David Brooks argues that, like the UK, the US has shifted from a practical, industrial nation to a more genteel nation — with consequences:
The shift is evident at all levels of society. First, the elites. 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.
It would be embarrassing or at least countercultural for an Ivy League grad to go to Akron and work for a small manufacturing company. By contrast, in 2007, 58 percent of male Harvard graduates and 43 percent of female graduates went into finance and consulting.
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.” As talented people adopt those priorities, America may become more humane, but it will be less prosperous.
Then there’s the middle class. The emergence of a service economy created a large population of junior and midlevel office workers. These white-collar workers absorbed their lifestyle standards from the Huxtable family of “The Cosby Show,” not the Kramden family of “The Honeymooners.” As these information workers tried to build lifestyles that fit their station, consumption and debt levels soared. The trade deficit exploded. The economy adjusted to meet their demand — underinvesting in manufacturing and tradable goods and overinvesting in retail and housing.
These office workers did not want their children regressing back to the working class, so you saw an explosion of communications majors and a shortage of high-skill technical workers. One of the perversities of this recession is that as the unemployment rate has risen, the job vacancy rate has risen, too. Manufacturing firms can’t find skilled machinists. Narayana Kocherlakota of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank calculates that if we had a normal match between the skills workers possess and the skills employers require, then the unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent, not 9.6 percent.
There is much truth in this, but even David Brooks makes the mistake of confusing “America’s brightest minds” with “Ivy League.” There are plenty of very smart people who would be very pleased to work for a small, entrepreneurial manufacturing company in Akron.
Too many college graduates indeed tend to be too trendy in their career choices, and I would bet this is especially true in the Ivy League. (GE CEO Jeff Immelt has observed that the most popular employer among members of his own HBS class was the videogame maker Atari — seventeen of his classmates went to work there.)
Following the herd is not a sign of intelligence; often it is a sign of cowardice.
Also, regarding Michelle Obama’s line about “don’t go into corporate America,” the business guy who created the container freight industry did more to reduce world poverty than all of the foreign-aid bureaucrats of the last five decades. And while he made a lot of money, it probably wasn’t as much as the Obamas will extract from their career in “public service.”
I’m reminded of why MBAs fail at entrepreneurship and the infamous Harvard MBA Index.