December 04, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:How good were the good old days?
Well, I've upgraded both Movable Type and my web browser (now proudly using Firefox 1.5) and for the first time in, like, a zillion years, I can see the nifty little buttons that let you hyperlink and make things bold and so forth. So now that I don't have to make all the damned HTML tags I want to celebrate by blogging my little heart out.
Luckily for me, there's a lot of fodder out there. Starting with this post by Laura of Apartment 11D:
Due to a gross miscalculation about the time it takes to write a dissertation, my son was born before either of us had finished. So, we lived in a seedy fourth floor walkup in Washington Heights with waterbugs the size of your fist flying into the baby’s bassinet. We were on welfare. My parents slipped us money at family gatherings and dropped off bags of groceries. Suspicious paint flaked up at the window sill.One day, I walked into the court yard of my building and braced myself for the long haul with kid and stroller up the stairs. As I paused, I realized that the drug dealers had taken their pit bulls off their leash, and the dogs with studded collars were bounding for my kid. “Get your dogs off my kid!” I yelled at the guys in their black puffy coats, hoping that they would leave me alone, because their grandmothers loved me.
We were not only “elaborately educated” but positively festooned with degrees and here we were, living in poverty. After one year, degrees were finished, resumes submitted, but the jobs were too rare. We could either live in separate cities and far from family support or we would have to start over.
We started over. Husband ran out and got the first temp job he could find, an assistant job at an investment bank. We had tried fulfilling work, but it didn’t work out. His new job was demanding and inflexible and not interesting. At first it only paid enough to get by. If I worked, we would go into further debt. So, we assumed a traditional family structure, an imperfect situation for both of us, but the most important thing was to keep the pitbulls off our kids.
The temp job turned into an important job, Finally, after five years, we were able to take the two kids away from the pitbulls and waterbugs and drug dealers, and bring them to a place with a tiny backyard and a good school system.
We’re doing okay now. We still have to work our way through the student loans. And with all those years in grad school, we have no retirement money. We had to buy at the top of the market for the house, so we’ll always have to be very careful. I still buy the kids shoes at Payless and my meat on sale. But we’re okay.
That experience changed me. Made me a utilitarian. The number one purpose of work is to keep the pitbulls off your kids. Everything else is gravy. A fulfilling job. Gravy. A nice social life. Gravy. A job that benefits humanity. Gravy. A job that helps to overthrow the patriarchy. Gravy.
I think that these utilitarian notions of work are more common with my generation than with older generations. We don’t believe that we’ll have social security to rely upon. There are fewer jobs in key fields. Academic jobs were a dime a dozen back in the seventies. We’re saddled with student loans and the knowledge that our kids’ college tuition may exceed a year’s salary. Housing costs are insane. Mobility is much more difficult. There is little room for either gender to experiment with career changes or alternative plans. Whatever is working, you stick with, be it two incomes or one, fulfilling or drab.
On the one hand, I thoroughly agree with the sentiment of hte penultimate paragraph. My generation of nice upper middle class white kids was given a ferocious sense of entitlement by our parents and teachers. As long as we played by the rules we were taught in school--do your work on time, study hard, put work first--we were supposed to have wonderful jobs, terrific spouses, adorable children, a house whose tasteful bibelots and appropriately offbeat furniture all our friends could admire.
If you're a long time reader of this blog, you know what happened to me. I got into a top business school at the height of the internet bubble, went about $100K into hock for tuition, books, and living expenses, and by October of my second year had already secured a high paying job as a management consultant, complete with hefty signing bonus, relocation expenses, and a new new economy "live anywhere you want" policy. I spent most of my second year blissfully studying things that would have no relevance to my future job, travelling, and co-producing the annual GSB follies.
Then the recession and 9/11 happened, and they fired my entire associate class before we could start. But not before they strung us along with ever-later start dates, so that by the time we started looking for another job, we were competing with next year's class of business school graduates. Every time I went into an interview, I could see the interviewer thinking "What's wrong with her? Why doesn't she have a job yet?" Of course, they knew that I'd lost my job through no fault of my own; I simply bet on the wrong horse in the management consulting stakes. But still, why take a chance?
I had never before experienced the feeling of being unable to get a job. A permanent job, I mean; by this time I'd been working at the World Trade Centre Disaster Recovery Site for quite some time. But that didn't really have any future. I needed work I could build a career out of, work suited to my educational background, skills, and ambitions. Unfortunately, such work was pretty damn thin on the ground. My classmates in similar situations started going back to their old fields. My old field was installing computer networks, a field that had attracted a flood of new workers in the capital spending boom that preceded Y2K, and had subsequently busted along with the technology bubble. One technology recruiter I called actually suggested that I find some banker to marry and have babies, since he couldn't find himself a job, much less anyone else.
You have never seen anyone as indignant as I was to discover that the universe was not going to automatically provide me with everything I thought I had earned. And after the righteous anger had waned, I experienced something perilously close to despair. I felt as if someone had told me that the law of gravity had been repealed: if going to a good business school and doing everything you were supposed to was not enough to guarantee you security, what was? If that universal constant could not be depended on, I began to feel that perhaps nothing I had believed in could be relied upon.
That sounds grandiose and adolescent, and of course, it is. But unless you have been out of work for an extended period of time, it's hard to understand exactly how desperate it can make you. In American society, what you do is what you are; everyone asks how you make your money, and if you are not working, you become an object of pity, even as everyone reassures themselves that there must be something wrong with you, so that they do not have to confront the frightening thought that this could just as easily have happened to them.
That was one way to discover that the promises the meritocracy held out to its elite students cannot always be fulfilled. Lots of people end in the same place, though they get there down different roads: there are too few jobs in your chosen field; or a sudden layoff forces you to take the first job you're offered; a child's disability requires Mom or Dad to stay at home changing diapers instead of overseeing mergers; spouses jobs pull in different directions, forcing one to sacrifice their career aspirations; or it turns out that your job just isn't as great as it looked when you signed onto that career track at age 25. The result is that many in my generation . . . or really, the handful of my generation that went from elite school to elite school, academic honor to prestigious job . . . feel somehow that we were cheated, that we'll never have it as good as our parents.
But I think that this is vastly overblown. And worse, I think a lot of liberals tend to generalise their experience to that of their entire generation. Now, there's nothing that sets my teeth on edge than someone claiming that conservatives possess some fountain of widsom undreamt of by liberals, but I haven't seen conservatives making this particular sort of argument; when conservatives look to the past as a lost eden, they romanticize its social structure, where men were real men, women were real women, and children got a kiss and a cookie from a loving mother every day at 3:00 on the dot. Liberals look longingly back at the security and flat income distribution of the 1950's and 1960's.
But when I look at what my family was actually doing, it looks like neither paradise. My great aunts worked all through the fifties and sixties, on the farm or teaching school. My grandfather had his own business, a gas station. He was certainly successful, but he spent most of his day pumping gas. My mother stayed home with us until economic insecurity and the sheer boredom of keeping house in a small apartment turned her out onto the job market, where she sold real estate, as she continues to do. My father stopped working for the City and took a job with a trade association. When I look back I don't see a halcyon era of secure, well paying and fulfilling work; I see people doing what they had to to pay the bills. Indeed, when I began freaking out about my drastically reduced income expectations, my mother pointed out that when my parents moved into the apartment I grew up in, she was 9 months pregnant, had just quit her job, and they had a (to them) giant mortgage, and less than $500 in the bank.
And that's for nice middle class kids with good educations. The lives of the working and lower-middle class were even less fulfilling. Yes, many of them had secure union jobs that were relatively well paying, and I don't want to minimize the value of that; economic insecurity is terrifying. But most of those jobs were like well padded prisons. Forget the visions we all have of those mid-century factories, culled from World War II propaganda films showing happy workers driving rivets, with the vision of a brighter, freer world always in front of them, even as they stop to wipe the honest sweat from their rough-hewn brow. Working on an assembly line is like working inside a clock . . . your entire energy is focused on willing that minute hand to move. Almost any of my readers who worked on an assembly line would find themselves going insane after fifteen minutes of the mind-numbing repetition. And then you have 7 hours, forty-five minutes to go. By the end of your shift, the minute hand moves too slowly for you to concentrate on; you watch the second hand, which advances so sluggishly that you begin to suspect you are trapped in some sort of Einsteinian relativistic vortex where time is moving at a different rate for the rest of the world than it is to you; your life is rapidly trickling away even though the clock is stuck at ten minutes to five.
That's one day. Then you have four more days. And Sunday afternoon spoiled by the knowlege that you have to go back. Endure that torturous progression fifty times, and you've made it one year. Just thirty more to go before you qualify for that gold plated pension. And though it's tempting to believe that the only reason people like me find such work so intolerable is that we're just too gosh-darned bright, it ain't so. Slow and average people find assembly-line work just as stultifying as I do. The only people who find repeating the same action thousands of times a day challenging are too limited to be employed in most factories.
Most white collar jobs were almost as dull. It's hard to be sad at the loss of millions of payroll clerks tabulating ledgers by hand, secretaries dutifully typing up someone else's dull business letters, operators connecting long-distance calls, or any of the other jobs that have been destroyed by technological innovation. Some people are worse off, to be sure, and unlike most libertarians, I'm not willing to simply shrug off the very real unfairness of dumping workers in their mid-fifties on the job market with no help because they bet on the wrong industry 25 years ago. But fwe've replaced those jobs with jobs programming computers, selling software, helping users, designing robots. On the whole, that's a good thing.
It's easy for local tragedy to feel global. If you'd asked me in 2002, I would have guessed that the recession was the worst one since the Great Depression; literally half or more of my friends were out of work. Similarly, to academics, it feels like the whole world is going to hell because academic employment has become dramatically less secure; there has been a glut of graduate students, particularly in history and related fields, that has persisted since the 1960's, even as increasingly professional administrations rely more and more on adjunct professors who get no benefits, no job security, and get paid slightly less per hour than those Bangladeshi children who knot rugs. Though to be fair, the adjuncts are not chained to their desks, at least not literally. Of course, that may just be because the administration wants to keep them running around as much as possible.
But the fact that some of us have had to settle for jobs less lucrative or fulfilling than we expected does not mean that the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket. Yes, we probably can't rely on social security, but on the other hand, it's easier than ever to save for retirement, with Uncle Sam basically giving you a 30% match on every dollar you put into your 401(k). I think the most frightening thing for many of us is the feeling that we have no safety net--that we'll end up poor and abandonned in retirement. But for most of us, it would probably be easy to save for retirement if we were willing to live like your parents did--or at least like my parents did. One television, no stereo, no VCR, no cable, one (used) car, six rooms for four people, no eating out, no cell phones, no vacations other than visiting relatives, stretching meat out with egg and bread and noodle rings, jello as a salad, turn the light off when you leave the room and get off the phone--it's long distance!
That sounds dreadfully as if I'm lecturing Laura on how she'd be fine if she didn't waste so much money. Which is stupid. For one thing, I don't know Laura, and for all I know she pinches pennies so hard that Lincoln screams. And for another, I don't have kids, which I am reliably informed suck up 10% more income than any normal person earns, so it would be ridiculous of me to comment. And for a third, I know all too well just how deeply an intellectually rewarding trip to graduate school which does not result in the expected job can dig you into a financial hole. I know y'all think I'm joking about my student loan officer when I shill for you to buy stuff through my Amazon account, but without those commissions, I wouldn't be able to afford to buy books; the budget here at Stately Galt Manor is so tight it squeaks.
But the thing is, that even as I indulge in invidious comparisons between my apartment and the one I grew up in, and those my classmates are currently renting or buying, I have to remind myself that in so many ways I'm better off than my parents were at my age. I'll live longer (well, statistically, anyway), I have a fantastic job, and though I complain about lack of space, I have everything I need. The things I want more space for, and more money for, are incidentals that the human race lived happily without until, oh, last week. On the other hand, I have things they never dreamed of, like this blog, that enrich my life in various intangible, yet crucial, ways. Just like the song says, the good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems.
Posted by Jane Galt at December 4, 2005 08:29 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksI'd feel a little better if I weren't convinced that the American body politic did nothing domestically from 1937 to 2005 but continually screw posterity.
Posted by: AT on December 5, 2005 04:54 PMI suspect that, all in all, very few of us would trade our lives with those of our grandparents.
How do middle class people manage to live in New York City? I turned down a job there in the 60s because I would have had to live in a room in the Y, even with a degree in business! Everything seems less expensive today, except housing. I recently found a copy of the settlement paper on my grandparents house in the 20's: $700, for a duplex one block from a major Phila. suburban train station. The house today sells for upwards of $250K. Meanwhile, virtually anyone can afford to go to Europe. As a kid, the only adults I knew who had been to Europe were GIs.
When will Wal-Mart start building homes!!
Jane -
I read this last night and was disappointed to see this morning that it had vanished. I'm glad to see it's return. At your best, as here, you are not only an enjoyable economics writer but also one of my favorite chroniclers of the human struggle. Your candor and perspective enriches my life and, for all of this, I wish you a very Merry Christmas.
In addition, this post is a timely reminder of the often unacknowledged role that luck plays in all of our lives. After reading your post, I'm paring back tonight's grocery list so that I can spare a little more for the bell-ringers.
Thanks again,
Brendan (aka Whaa?)
Posted by: Very Nice on December 5, 2005 04:56 PMAre you sure that assembly line work is as stultifying as all that? As I recall, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book "Flow" found that some assembly line workers actually enjoyed it; they created challenges for themselves by finding more efficient ways to make certain motions, etc. I know that when I worked at McDonald's as a teenager, there were times when I enjoyed (say) having to toast hamburger buns. Yes, it was very repetitive, but I would figure out ways to scoop all 12 buns off the flat-grill toaster at once (thus saving effort). Or I could do it fairly automatically and spend the hours thinking about any subject I pleased. Or I could just chat with co-workers. And I noticed that for some people, a job -- any job -- is an escape from a not-so-happy home life. Bottom line is that I wasn't nearly as miserable in a repetitive job as I had expected to be, and neither were most of the people I worked with. In my impression, the things that make people miserable at work can be present in any job: lack of control, hostile co-workers or bosses, lack of anything meaningful to do or the opposite (too much to do),
Posted by: Stuart Buck on December 5, 2005 05:29 PMI've worked in a factory (making plywood). My job was to watch a giant kiln suck sheets of green wood in to dry them. I didn't actually touch it unless it jammed or tried to suck two sheets at once, in which case I had to leap in to action and fix it before the next sheet-sucking cycle, maybe 5 or so seconds away.
Two bathroom breaks and one 30-minute lunch a day, when relief came to stare at the machine in my place. All that and they made me buy my own leather gloves (still have them!)
I told my mother at the time that it was the perfect job for a cat: they like watching machines do things over and over and over.
On good days, I got to work at the manual-feed machine and actually shove wood into the kiln myself. On really, really good days, there'd be a fire billowing out of the kiln and we'd get to open it up to put the fire out (after everyone and their mother applied lockout tags to the control box). The local fire department had reputedly never, in all the decades the plant had been in operation, arrived before the employees had suppressed the fire. Why would we let them have all the fun?
I didn't enjoy my summer at Burger King when I was 16, but it sure beat the hell out of factory work.
Posted by: Rob Lyman on December 5, 2005 05:37 PMI am so very glad you got around to the fact that on average we have more stuff and more disposable income and more leisure than our forebears. I was concerned that you were going to spin a tale of only misery and woe. Even if you did, your writing is so excellent that I still would have read it all...
I would like to echo one of (or what I took to be one of) your points that if one were to choose to live with only a little less, save a little more, and make more considered choices about life options it can all work out just fine (barring injury, illness or other catastrophe).
I too had an expensive education (GWU undergrad, Johns Hopkins graduate) but I borrowed very little. Instead I worked some 30-40 hours a week through undergrad, took almost two years off to work and save a bit, then worked full time for my gradschool and racked up as many free “tuition-remission” credits as I could before attending full time and then still working “only” 25-30 hours a week. I applied for and got as many scholarships as I could, and I bought most of my books second hand. I lived in a small basement apartment but made sure to walk everywhere. I had no car until near the very end of school.
Sure gradschool took almost 4 years, but it cost me all of $7,000 of my own money.
Within a year of graduating I paid off my remaining loans. I have never carried a credit-card balance; I paid for both of my current cars with cash, not debt. When I opened my first bank account as a freshman I tore up the ATM card and wrote myself a check once a week (Monday) and if the money ran out, it ran out.
My wife has a similar story: she chose the schools she attended almost exclusively based on the availability of scholarship money, and she never had consumer debt.
The main point is that life can be made much easier by choosing not to close off options: namely that at anytime I could have survived taking any job regardless of the pay because I avoided the debt trap. The only debt I have is a mortgage and I could pay that off at anytime I wish.
Most of my peers are not in such a happy situation and have all kinds of financial obligations that make their lives feel precarious.
Posted by: Garth on December 5, 2005 05:42 PM"Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book "Flow" found that some assembly line workers actually enjoyed it; they created challenges for themselves by finding more efficient ways to make certain motions, etc."
When I was in a job assembling automotive wire harnesses, that took care of the first hour. After that, the job got boring. Also, my fingers were getting sore from the force required to snap contacts into the connector block (repeated every few seconds) - and I looked at the old ladies trying to do the same job with great wads of tape wrapped around sore fingertips and realized that I'd better not get so efficient I caused the quota to be raised, because no way could their fingers take any more.
It's true that the monotony doesn't affect everyone the same. Many of the people who last in such jobs aren't too bright - maybe there is a continuing mental challenge for them? And it is possible for even the hyper-intelligent to get into a sort of meditative state and tune out while the fingers keep flying. For a while.
Posted by: markm on December 5, 2005 05:43 PMMegan,
This is the second recent post in which you’ve obviously struggled with regret over your life and who you are. If it helps, I’d like to reiterate, and amplify, something I told you once in Hyde Park. Back at the U. of C., I mentioned to you once that your production of the GSB follies was outstanding. What I thought then, and did not say, was that I suspected back then that you were destined to be a star; your ability to gracefully organize a bunch of GSB-ers into such a stupendous show is something that very few people have.
Since then, I’ve been reading your blog, and I am more certain that you are becoming a star, although not in the way you thought you would. You are the marquee name on one of the most-readable econ and politics blogs on the web. You draw intelligent readers and commenters with apparent ease. Not everyone can do that, and it’s a bigger deal than you appear to realize.
Back when I praised you for the GSB production, I added “not that you should care what I think.” By that I meant that your ability was real, and obvious, and that I was sure that you knew you had it, and didn’t need me to tell you. On that, I may have been wrong. Maybe you do need others to tell you. Hence, this very comment. For what it’s worth, I think you are becoming a star, and I think that it will pay off for you eventually. Please note that I have no personal contact with you, that I am not related to you, that I live across the continent from you, and that, in general, I have no attributes that might cause me to generate pleasant dishonesties on your behalf. In other words, I think that my assessment is objective. Just wanted to let you know.
PS to anyone reading this: no, I’m not Megan’s dad.
I think that too many people are drinking the academic kool-aid. It may be to some extent true *for a single individual* that an advanced degree will greatly improve your earning potential; however, when the same idea is sold to millions of people simultaneously, it is much less true (unless said advanced degrees are for things that have direct economic value, which most of them aren't)
This situation is going to result in large numbers of people with big debts that will hold them down for years or even decades.
Posted by: David Foster on December 5, 2005 06:14 PMYour post reminds us all of the importance of luck.
This is true even of good advice. Someone drilled into my head (forgot who) at the end of grad school that I would suddenly have a larger income than I did while working on my thesis. He advised me to live at a level just above that of a grad student and use the rest to save or pay off loans. Then take a little every month and reward myself with a good dinner or a night out or even a toy (e.g. camera or a few cds/records)
Having been unmarried and without dependents I did just that. I don't think I have ever felt as free of financial worries as I did during those few years. And amazingly, the few bucks I put away into my retirement fund nearly two decades ago seem to loom large when I look at my overall investments.
Yeah, luck and moderation. Need to keep remembering that.
Posted by: nn on December 5, 2005 06:14 PMYou're a good woman, Megan. I was a pressman on a four-color web offset press. Hard work, but I'm retired now and enjoying my life. You'll do just fine.
Posted by: AllenS on December 5, 2005 06:24 PMHere's the flip side of luck: I got a degree in philosophy at a regional state school, worked in record stores, played in terrible bands, messed around with computers, learned a little C and Perl, and seven years later I make a little over $100,000/year. I work from six hour days, five days a week, and everybody thinks I do a great job and I get great evaluations.
I used to work long hours and work hard and got paid shit money -- now I hardly work at all and make a bundle. My parents are from that generation where basically everyone had shitty jobs and no consumer electronics. If they weren't so happy for my prosperity I'd be ashamed of myself.
There's no point in this, other than that luck has a hell of a lot do with outcomes.
Posted by: Dennis on December 5, 2005 07:00 PMI like Laura, I read her a lot. I can't really feel sorry for her. Here's someone who lives in New York City, is working on (paying for!) a graduate degree and has children. She gets welfare. She was looking for an academic job in a liberal arts field (I believe).
Call me crazy, but this seems like an enormous sh*t sandwich: high cost of living, dependents, low/zero wages, paying high tuition (for a gold-plated degree) in a field where the only jobs are academic and low paying. Didn't she see the oncoming train at the end of the tunnel?
I have tremendous respect for her ability to deal -- she's probably tougher than I am. I'm just surprised that she thinks that this sh*t sandwich would have tasted better in the old days. I'm not sure that her situation would have been any better if she were trying the same thing in the 1960's.
Life has always been hard. It's just how it's hard that's different.
The trouble with playing by the rules is that if everyone does, it simply becomes a recipe for a new mediocracy.
You've been forced to find your true calling the hard way, but now that you have, you'll add a lot more value to the universe and eventually reap a lot more in return (and then some idiot will tell you how "lucky" you are - I guarantee it!)
I've done the opposite - never wen't to the right schools or took the right jobs - and in the short term it looked like my contemporaries had left me behind. But now I have a much more interesting and enjoyable life than most of them and earn just as much money...
Posted by: Dan Hill on December 5, 2005 07:30 PMPlease excuse the changing tense in my first paragraph. It should all be past tense in terms of her former (negative) situation.
Posted by: Klug on December 5, 2005 07:32 PMMan, posts like this and Laura's make me feel guilty about how easy I've had it and make me wonder if I'm a crazy ingrate to be leaving my cushy job behind.
Posted by: fling93 on December 5, 2005 09:03 PMLaura's story is pretty tragic - to a point. Frorm the context of her post, it seems as if she had to stay in New York - even after getting her PhD. I have two friends who got PhD's from excellent institutions - in history. Neither had any illusions of living where they wanted to live. First of all, they only went to school where they got paid. Second of all, they literally went wherever they could find a job after getting the sheepskin. One went to a small college in Oregon. He grew up in Jersey and didn't know a soul. The other bounced around the east coast working for historical societies.
Living in New York is financial suicide for most people who aren't doctors/lawyers/investment bankers. That's just the way it is. If you CHOOSE to live in NYC on a liberal arts salary, you run a very real risk of cockroaches and pitbulls. The same goes for northern California.
I live outside of Richmond, Virginia, and I can support my family on my income alone. I had an opportunity to interview for jobs in Northern Virginia. I made the CHOICE to refuse. The cost of living was (and still is) prohibitive for someone with three kids. I really sweated out the rest of the job search, but I found a great job in Richmond. (Yes, I got a little lucky.)
Sometimes people need to understand that life is made up of choices - tough ones, but choices nonetheless.
Posted by: Doug on December 5, 2005 09:05 PMDon't cry for me, Argentina. I didn't really mean to write a "poor me" post. I explain more in the following comments. But I wanted to talk about how we got into that mess.
First of all, big time stupid. And my dad is an academic. You would think we would have known the story. But when you're twenty, you don't think. And no one at school talked about this stuff. Not the faculty or even the other students. Jobs and money were dirty things. Morons all of us.
And kids do change things. Suddenly and unexpectedly. Childcare in NYC is crazy. If you single, you're bohemian. If you've got kids, you're poor. Suddenly you don't want to move to the job in South Dakota, because then Grandma can't babysit any more.
But I really feel like things did changed a lot between the early 90s and the late 90s. Rent skyrocketed faster than salaries.
Does our generation feel less secure than previous generations? Regardless or not of its truth? I don't know. I would love to know. Have you seen any data on that score?
Posted by: Laura on December 5, 2005 09:25 PMI forget how lucky I am sometimes. I got a PhD in Chemistry, so I got paid ~$20K a year to go to school, teach and to do researh, and the department paid my tuition, and gave me about $500 bucks a year for books and stuff. Science isn't everybody's cup of meat, but graduate science education is a sweetheart deal. Chemistry may be the best, because the unemployment rate is usually very low. You don't make management consultant bucks, but it pays nicely if you go into industry rather than academics.
It was a little tougher for me, because I was married and had a kid, but I incurred less than $10K in debt.
Posted by: Dave Eaton on December 5, 2005 11:35 PM"Indeed, when I began freaking out about my drastically reduced income expectations, my mother pointed out that when my parents moved into the apartment I grew up in, she was 9 months pregnant, had just quit her job, and they had a (to them) giant mortgage, and less than $500 in the bank."
I think my parents' (and my paternal grandparents') lives were rather more comfy than this, but looking back on my father's youth, I'm still often ashamed of how easy everything has been for me. I've never had a real job, for one thing -- working construction in the summer, or just waiting tables or 9-5 drudgery or anything like that. I've never had to live on a few hundred dollars a month. I've never even had to live in the seedy part of town, just to find rent I can pay. My parents went through all that, even though they were both of them, I think, considerably more privileged than the average American of their generation (albeit in rather different ways).
It is always so good to remember how good one has it. Reading your post made me feel, once again, a great gratitude towards my ancestors.
Posted by: Taeyoung on December 5, 2005 11:46 PMI've worked in factories all my life. It's enjoyable work. I've heard of horrible jobs in manufacturing, but those are mostly in the past. If something is injurous or boring, that means it's being done wrong. What's funny is young people won't do factory work any more. We pay our machinists more than but a handfull of our professionals.
Farm work is another matter. Being on the working end of a hay trailer was harsh. Thank God for the geniuses at Vermeer who invented the round baler.
Posted by: kevinm on December 5, 2005 11:53 PMLet me be the next to say: where did you get your ideas about factory work? I've worked as a senior software engineer and I've worked as a shipping clerk and been happy in both jobs but I'm pretty sure I found mindless labor less stress-inducing. You can easily get in the zone, get a zen meditation thing going and, yes, devote spare brain cycles to hobby interests. When my job is intellectually challenging, I tend to work extra-long hours, worry about tasks left unfinished in the off hours, and don't have much brainpower to spare when I get home. When it isn't, I can trivially leave work behind and have intellectually stimulating hobby interests on the nights and weekends. Yeah, I've got a CS degree and SAT scores to match, but I've often thought I might be happier driving a truck.
Are you just buying the liberal line on the alleged inhumanity of factory work? I've worked around modern assembly lines in China, and as near as I could tell, the people working the line were at least as happy as the programmers at every software company I've worked for.
Posted by: Glen Raphael on December 6, 2005 01:33 AM
A. In my experience there's no such thing as luck.
B. One of the reasons graduates have such a hard time getting work is that they are usually appalling salespeople. They don't even seem to know the features/benefits distinction. (Explained here.) They think that reciting a load of features (degrees, grades, experience) will somehow get a firm interested in hiring them. Then they get depressed when it doesn't.
Tell the little graduates in your life that all any firm cares about is benefits: how are you gonna help me solve my problems? Then get them a book on selling and make sure they read it. That way they won't move back in with you.
Posted by: Brian on December 6, 2005 02:15 AMThe old joke about the liberal arts degree and "would you like fries with that" comes to mind. If there is a glut of academics, then unless you look to be top in your field, perhaps another degree would be a better idea. And its always good to have a backup - like learning to code on the side.
Perhaps we need to educate people better about the financial folly of getting a PhD. Even if the PhD was free, starting work 5+ years later means you have that much less experience and that much less savings[1]. And its not free. One of my classmates has parlayed his PhD into a high-paying wall street job, but I doubt the rest will ever catch up. So unless you need that PhD to be a prof, and are top enough to make the cut, its not a good financial choice.
And that's for any PhD - let alone one which is useless outside of academia.
And for another nail in the coffin, haven't there been lots of studies showing that MBA's are a net financial cost?
[1] Remember the classic example: The person who saves X$/year for 5 years and then never saves again will retire with more than a person who waits 5 years and then saves X$/year forever. Those extra years of not saving while you get your PhD put you at a big starting disadvantage.
Posted by: Patri Friedman on December 6, 2005 02:18 AMAs much as I wouldn't want to have my grandparents' living situation, in my book nothing builds perspective like living among third-world subsistence farmers for a few years. I'd certainly take my grandparents' situation over that! (It wasn't bad for us only because we were elite Westerners with resources unimaginable to our local colleagues.)
Posted by: Kirk Parker on December 6, 2005 03:07 AMSuddenly you don't want to move to the job in South Dakota, because then Grandma can't babysit any more.
Oh, please, don't move to the job in South Dakota..
When my kids were little, my situation was about the same as Laura's except for one thing - we were living in the sticks, in Central Pennsylvania, far away from Grandma and any form of real employment.
I grew up in New Jersey, near the city, where there were always jobs, even for a liberal-arts major. Sometimes the jobs paid well, sometimes they didn't, but if you were willing to take anything, waitressing or a nursing home job, you could get it. Yes, the job was dull, but your co-workers usually made it bearable. But in a rural college town where you're competing with several hundred students for the one open job at McDonalds, your liberal arts degree is equivalent to a graduation certificate from nursery school. You practically need a masters to be a fry cook and a doctorate or twenty years of experience for anything university-related. Then, the competetion is still outrageous.
Rural grad-student apartments still have roaches, depite the subzero temperatures and broken-down heating systems. However, the three-foot high frozen snowdrifts keep the pitbulls inside.
One of the happiest days of my life was when we came back to the city.
Posted by: mary on December 6, 2005 09:17 AMI paid my own way through college with a smorgasboard of humiliating, low-paying jobs, and graduated with a Master's degree in Information Systems six months before the peak of the tech bubble. I started out making more money than I thought I'd ever make, more than my parents ever had put together. My professors were actually visibly upset by how much money I was being offered.
Since the job I accepted was in the relatively stable and unsexy niche of ERP systems and invested in low-risk municipal bonds, for me the subsequent collapse of the tech bubble was merely a distant rumor, a thunderstorm over the hills, seen and heard but never felt. I parlayed the training from that job into a small e-business while continuing to work full time, and doubled my income. (You can hate me now.)
I don't live particularly well; I drive an average car and mostly stay at home. I'm still quite paranoid about losing my income. I put away around half what I make. I hope to be financially able to live on investment income only within 5 years.
I often wonder what life would have been like had I graduated six months later.
Posted by: TallDave on December 6, 2005 10:16 AMI'm sure academics had better lives back 'in the day'. Of course, back 'in the day', everyone in academia - the profs, not the students - had rich relatives. Academic work is 'fulfilling' hobby-work which has never, in the history of education, paid well. The Oxford Dons of yore were Lord so-and-so's nephews. The Harvard Profs of old were the sons of businessmen and/or had trust funds. Those few who weren't were the reason for the stereotype that the faculty parking lot and the student lot were virtually indistinguishable. After all, ignoring the problem of raising kids on an Asst. Professor's wage, who had the money in 1930 to go to Harvard for 8 years, in order to get less money than they would if they stopped after 4? The boomer generation were probably the first generation of academics not to have this kind of background, and that only because of government education subsidies.
For that matter, journalism has always been low-paid 'fulfilling' work, too. The hard-boiled newspaper reporter in the dive-bar isn't too far off reality. It had more non-upper class entrants because it was more of an apprenticeship thing, but it still didn't pay well. Computer programming may, once the labor market reaches equilibrium, look very similar, since it is a creative 'writing' type job, albeit for the logically minded. Medicine only pays well because it is unionized. The insane stress of being a med student and resident is an intentional act of the medical establishment, acting as an artificial barrier to entry which allows extant doctors to raise rates. The competitive market wage for doctors would be scalable to that of nurses - a family practice doc would make only slightly more than a nurse-practitioner, at a guess. (Higher skill and stress jobs - brain surgery and the like - would have higher pay.)
High-paying, fulfilling, reasonable hours/low stress. If you are really talented, you can have two. Most people can only have one. It has always been, and will always be.
If the job is fulfilling and interesting, it will pay much less than a similarly difficult job that isn't fulfilling and interesting. Living places which are interesting will be more costly than doing so in less interesting places. Labor markets in college towns will always be incredibly competitive, because people want to live there. Basic economics.
A funny thing about all the comments is that few if any of them involve the central point of the article which was keeping her family safe and providing for her family. Material possessions have value but it seems like the writers focus was on them being a means to an end. If you think the old days were less rewarding I think it's due to our changing priorities and values not material rewards.
Posted by: ICallMasICM on December 6, 2005 11:07 AMI too graduated right around 9/11 at a top tier school. The economy was already going south by that point and a job in finance was difficult to finagle. Fortunately I stayed away from the ibanking/management consulting field that did massive layoffs, but many of my friends were not so lucky. Still it took me much longer to find a job than at any other time in my life. It was tough, and certainly any sense of entitlement from having prestigious degrees wore off quickly. I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one going through that horror. And I have to agree that the earlier generations had it worse.
Posted by: Rosa on December 6, 2005 03:50 PMWhat I really find funny about your generation's sense of entitlement is that you actually think someone would read the 2,000 words of prattle you posted. I gave out at paragraph 3. As for your friend Laura, she lives among dope dealers not because she has to but because she wants to. She'd rather see her son eaten by dogs than not live in Manhattan. If people were really driven by the market economy, you and Laura might be living in a suburb of Seattle. Since you're driven by longings for prestige rather than cash, you're in the Big Apple.
Posted by: Alan Vanneman on December 6, 2005 04:14 PMOne thing that makes women different from previous generations is our ability to exercise control over reproduction. Several people have pointed out that it's easier to live on a shoestring if you don't have children. As the parent of two children, I can tell you it's the difference between night and day, fire and ice, etc with the comparison of extremes. If people today feel less financially secure, no matter whether they really are less secure than previous generations, we're going to see the results in birth rates. I think we're seeing the results.
Posted by: cowalker on December 6, 2005 09:05 PMI'd think in a high level job search, features are better than benefits:
http://www.bly.com/Pages/documents/Era126.htm
Posted by: rakehell on December 6, 2005 10:26 PMAs for retirement, the only pension I've managed to vest in, will pay about 1/10th of my expected Social Security benefits when I retire more than 20 years from now. My father, having vested in 2 different pension plans, along with 401k contributions makes about 10x his Social Security benefits. Very few people these days will ever be covered by a pension at all. Down from about 40% of the workforce being covered at one time or another in their careers back in the 70s.
When I was getting my first bachelors degree (in engineering), back in the early 80s, I did some calculations that showed it would take more than 40 years to repay the cost of a Masters degree.
What I think is happening is that more and more people are learning first hand that those "promises" were worth exactly the paper they were written on. And that luck is far more important than we give credit to. I noticed a couple posters above deny that it even exists.
Posted by: Peter on December 6, 2005 11:29 PMWhat I really find funny about your generation's sense of entitlement is that you actually think someone would read the 2,000 words of prattle you posted. I gave out at paragraph 3. As for your friend Laura, she lives among dope dealers not because she has to but because she wants to. She'd rather see her son eaten by dogs than not live in Manhattan. If people were really driven by the market economy, you and Laura might be living in a suburb of Seattle. Since you're driven by longings for prestige rather than cash, you're in the Big Apple.
Evidently, YOUR generation's specialty was asexual reproduction.
Posted by: anony-mouse on December 7, 2005 02:40 AM'One thing that makes women different from previous generations is our ability to exercise control over reproduction. '
People from previous generations weren't able to control reproduction? On what planet? Talk about drinking the Kool-aid.
Posted by: ICallMasICM on December 7, 2005 11:18 AMFrom this week's The Onion:
"A machine can break down mechanically, but can it break down emotionally, mentally, and spiritually?"
"I can, and I have. Every day, a little piece of me dies. Could a machine say the same?"
. . .
"No matter what else they take from me, my utter and total hatred of this nightmarish fish-stick factory will always be mine. After all, isn't that what makes us truly human?"
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43214
MB
Posted by: Middle Browser on December 7, 2005 12:37 PMPatri Friedman: Remember the classic example: The person who saves X$/year for 5 years and then never saves again will retire with more than a person who waits 5 years and then saves X$/year forever. Those extra years of not saving while you get your PhD put you at a big starting disadvantage.
Technically, it's 7 years (my Dad is a financial consultant and my Mom sells insurance, so I've heard this many times), and assuming an annual return of at least 10% (which is pretty reasonable if you invest mostly in equities).
But the point is very, very valid (and for anybody who doesn't believe this, I highly recommend running it through a spreadsheet yourself). And this makes me feel better about my choice of working first and then now deciding to go back to grad school (to get a Master's, not a Ph.D -- academia looks too messed up for me). And since I won't need to touch my retirement accounts because I also saved extra outside of them, and because my mortgage payment is only 7% of my current gross income (18% of my wife's), this will only delay my projected retirement by a few years.
Yeah, I don't feel guilty for very long before I turn to gloating. I'm evil. Hate me.
Posted by: fling93 on December 7, 2005 02:23 PMWhoops, sorry. It's actually X$/year for 7 years and then nothing for 23 years vs. nothing for 7 years and then X$/year for 23 years. Bumps out a bit further to get to forever.
Posted by: fling93 on December 7, 2005 02:31 PMMedicine only pays well because it is unionized. The insane stress ...
This is right, but it's not the stressful hazing that is the artificial barrier to entry. The significance of the hazing pales in comparison to the ENORMOUS barrier to entry posed by having artificially restricted class sizes.
Why is getting into medical school so insanely competitive? Why are there so many more fully-qualified candidates for med school than there are seats? In a free society, new medical schools would simply be opened to service this demand.
The AMA has been given the authority of law from state legislatures for going on 100 years to artificially limit class sizes and the number of schools in any given state.
Let's say that I was a highly qualified surgeon, and I wanted to open a medical school. I could not, because of the huge artificial, arbitrary restrictions under every state's law.
They pretend that this regime is to ensure quality, but that's a lie, of course. If that were true, they would promulgate neutral standards of quality, and allow anyone who met them to open a school and practice medicine. They do not. They arbitrarily cap class sizes and block the opening of new schools.
Add to that the massive subsidies given to existing schools but not to start-ups, and you have an entrenched system of protectionism.
So, after 100 years, the demand for doctors vastly exceeds the supply. Guess what happens to the price of their services.
Posted by: George Gaskell on December 8, 2005 11:15 AMComments are Closed.