“…America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.” The Genteel Nation
England Forty Years Ago
In the early 1970’s I was a graduate student in London. One of my fellow students was a 40-year-old senior government official specializing in trade. His ministry was paying for his degree, as well as giving him a full year’s paid leave. His father was a coal miner; he was the oldest of eight children. His parents sacrificed to send him to public school (what we would call private school) and then Cambridge. His siblings remained in the village and became coal miners. He asked me what I intended to do after completing my master’s program; I told him that most likely I would return to the states and work in private industry. He pointed out that “this was just not done” in England as government service was prestigious while business was a pursuit of the uneducated classes. It was not work for a gentleman.
During the year, I also had lunch with the head of DCL, the predecessor company to Diageo. Clearly a bright man from a lower middle class background, he never “went to university” or had any formal business training. He apprenticed at DCL and worked his way up from the shop floor to management. The prevailing attitude in England was that business was dirty and was not a worthy pursuit of the upper class. The state of the British economy in the 1970’s was deplorable, a mix of inefficient state run enterprises, internationally uncompetitive private companies, and labor strife everywhere.
The Genteel Nation: America Today
Fast forward to the present day American economy, and consider some insightful comments by David Brooks of the New York Times. Americans believe their country is in economic decline, faced with declining real wages and a jobless recovery. We have missed a key cultural pivot point; that is, we have departed from the hard headed practical mentality that built the country. Graduates from Ivy League institutions overwhelmingly select careers in finance and consulting. Taking a manufacturing job in Akron would be “embarrassing” or “countercultural.”
Disdain for business is reinforced by the First Lady:
The shift away from commercial values has been expressed well by Michelle Obama in a series of speeches. “Don’t go into corporate America,” she told a group of women in Ohio. “You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. … Make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry.” See The Genteel Nation
We spawned a service economy of junior and mid level office workers. To sustain a lifestyle comporting with a management image, we went into debt, produced too little and imported too much. The economy adjusted “underinvesting in manufacturing and tradable goods and overinvesting in retail and housing.” We now have a nation of too many mortgage brokers and too few mechanics, an explosion of communications majors and too few high-skill technical workers. To the detriment of the nation we have a “gentility shift.”
We Need to Get Our Hands Dirty
In a 30-year span, I witnessed the dissolution of manufacturing in this country. My job took me to the factories of upstate New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New England. Today many of those factories are empty or converted to condominiums, shopping centers or museums. Left behind are job training centers, a WalMart, nursing homes and numerous drug stores to service an aging population.
During law school, I lived in a dorm with MBA students. Unlike my English colleague with his fully paid government year-long leave, it was manufacturing companies, International Paper, GE, Ford and others, who were paying for their best and brightest managers to obtain an MBA and return to run a plant or a manufacturing division.
We have been gulled by the seemingly easy money of Wall Street. We are woefully uneducated about the economy. As I have pointed out, service and government jobs are a derivative of a productive economy. See, e.g. It is All a Derivative of Productive Enterprise. We perpetuate many economic illusions. One illusion is that we can all work for the government as suggested by our First Lady. This advice will lead our economy to ruin.
It is time for our elite graduates to recognize the need to work in private productive enterprise. When working for a manufacturing company holds as much allure as Volunteers for America, collectively we will all do better.
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Related posts:
- The Mirage of a Financialized Economy
- Is the US Economy an Impaired Asset? Part II
- The US Economy: An Impaired Asset? Part I
- It is All a Derivative of Productive Enterprise
- The Economy at Street Level
Tags: consulting, David Brooks, England, manufacturing jobs, Michelle Obama, social work
