Shannon Love believes the Chinese are going to kick our asses. I don’t know to what degree I agree with that, but David Foster’s comment caught my attention:
One more thing that’s kind of worrisome is the growing preference for “staff” jobs rather than “line” jobs among the highly educated. (I use “line” here to refer to a job in which an individual has decision-making authority and accountability for the results of those decision, and “staff” to refer to a job which is basically advisory in nature.)
There are a lot of people who are more thrilled by the chance to have proximity to some galactic decision (“should our company spend $10 billion on acquisition X”) than by the chance to have actual ownership of some less-galactic decision (“how many Gerbilator units should we produce this quarter, and what should we price them at?”) To some extent, this represents an attempt to extend the habits of school into the workplace; it also has a component of sheer cowardice.
This phenomenon is at its peak in the “non-profit” world, but also exists in business (as in the example above) and in government… where many “elite” college graduates would be excited about writing a paper on “transportation alternatives for the nation in 2020?” but would be most uninterested in being the Atlanta tower manager for the FAA.