Showing posts with label Lex Anteinternet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lex Anteinternet. Show all posts
Lex Anteinternet: Looking exactly like a Game Warden should.
Lex Anteinternet: Looking exactly like a Game Warden should.:
Lex Anteinternet: Breaking off the trail at the last possible moment.
Lex Anteinternet: Breaking off the trail at the last possible moment.:
Breaking off the trail at the last possible moment.
Years ago, the Trib used to run a paid column on Sundays by a local Protestant minister. I can't recall what denomination he was in, but it was over in the Anabaptist end of things.
It was always interesting, as the author was clearly really going down the trail of the early Church, and he'd follow it week after week consistently. . .right up until it suddenly didn't go where he wanted. So, for example, he'd note Christ's commission to the Apostles, how Peter was the head of the early Church, and come within a hair of adopting the principal of Apostolic Succession. . . before he'd suddenly break off. Or he'd take a look at the Last Supper, start going down the road of Transubstantiation, and then suddenly break off.
It's a very human trait.
Some time ago, on Twitter, I subscribed to Robert Reich's Twitter feed, and I'll occasionally read his articles. They're interesting on economics.
Reich is solidly in the old school, "progressive", left wing of the Democratic Party. I note that, as he can't get over it.
He'll start following a trail of economic thought, and how the economy in his argument is dominated by the few, how that needs to stop, how average people need more control of the economy, and get right up to the brink of Distributism. . .and then break off. Taxes are the solution, he argues.
Well, they have to be. After all, that's the progressive solution for, well, nearly everything.
Robert. Your inner Distributist is trying to visit with you. That's Chesterton's cigar you're sensing late at night . . .
Lex Anteinternet: The Great Hesitation?
Lex Anteinternet: The Great Hesitation?:
Well, maybe not resignations, although one newly minted lawyer I'm familiar with, who was mentioned in a draft post here the other day, is on her third or fourth position in just two years. But some of those were temporary by nature (one definitely wasn't).
The Great Hesitation?
Evidence for the “great resignation” is thin on the ground
Job quits are not unusually high
So states The Economist.
And not just the economist.
Perhaps. . . but I think something else may be going on, which explains the caption of the entry here. Let's call it The Great Hesitation.
The recent news stories on the Great Resignation are claiming its pretty much bunk. But what was it in the first place? Well, supposedly just what the name implied. People were quitting their jobs in the post Pandemic world.
Apparently, they aren't.
That doesn't mean something isn't going on.
Some personal observations.
A couple of months ago, in late summer, I tried a case in Denver. The hotel I stayed in downtown had very little in the way of staff. We were warned about that upon checking in. It was also quite spartan downtown in general, and maybe that explains it. Maybe they just hadn't added staff back, as they weren't anywhere near at capacity. . .maybe.
Countering that, downtown restaurants were back open, and they seemed fully staffed and plenty full. Well, full, not hugely full as they often had been.
Further, however, it seems that the entire legal industry is experiencing an entry level lawyer shortage.
Not that there's a shortage of graduating folks from law school. Not hardly. There are lots of new graduates. They're just not taking law jobs. And that isn't a singular observation, it's extremely widespread.
This is also true of staffing positions for law firm. Lots of openings. . .no takers.
So what's going on?
Well, maybe not resignations, although one newly minted lawyer I'm familiar with, who was mentioned in a draft post here the other day, is on her third or fourth position in just two years. But some of those were temporary by nature (one definitely wasn't).Rather, it seems fairly obvious, people aren't going back to jobs they once held, or they're holding off entering the job market entirely.
At some point, that probably has to end, but this is some sort of big social trend. And it's been going on for a while. We may have in fact just noticed it, and in part it may be somewhat amplified right now.
So what's up?
Well, a lot of what's up is what we've noted here again and again about the nature of modern work, and people are reacting to it. And the people who are reacting, are those at the entry level, or those who have been knocked out of work. People aren't getting in, and they aren't coming back.
Those who never left, have kept on keeping on.
The other thing that is going on is, I suspect, something that's been going on for quite some time. And its a generational thing.
The World War Two and Silent Generations weren't given much option about working, but because of the war and developments in it, combined with the advance of certain types of (domestic) machinery, they entered work at a pretty advantageous time. The World War Two Generation built the modern American work culture, although they did it when they were quite young. And the Great Depression and the Second World War enormously amplified a trend that had been going on since the early 1900s, which was the migration from the country to the city. The Silent Generation went along with all of this, as it didn't really have any choice. The Baby Boomers, in spite of initially protesting everything, fully embraced it by the 1970s, theirs being the last generation to enter the workplace in which 1) you didn't need a college education in order to get a decent paying job; and 2) a bachelors degree pretty much let you write your own ticket.
Things have fallen apart since then, although the generations that entered upper middle class positions haven't noticed or have excused it away.
It turned out, and turns out, that a bunch of the things Americans were told since 1945 about work, combined with economic policies in place since that time, have created a work life that people simply just don't like. Shipping blue collar jobs overseas, amplifying the move to the big cities beyond what was already in place, and putting everyone in cubicle jobs didn't suit their tastes as it doesn't suit nature.
Additionally the inflating requirement for a college degree, combined with the forced industrialization of female labor has pushed the marginalization of young adults back to some degree.
Indeed, in the draft posts I have up here, I have this item, which I'll incorporate here as its somewhat relevant.
Some time ago we took this highly unpopular view here in our Zeitgeist series.
Children and Forced IndustrializationYou've seen them here before, and yes, here they are again. Migrant farm couples, 1938.I've come to be simply amazed by the degree to which Americans are now acclimated to the concept that the government ought to pay for things, well, related to sex in some way or another.Joe Biden's economic "relief" bill, which really addresses a topic that no longer really needs addressing, includes a big boost for pre K childcare.Why?To make my surprise, if that's what it is, more plain, what that means is that money will come from taxes (and loans) to help pay for the childcare of people so that they don't have to pay for it, directly, themselves.More bluntly, this will make it easier, which is part of what is being boosted as a reason to do it, for those with low incomes to have two working parents, as the thesis is that otherwise they'll have to make economic choices that will be difficult.First of all, while it makes me sound like a Marxist saying it, isn't it clear that what this amounts to is the forced industrial employment of women? What hte goal really is, is to make it easier for working mothers to work, which rapidly equates into forcing them to work, which is essentially what our economy had done over the past 70 years. That is, we've converted from the early industrial revolution economy of forcing men out of their homes to work from eight to twelve hours per day to one t hat now requires women to do the same. In order to do that we've subsidized all sorts of things to the benefit, essentially, of industry, and now we propose to go one step further.Indeed, the irony of this is that this is where Marxist and Capitalist come back around and meet. Early Marxists sought the dissolution of marriage and the collectivization of child care. That has been regarded s horrific, but that's exactly what industrial economies have done over the past seventy years and the Biden Administration proposes to knock it up a notch.This isn't just.It isn't just to force women to leave their children in order to work. It likewise wasn't just to do that in the case of men, but the level of subsidization evolved into force was lower in that case, although still very real.It also isn't just to tax people in order to pay for the children of others, except in dire emergency. People like me who have paid for and raised our own children are now being asked to pay for the care of children we don't remotely know, including children who are raised in circumstances which we wouldn't approve of. If, for example, we can be taxed to pay for childcare for these children, can we also justly require that they be raised with basic sets fo values, including the value of a two parent home, which quite a few won't have? No, certainly not, we won't be allowed to suggest that.I feel this way, I'd note, on a lot of programs in this area, the long lasting ones which provide examples of why going down this path is a bad idea. I've mentioned the "free and reduced" lunch and breakfast programs before, which directly transfers the duty of feeding children from parent to government. I know that it had good intentions, all of these things have unthinking good intentions. The proposals to wipe out student debt or provide free college education also have good intentions, and also are all massively subject to the law of unintended consequences. What they also are, without it really being thought out, are subsidies for industry in varying degrees.I know that the ship has sailed on many of these things, the strong evidence against doing them notwithstanding. It's almost impossible to go back, once these steps are taken. Americans may imagine themselves in some quarters as being rugged individualist, but even people who imagine themselves to be real libertarians acclimate themselves to such things pretty quickly. But it is interesting to wonder what would happen if things went the other way. I.e., if, save for K through 12 education itself, the government simply got out of this area entirely. Feed your own children, provide for you own children, no subsidies for childcare of any kind, and not even any governmental bodies that seek to enforce child support orders. Leave it up to the individual.It'd be really rough for some at first, but I suspect pretty quickly a lot of the old rules would rebound once the burdens returned to the individual. It might even do more economically than proposals to raise minimum wages would, as lots of families would be back to one breadwinner.But no, we're just going to keep in marrying the government and making it the big parent.I should note that probably right away, if anyone reads this, there will be a claim that this is radically traditionalist or something, or maybe anti feminist. Feminism, I'd note, is a term that's now so broad to pracitically not have a meanning without further refining, but in any event, none of that is intended.Indeed, I'd note that its already the case that the public sector has, in some instances, taken care of this much the same way that it took care of health insurance during the 1940s. It's a recruiting incentive. Some big firms of various kinds have in house daycares so their female employees don't have to worry about finding one and still being able to get to work.In addition to that, at least by my observation, it's also the case that workplaces have becoming much more child friendly over the years, particularly in recent years. I never observed children in working spaces when I was younger. Never. Only farms and ranches were the exception. Now I see them all the time. Its not unusual at all for female employees to bring children into the office for one reason or another, often for long hours, and for that to result in very little notice. Therefore, I really don't think that the claim "women will have to choose to go childless" is true, although that no doubt has an economic aspect to it. The poorer you are, the fewer the options. It's one thing to bring your child into a business office. It's quite another to your job at the bar or restaurant.I also don't think that this would ipso facto mean an increase in abortions. Indeed, the current legal trends are towards increasing restrictions in this area as both men and women support increasing restrictions. And social trends seem to suggest that younger people are less interested in acting like their grandparents who came of age in the 60s and 70s in this area in general.What I do think, however, is that it forces choices up front and therefore vest "moral hazard" where it ought to be vested, at the individual level. That probably reemphasizes some old values while combing them with the new economy, which should be done.It probably won't be, however.
That pretty much guaranties that this blog won't be receiving any Radial Feminist Of The Year awards.
Following that, we ran across this item on Twitter:
I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.
My point would have been a different one at the time I first noted these things, but they're still relevant to this one. Lots of people who would have entered their full adult years in their late teens and then gone on to pretty stable adult lives by their mid 20s, now are in college and university for many years instead by necessity. Some are pursuing careers that they really want to be in, both men and women, but many are there by economic force or compulsion The reason that's relevant is that they've become acclimated to it, and at the same time know that jobs they've trained for that they really dont' want won't be all that much when they obtain them.
The solution?
Well, maybe they're making it now. If much of the old economy was remade in a much more local, direct, fashion, it would not be a bad thing.
Blog Mirror: Losing Time
A new entry by South Roane:
Losing Time
This gets a bit to a topic I've addressed elsewhere, both here and on Lex Anteinternet, that being that if I'd had my ruthers, I'd just get by on what I grow, shoot or catch. That wouldn't be my wife's ruthers, however, so a volunteer cow and one of her cousin's pigs is in the freezer right now. And with my really bad luck on hunting license draws recently, if we got by on what I shot or caught, we'd be eating a lot, and I do mean a lot, of rabbit, as it's the only thing that in recent years I could be nearly guaranteed of getting.
Having said that, I did get a deer last year with a general draw license.
I posted a comment on the linked in blog entry, which is as always well worth reading, but what I'd note again here is that when we look back, and some do, and think "I'd live just like my ancestors. . . ", well, they didn't have freezers. At least not until the 1950s.
Related threads:
The Good Old Days.
Among the blogs linked in to our companion blog Lex Anteinternet is the blog of the Adam Smith Institute.
I'll confess when I linked it in, I'd run across it and had confused it with another entity, perhaps The Philadelphia Society. No matter, this British institution celebrates the thinking of Scottish economist Adam Smith, a person whom free marketers herald, and with good reason.
In terms of economics, I'm a distributist, which puts me in a group of about five people or so, all of whom have to spend endless time, if the topic comes up, just trying to explain what distributism is. Distributism, a species of free market economics, hasn't been popular in the main since the Second World War, and to compound the problem of its obscurity, its not only saddled with an unfortunate name, but it attracts people who are sometimes on fringe of wacky, or not outright wacky. For example, as its modern founders were Catholics (Chesterton and Belloc), and English, it'll attract very conservative Catholics who have strayed into thinking they are monarchists. As Belloc had an absurdly romantic concept of the Middle Ages, and as some Belloc fans think everything he said must be accepted without analysis, perhaps there was some inevitability to that, and to a completely inaccurate view of what Medieval economics were like (and I do mean completely inaccurate).
Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society posts some really thought provoking items, and todays' entry is not exception.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS ARE RIGHT NOW - AND DON'T FORGET IT
I'll admit, I don't really fully agree with what the headline relates, but in some significant ways, this is really correct. They correctly note, for example:
We’re richer, live longer lives, have more choices, are, in general, just the generation of our species living highest upon the hog. At levels quite literally beyond the dreams or imagination of those significantly before us.
They go on to honestly note, however:
However, happier is more complex, one correspondent grasping this point:
Here's an interesting item on this:
This is why all those surveys showing that female - self-reported - happiness has been declining to standard male levels over recent decades. That wholly righteous economic and social liberation of women has led to greater choice and thus higher opportunity costs. As women gain those same choices as men therefore happiness rates converge.
The article doesn't really draw any conclusions, save for one, these are the "good old days". And it makes some pretty solid arguments.
All of this is in reply to a post in The Guardian, which posed the question of "when", or "what" were the good old days. [1]. It wanted reader comments on the same.
The Guardian is a notoriously left wing newspaper with frequently very radical ideas. It's gained global circulation in the age of the Internet, and it now is fairly widely read in the US, helped in part by the fact that it lacks a "pay wall", unlike the Washington Post or New York Times. My point here isn't to criticize those latter papers, but to simply note that's how The Guardian is now read by the same folks in rural Wyoming who read the NYT. Indeed, perhaps they're more like to read The Guardian, even though its radically "green" position is likely to make some folks pretty upset locally and they are, in my view, often way off in left field.[2].
Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society likely is correct that in all sorts of substantial ways, we're in the good old days right now. But it is interesting that female happiness is declining. And what its declining to is the rate of male unhappiness.
A couple of years we reported on the finding that workplace discontent is way up over 50% in the United States. That makes it seem like Joanna might be right in her comment to Peter in Office Space that "everyone hates their job", but if that's true, it's really distressing, to say the least.
The Guardian item brought a lot of replies, and its clear that a lot of people really do look back on a prior era, material advances not withstanding, as happier than the current one. Some people cited the 1950s, which seems to often hold this status in people's recollections, in spite of the really scary Cold War, the hot Korean War, and for the British the falling apart of the British Empire all being a feature of it. One person commented that it was the 1970s, which wouldn't occur to me, as I lived through the 70s and have a pretty good recollection of it.
Indeed, there's a good case to be made that "the good old days" were the days in which you were young and without burdens, as your parents took care of them, or some past era you didn't experience, reflected through a mirror, inaccurately, with the bad things filtered out. There are, for example, people who are real fans of the 1940s, and the 1940s were generally horrific on the main. The British often look fondly back at the 40s, I'd note, as, at least in modern times, it really was "their finest hour." Be that as it may, if you were on a beach at Dunkirk hoping not to become a casualty or a German prisoner of war, it would have been unlikely to be seen as a nifty time, at the time.
But I digress.
Focusing on the rising level of female discontent, the Adam Smith Institute correctly notes the following, in my view.
That's pretty hard to disagree with.
What that comment means is that the calls by those who would really return truly to the past are misguided due to the horrors of the past. One of those was high infant, and female, mortality.
Both of those factors are well known but easily forgotten in romantic recollections of the past. Indeed, its interesting to see how this has evolved over time.
To set things in a bit of context, if we went back, let's say, to the 1700s, we'd find that the normal state for men and women to live in was, not surprisingly, marriage. No matter what moderns may like to believe, this is the normal state and for a society on thinner resources, it was actually the only one really safe if people were to yield to their reproductive instincts in any fashion. This is not a surprise.
What might be a surprise, however, is that remarriage by males was extremely common at the time due to a high female mortality rate mostly associated with childbirth. I.e., lots of women died in childbirth and the men usually went on to remarry. It must of hung like a cloud over pregnant women like nothing else.
Additionally, infant mortality was really high. Indeed, a lot of the illusion that we now live longer is based on the massive reduction in the deaths of infants and young children. Take those figures out, and average lifespans aren't much different than they are now. Additionally subtract those figures for women who died in childbirth and this is even more the case.
Not too many women in developed countries now die in childbirth and infant mortality is also way down. We know this intellectually, but we have a hard time grasping it in real terms. I don't know of a single person, personally, who has died in childbirth. I know of couples that have lost infants in childbirth, but not many.
So the Adam Smith blogger certainly has a point.
But it also begs a point. If being free from the high risks of death in childbirth and the risk of losing an infant aren't making women happier, why is that.
That gets back to what we've noted before. People aren't really meant to live this way. I.e, in an industrial society.
And that gets back to the overall happiness rate.
We noted the other day that what the Industrial Revolution achieved, in social terms, was to take people off the land and into factories and work places, but not all at once and not by gender all at once. It took men first, due to their physical build in part but also in part as it was easier to spare them from the home. I.e., you can take a young man with a child and send him down a coal mine without the child, but you really can't send a nursing young woman down the coal mine without the kid.
We're so used to the concept of men being out of the home and away from their families that it not only seems the norm, it became celebrated as the social norm for a long time. However, as we've also noted here in the past, the development of domestic machinery changed that for women over time and their labor became surplus to the home. When that happened, they were redeployed in the economy in the workplace. That went from a more or less temporary matter in a lot of households to a necessary one over time and now the economy demands it. It demands it so much, in fact, that a recent (and maybe still ongoing) effort in the U.S. Congress was to subsidize the workplace by government funding for daycares. People are so used to this concept by now that they don't recognize that for what it is, which is a pure subsidy for employers so that women with children have no excuse but to go to work.
Starting to resist that are women themselves. We just dealt with that more recently here:
A lamentation. The modern world.*
That post contained this item from a young woman in her early twenties from Twitter:
I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.
I don't mean to keep belaboring this point, and this does all recall, kind of, Thomas Wolfe's comment that "you can't go home again and stay there". That seems to be sort of true, but then what Chesterton stated, and which is featured on the footer of this blog, about clocks being human contrivances and being capable of being set back is also completely true. What we seem to have achieved, however, is to create a system that makes us materially much wealthier but its contributing to some degree to our misery.
Why is that?
Well, it might be that a major deep seated reason for all of these changes was to secure us from the wolf at the door, but it was never meant, psychologically, to take that door out of the field. In other words, maybe we burned down the farm, in order to save it.
And we could always rebuild that.
Footnotes.
1. My favorite reply to the question was this one:
I remember a time when nostalgia was a thing of the past.
I'll get my hat...
2. The Guardian aids itself in being taken seriously, I'd note, by not prominently featuring Cheesecake like so many other British newspapers.
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