care about the absolute condition of the poor -- whether they are hungry, cold, and sick. But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett's incomes to mine. And I'm not sure why anyone should.

McArdle's examples seem a bit odd. I can't recall hearing anybody argue that either Gates and Buffett are undeserving of their wealth. On the one hand, McArdle seems to recognize that the two issues are unrelated - and in fact that inequality of income and wealth is what allows some entrepreneurs and investors to come out on top. But on the other she appears to be suggesting that if you're concerned about anything beyond absolute poverty, you're engaging in some form of class resentment whereby you want to strip wealth away from people like Gates and Buffett. The disconnect is highlighted by the fact that McArdle wants people to have equal economic opportunity, independent of their economic status. If McArdle's statement is meant to be, "As long as there's a reasonable path from poverty to wealth, I don't care about income inequality," fair enough. But if her statement is taken literally, surely she is aware that there is a tipping point at which income inequality will pretty much lock the class structure in place.

Despite her implication that professionals work harder than hourly workers, McArdle does recognize that there's a lot more to the picture than that. She suggests, in my opinion quite rightly, that higher wage earners are apt to give their children better education and better opportunities, and in many cases "the actual skills required to earn more money than everyone else". I read a comment a while back, I believe from one of Donald Trump's children, describing how he had proposed attending a college that would have allowed him more time to pursue sports or hobbies. He was told to go to the best college he could get into. Did he necessarily get a better education there? Perhaps, but probably not. But "The Donald" has a very clear understanding of the value of branding. Trump provides an example of how somebody can benefit not just from family money, but from entering the same business as their parent. Trump's father was a successful real estate developer in New York City, so it's far from a surprise that Trump became a real estate developer in New York City. And with some hard work, luck, no small amount of ego and force of personality, along with dad's money and connections, Trump succeeded (and failed) on a much larger scale than his father. The lesson to be inferred is less that Trump received an unfair advantage, and more that children will often follow a career path consistent with that modeled for them by their parents. And yes, if you learn the ins and outs of any job from somebody who already holds it, you're more apt to succeed in that job.

Children of the wealthy are also more likely to get a level of support unavailable to the rest of us - a job at their parent's firm to help establish them in their parent's profession. Yes, about forty percent of sons at some point work for one of their father's past employers, but it should go without saying that at the bottom end of the labor pool that is more likely to establish you as a lower-end wage earner than to help propel you to the top 1% (where the number of sons working at dad's current or old employer approaches 70%).¹

Also, it's not like the top 1% through the remaining 32% of their children to the wolves. A couple of "sons of bankers" come to mind, one of whom was sharp as a tack but uninterested in banking. His father put him through law school and funded his founding of a law firm. Another was not very bright or motivated. His father bought him a commercial janitorial services company. It's much easier to enter into a profession, or to succeed as an entrepreneur, when your path to success is greased with family money.

The benefits of having wealthy parents can't be avoided and, even if you believe it should be, it's difficult to impinge a cure that would not be worse than the disease. But let's recognize that if Donald Trump's dad were a shift manager at a restaurant, Trump would be a success if he became a general manager. He would be a phenomenal success if he became a successful restauranteur - but probably still somebody we wouldn't have heard of. Trump moved from third base to home plate - but unlike most of the rest of us, he started on third.

While McArdle professes some level of surprise that although "Ivy League colleges threw open their doors to the bourgeois masses, and cut back on the Saint Grottlesex crowd," inequality persists, perhaps she should consider both that the Ivy Leagues have not eliminated preferences for the children of alumni, and that the number of people who can attend Ivy League schools remains insignificant - even though the signal drawn from attendance is massive. Using McArdle's own anecdote from another piece, quoting Bryan Caplan's finding that "Super-elite credentials matter much more than your academic record",

You see this in Washington all the time -- a friend who went to a lesser-known state school said he could always tell the people he wasn't going to like when he met them at cocktail parties, because the minute he told them where he'd gone to school, they became extremely interested in going to get another drink or find the cheese dip. This is one of the smartest, most consistently interesting and original, most talented writers I know. Having actually attended one of those elite schools that apparently make you fascinating, I can attest firsthand that statistically, the elitists were vanishingly unlikely to be as interesting as the person they abandoned because he'd gone to a state college.

The first question that comes to mind: Why do McArdle and her friend keep going to those parties? (The answer, of course, is obvious: They're hobnobbing with rich, powerful people and it benefits them to "see and be seen".) The second question is, why does her friend keep dropping the name of his undergraduate institution into discussions? It's truly difficult for me to believe that, as a matter of course, the people at these parties are changing the subject from his scintillating conversation and saying, "This is a nice conversation and all, but unless you went to Harvard or Yale I have to move on to more important people or, if you went to a state college, the cheese dip."²

When McArdle observes that middle class parents would be horrified if their children, like those of the bottom quintile, had only a 17% chance of achieving a household income of $90,000 or more, she's correct. But that also highlights how she misses the boat on income inequality. The more education your parents have, the more wealth they have, the more business and political connections they have, the more they can do for you - even if simply by example³ - to land you among the nation's highest wage earners. If you truly don't care about income inequality, and truly don't care if the bottom drops out on the middle class, you cannot credibly claim to be concerned about the associated collapse of opportunity to rise.
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1. Admittedly the figures are from Canada, but I expect that the experience is about the same in the U.S. and U.K.

2. Unless, perhaps, these conversations involved his lobbying various political insiders for a nomination to the Supreme Court, but that's another story.

3. Most will do much more than act as role models.