This is a rambling reflection which incorporates some of my ideas and complaints, as a working class white man who’s found himself searching for a job several times recently.
Privilege = A Good Job
Let me be very clear. Your life and safety and status in this country is due almost entirely to one variable: your job. Privilege isn’t being a man, or being white, or even being able-bodied (although that last one is pretty sweet). Privilege is having a cushy job. Better yet, privilege is having the credentials that guarantee you a cushy job, almost regardless of where you go or what you do. I want to get that straight right up front: if you think that black, female therapists and college professors and recruiting executives are ‘marginalized’ because they’re black and female then chances are you’re a professor or an executive yourself, or at least in their class. Put more plainly: you don’t know what you’re talking about. Let’s be honest, just for a minute here. Which person do you really think has the harder life, the greater stress, the lower status? The white janitor on a college campus… or the black lesbian administrator who works in the same building? If you think the janitor has an enviable station then I have good news. I bet he’ll switch places in a heartbeat. Then everyone can be happy.
Of course, people must go to college and work hard and satisfy employers and complete internships to build their credentials and distinguish their careers. Your job and your credentials aren’t only privilege - but then again, nothing meaningful is. Almost everything is some blend of personal effort and luck and unearned endowments. The point is that these are time-consuming, expensive, gatekept choke points that people must pass through. Black and white young men who are trying to support a family or make their fortune often don’t have the time or patience (or temperament) to sit in a classroom for 4 or 7 years, especially when they’re starting out. Our system has deliberatively and extensively privileged college degrees and other similar credentials over talent, experience, initiative, and work ethic. Consequently, we have a social structure in which the kinds of people who gravitate towards college education (richer, more conscientious, more conformist women, mostly - who often have parents and social networks in place to help them along) have been consistently rewarded with money and status, while the rest of us have been slowly pushed towards the margins.
The picture becomes even more bleak when you consider that college education these days actively selects against the independent-minded and courageous. What is a ‘diversity statement’ other than a mechanism to ensure that incoming students and faculty are willing to publicly conform to groupthink? Meaning: they’re either agreeably conformist or they’re independent-minded (and have their own ideas about equity) but they’re cowed enough to parrot the orthodoxies. But that is a topic for another day.
I regret that all of my examples feature ‘black’ or ‘gay’ or ‘female’ hypotheticals, but that’s the world that we inhabit. I didn’t make it this way. The fact is that most of the employers in this country (especially the most prestigious and lucrative ones) now systemically discriminate based upon color and sex. They have been openly doing it (and advertising it) for years, in contravention of the Civil Rights Act and federal law. These days (for about the past 6 months) they tend to pretend that they're not doing it, but considering that the same people are doing the hiring as were doing it 5 years ago, and considering that those people (who profoundly misunderstand struggle and disadvantage, not having experienced much themselves) consider the mission of anti-SWM (straight white male) discrimination to be a kind of holy duty, a righteous gesture to reform and purify this wicked society, I think it’s a safe bet that this is still happening.
I know that I lost the opportunity to be a firefighter in New York City, years ago, because of DEI-type ideology and its minions. I think it’s a safe bet that I’ve been passed over for jobs in the past half decade because of my unalterable characteristics. It doesn’t bother me too much. I’m a man, and so I’ve internalized the ethic that it’s my responsibility to make my way in the world. Ultimately I would rather have that kind of attitude then to feel like a victim and receive the exorbitant benefits of some notional pro-SWM discrimination. I don’t want anyone to benefit from discrimination. I want the best person to get the job, regardless of their sex or sexuality or skin color. Most Americans (of every race) agree with me. Not, however, our policymakers nor our cultural gatekeepers. They very much believe that activist discrimination is wonderful and a powerful administrative apparatus to meddle with hiring and culture and operations is necessary. Of course, they’re the very people who staff that apparatus. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence.
It’s as clear as mud! All I feel certain of as I read this is that these rules will probably not benefit me. I also feel certain that 90% of these steps are superfluous make-work, adding no institutional benefit.
So I don’t waste much time bemoaning the racist and sexist marginalization that is harming my people (the SWM). What’s the point? However, during my last period of unemployment it was as if the American corporate-progressive regime had embarked upon a Kafka-esque mission: let’s make circumstances as maddening and flagrant for working class men on the job market as possible. It wasn’t the discrimination (which is in any case veiled and never acknowledged during the hiring process). It’s the entire process of job searching these days. It’s the websites and the virtual meetings and the applications and the advertising and the cultural circumstances in general. I will relate my experiences but I want you to keep my opening claim in mind: the biggest privilege a person can have in American society is having a cushy job, and it’s even better if you have the professional credentials that guarantee you financial security regardless of what you do or where you live. Those people are the main beneficiaries of American privilege. The people who made their own arrangements with the Blob are rewarded: allow me to latch onto your corpulent undercarriage, and I will support and defend you. I will go to work every day and follow the rules and participate in all of the charades. If a dilemma arises, and I’m suddenly in doubt about whether I’m doing the right thing or whether my work is actually helping or whether I should turn on a friend who’s speaking out, I will attend to your priorities, oh Blob. I will toe the line. I will conform.
:
I think that many people in the nonprofit sector, in corporate HR, in K-12 education, and especially in campus administration, have too high an opinion of their intellectual and moral superiority.
During my brief and unhappy experience as an adjunct economics professor at George Mason, I assigned students short essays, and a portion of the grade was on the quality of their writing. One student complained about the poor grade I had assigned to her on writing, so I proceeded to go over her essay with a red pen and highlight its flaws. It was soon covered in red. Meanwhile, she whined, “But I’ve always been told I’m a good writer.”
Exactly. These midwits have always been told that they are great, but they are not. And that is a somewhat different notion of “surplus elite” than what Turchin seems to be offering.
What we have in surplus are social justice activists.
My 2024
Last year I found myself unemployed, due to a fairly routine cycle of corporate downsizing.
No, we didn’t have any teary ceremonies. No, CNN didn’t run any breathless features about the anxiety and economic insecurity of the move. My employer hired a consultancy, staffed by people in their late 20’s with glittering private school degrees and mid-6 figure incomes, who send emails and schedule ZOOM meetings for a living. I imagine that the cost of their advice ran into the millions, and there’s no requirement for quality or positive results in that game. You simply interview your employees, run your numbers, and generate your reports. Then you move on. It’s good work, if you can get it, but almost no one who’s ever had a real job in their lives can.
I had a brief virtual meeting (they’re all virtual these days) with a person in Washington D.C. and another in California, neither of which worked for my company or knew anything about our operations or the industry. I live and work in Florida, by the way.
I got the word a few weeks later, and I was unemployed. On the plus side, I had 6 weeks of severance pay (an unimaginable luxury in my world) and I was sober for longer than I’d ever been. I felt positive. After a month of searching I felt less positive.
‘Job Search’
This series was born from my experiences during that time. I thought (hoped) I’d left that condition behind forever. It turns out that I had not (more on that later). I carry a little notebook around with me everywhere, because I’m a weirdo, and I thought I would jot down my thoughts and encounters.
The earlier pieces in this series focused on various themes: the encrustation of credentialism, the borg-like consumption of our entire economy by the HR bureaucracy, the feminization of American work and life. This next part is the complaints section. This is what it’s like to be a single, male, college graduate (and a veteran) without any glittering credentials or valuable identity markers.
My real message with this essay is exclusive: the old pearls of wisdom (try your best, go meet employers and shake their hands, dress up and shine your shoes, draft an impressive and sincere cover letter) no longer apply. We have travelled far down the road towards the Sovietization of American life, and the days of business owners looking for outstanding candidates with a good attitude are mostly dead. Now, hiring is done by a weird assortment of HR departments, bureaucracies, recruiting agencies and middle managers. If I had a thousand dollars for every time I was interviewed by a friendly, very organized young woman in her mid-20’s (without any knowledge of the role or the work) I wouldn’t need to find a job at all.
So let’s begin. Let me tell you what it’s like to be a man without a job.
The Process
You organize your resume and you write cover letters, but cover letters are rarely read these days. There’s usually no route to get them to the people who will make hiring decisions, anyway - they’re insulated behind secret email addresses and layers of hiring bureaucracy. You can submit your resume hundreds of times and never receive so much as a human acknowledgement that anyone has seen it. AI, the proliferation of job websites, and hiring in the hands of administrators (who have often never worked particularly hard and who make more than you ever will) all act as obstacles to people seeing your credentials and experience. I have a pretty decent resume (a little fragmented and unfocused, but that’s been the shape of my life thus far) and some pretty interesting work experience. I also interview well. However, my general heuristic for online applications is that I will receive 5 follow-up replies from employers for every hundred applications submitted, and 1-2 interviews.
During my last period of unemployment I had dozens of interviews… without a job offer. When you depend upon work to feed and clothe yourself (there are no entitlement or assistance programs set up for unemployed working class men who just want to find a job) this kind of persistent failure can induce something very close to panic. At the time I was sleeping on a air mattress in a crummy apartment that I was helping to drywall and paint for some extra cash (one of my friends is a builder who got into property development). It might not sound luxurious, bedding down on the dusty floor next to junked AC units and piles of lumber, but it’s better than sleeping in your car. On many nights I would drive to a gas station a few miles away, and park and just watch the people. It was the only thing I could think of to suppress the mild panic attacks I was having as I lay there trying to go to sleep. That was my life, for over a month. Gym/run; public library (in business casual) to reserve a study room to do my interviews; ‘home,’ where I might paint or do some handyman-type things; bed; repeat. During this time I began walking a friend’s hyperactive and under-exercised little dog, just to take my mind off of things. It was the best part of each day. Now she’s my dog, and we live in a proper house (with all the painting and drywall complete).
Sadie - an extra mouth to feed, but a small one.
I have helped people with their resumes for many years (as a paid service, mostly). Some years ago I was dating a girl with a BA in sociology, but without much work experience. She wanted to find a corporate job. She was applying to be a recruiter, for healthcare workers, I think. I looked at her resume and spoke to her at length (we were dating, after all) and told her bluntly: you’re not going to get hired for anything other than a check-in desk at the gym, or a barista position, with this resume. I advised that she lie. “Find a friend who’s willing to sell the story, and create a fictional term of employment. Make sure the employer is small and private, so it won’t have a large HR department, and coordinate the details with your friend before you provide their number.” She did, and it worked. The chief symptom of a pathological system is that it rewards deceit and parasitism and selfishness, and punishes honorable behavior and initiative and industry.
So your resume is done. Onto the job boards and hiring websites. Many of them are mirrors - they simply direct on to another job website, where the actual jobs are listed. Many are traps, designed to hoover up your personal data to be resold to third parties. To this day I get up to a dozen nonsensical scam texts and calls a day from people trying to sell me things or trying to convince me that I owe money to the government. I often get messages from people with “job offers” too. The work is vague and amorphous, the pay is implausibly high, and it’s usually a ‘remote position.’ Apparently a company wants to pay me $6,000 per month (and the pay is often denominated in awkward periods like this - ‘per month’ or ‘per week’) to send out some packages! It sounds like a pretty good deal. Of course these jobs don’t exist. It’s yet another attempt (I believe) to gather one’s personal data.
But even many of the jobs on the job websites are fictional. I’m old-school; I like to visit a workplace and shake hands with a hiring manager. I realize that this makes me a fossil in terms of modern job searching, and that it’s often impossible and confuses people (why would you need to physically meet with someone in order to interview for a job??) but I don’t care. I quickly realized that a fair number of these advertised organizations didn’t exist. The companies weren’t at the locations. I know, because I drove there. When I checked months later… the same jobs were still advertised. I don’t know what the angle is here. Similarly, I often get flirtatious messages from ‘girls’ on Instagram and Whatsapp. I’m not sure why that is, either. Are they trying to lure people to their webcam? How is messaging men (who’ve never visited a webcam) individually and striking up conversations a good investment? I’m not sure, and so naturally I just ignore the messages from online ‘girls’. The ersatz job openings are harder to detect though, and I’ve wasted dozens of hours driving to employers that don’t exist, during times in my life when I already had enough on my plate. I’m not sure who posts those things or what they’re trying to accomplish, but they can go to hell.
You have to upload your resume separately to each job website and government system and corporate employer. That’s trivially easy. But then you nearly always must go through and complete hundreds of fields… with the exact same information. What was your third-to-last employer? What was their street address? What was your supervisor’s name? Office phone? Cell Phone? When did you work there? Select the date (the exact day) you were hired from a clunky drop-down calendar feature, and then do the same for your last day. If you lose the page expect to start over again. Sometimes saving your progress isn’t allowed. If you leave any field blank or format it improperly you can’t proceed. You will do these dozens, and very likely hundreds, of times during a job search period.
You submit your applications (these days it’s often little more than the click of a button, with your resume uploaded already, after you’ve perfectly completed all of the fields in the online application on the site). You get a response! In many cases you won’t hear anything else. Sometimes you will be able to arrange an interview. This is generally just the first round. Three interview rounds total is about average. Why should an inventory manager role or an administrative assistant position require three rounds of hiring deliberation? Who knows? The hiring specialists certainly don’t. None of the people you’ll be speaking to will probably have had any hand in crafting the hiring process. It rather seems to be a kind of organic growth, like a slime or a mold in a petri dish. The structure and the process is everything for these organizations and the process is never designed by a single individual. It’s often irrational and always wasteful. And no one is able to trim or reform it.
No one is in charge and no one really understands what’s going on.
Then there are the ‘bad’ jobs that are out there. I’m not talking about digging ditches or washing bedpans. Those at least have some kind of guaranteed renumeration. You won’t get rich but you’ll get your wages for the hours worked. I’m referring to the commission-based sales jobs, the ‘event coordinator’ positions, the insurance agent and the deposition-taker and the call center operator. During my last period of unemployment, I interviewed with a company that offered work recording and transcribing witness testimony for depositions. It started at $20 per hour - more with subsequent certifications and qualifications. Flexible hours, and a booming business (Americans becoming increasingly litigious) were both selling points. However you needed to complete an initial training (unpaid) and buy the hardware and the software (uncompensated) and there was no guarantee in terms of workload. You could work as little as you wanted but not necessarily as much - what if you only got 10 hours of work per week? It seemed like a pretty bad deal… but there were dozens of people in the meeting, interested and already trying to distinguish themselves. There are ‘event planning’ companies which only ‘plan’ one kind of ‘event’: standing out in front of a store or in a Wal Mart aisle and trying to sell phone plans or raise money for nonprofits or sign up voters. Some of those jobs pay by the hour. Some are commission only. If you don’t close you don’t earn. The next time you pass by a man in a worn-looking suit trying to get your attention with some overly-friendly sales pitch at least try to be kind. Long ago, during my years of active addiction (when I really didn’t have a great grasp on life and was doing whatever I could to survive) that man was me.
If hiring representatives show up to all of your scheduled virtual meetings you’ll be lucky. If you get called in to speak to someone face-to-face (and this is usually someone who actually understand what the job is) you’ll be lucky. However, in recent years there has been sustained and measurable discrimination against certain candidates (although not the massive bias that was earlier reported as a victory for equity campaigners).
This is actually incorrect - a product of the profound innumeracy of the journalists involved - but the fact that this is supposed to be a GOOD thing says a lot.
It seems pretty obvious that hundreds of organizations have intentionally tried to diversify their workforces (especially professional and supervisory roles) by selecting nonwhite candidates, and there are many anecdotal reports of this practice. There are also many fields that are being abandoned wholesale by regular old heterosexual men. This might be a discriminatory dynamic, but the main driver is probably just the shifting culture and incentives of certain fields.
Personally, I want to work in a setting where rules are set and obeyed, failure is punished, and extraordinary results are rewarded handsomely. If someone is lazy or stupid or indecisive I want that person to improve, or be fired. Many workplaces now are part-functional organization, part-employment program. That is, if someone comes to work everyday and isn’t drunk or stealing they will retain their job. In many positions (especially government work) that kind of standard has been codified into employment policy, through HR procedures and union contracts and employee protections. It’s now a deep-seated aspect of the culture, and it’s often reflected in the workplace atmosphere and the product quality of such organizations. Incidentally, I now possess the credentials to be a teacher for grades 7-12 in my state. I have plenty more to write about that experience (talk about product quality issues!), so subscribe if you haven’t already.
First: back to the indignities. For it’s not just the process of job-finding and -winning that is dispiriting. Your data is being sold to brokers and lead generators, you’re trying to stand out before committees of soft-headed, female college graduates, you’re navigating the bogus job offers and the nonexistent companies. Meanwhile, there’s a well-paid legion of professionals benefitting from their privilege, enjoying lucrative sinecures and taking 3 vacations each year. If these positions justified their money no one could object, but in many cases there’s little social value being created. Professors who teach useless things (or errant nonsense); psychologists who simply place all of their gender confused charges on the endocrinology treadmill, or who fail to push anyone towards real growth or self improvement; nonprofit executives leaching from the government and producing ‘reports’ or distributing payments or censoring online activity on behalf of the state; HR managers and lawyers who live from the friction and bureaucratic illogic of our society. These people have roles. They go to work every day and they send emails and they complete tasks, but it’s all an empty exercise. The mark of a ‘bullshit job’ is one without any appreciable product or accomplishment. The mark of a professionally parasitic job is one in which the society would be better off, if that entire sector of activity disappeared. There are increasingly more parasitic jobs every day, it seems. People should bear this in mind: someone has to create the wealth. Someone has to build the buildings and maintain the pipes and the wires and drive the trucks. We’ve been engaged in a civilization-wide project to give such people less status and influence and money. That’s a trend that cannot continue forever.
You log onto your dating app and see a bevy of early childhood educators and nurse practitioners and school administrators and marketing executives. They all make more money than you (more than you make even when you are working), and so a match is almost impossible. You surf YouTube looking for cosmology videos and political updates, and all of the ads are for sports betting websites and dating apps for foreign women and ridiculous ‘public service announcements’ regarding cash cards and government giveaways that don’t exist. You’re not interested in any of these offers or services, of course, but it feels insulting that so many corporations and agencies want to suck up the little money you have, which is fast disappearing. “A lot of people don’t know about the $5,000 government payment, available for anyone who fills out this form… “. You’ll hear this dozens of times each day, potentially. These are the kinds of ads geared towards poor people (by which I mean dumb people - people who tend to be less intelligent and who lack the basic knowledge of law and policy to understand that this is all a fiction). These are the kinds of ads geared towards people who believe that they don’t have to show a highway patrol officer their I.D., and who cannot name more than one founding father (George Washington?), and who think that Africa is a country. It’s not encouraging that they’re being regularly directed at you, multiple times each day.
Adding Insult to…
Meanwhile, your government gives cell phone plans and prepaid cards and Manhattan hotel rooms and airplane tickets to hordes of ‘economic migrants’, who’ve been lured here through a dark blend of political incentives and misplaced sympathy-grown-monstrous. The professionals who drafted those rules and wrote the executive orders and changed the regulations doubtless feel that they’re compassionate, but that’s only because they have such a minimal exposure to real poverty that they’re able to imagine that all of these people are refugees of some kind… rather than just a lot of bored and lazy people who want to live in New York City for free and get a better paying job somewhere down the road. Meanwhile contractors and corrupt and secret partners are making millions from obvious arrangements that will never find their way into the media. You (a veteran, without a rap sheet) lived in your car for a long time while progressives tried to funnel money towards their favorite groups. You’re not a member of any of those groups, though. You’re privileged (you keep being told), but it’s difficult to imagine exactly how. There’s little time to consider it though. You have to get back to job searching.
The Sweet Spot
People who don’t have much experience of poverty (jail, rehab, homelessness, psychiatric commitment, etc.) often tend to have a rosy view of the poor. This is especially true when their political ideology and personal identity depend upon such romanticization. On the left, this tends to take the form of an exaggerated, saccharine sympathy, which reveals itself mostly in fashionable opinions and voting patterns (and almost never in direct assistance to any actual poor people). That’s why the left loves illegal immigrants (“undocumented migrants”) and poor black people. In their mental universe these groups are at a kind of apex of disadvantage, and so the sympathy felt is concentrated. The masturbatory awareness of the believer’s own good intentions and righteous opinions are therefore heightened. The believer feels so good, so kind. And they don’t actually have to do anything. Louis C.K. described this perfectly:
I’m sure it’s wonderful feeling, and it’s on full display when you discuss politics with such people. They tend to be so enamored of their own good intentions that they never consider the possibility that (1) they don’t know what they’re talking about or (2) the kinds of policies and “solutions” they’re advocating have been implemented fully in the United States for more than 3 generations, accomplishing nothing more than a kind of slow immiseration and infantilization of the poor.
Here’s
, listing these behaviors while discussing a point about the relationship between poverty and unemployment. These are some other behaviors that have a statistical relationship with poverty:(+) alcoholism: Alcohol costs money, interferes with your ability to work, and leads to expensive reckless behavior.
(+) drug addiction: Like alcohol, but more expensive, and likely to eventually lead to legal troubles you’re too poor to buy your way out of.
(+) single parenthood: Raising a child takes a lot of effort and a lot of money. One poor person rarely has enough resources to comfortably provide this combination of effort and money.
(+) unprotected sex: Unprotected sex quickly leads to single parenthood. See above.
(+) dropping out of high school: High school drop-outs earn much lower wages than graduates. Kids from rich families may be able to afford this sacrifice, but kids from poor families can’t.
(+) being single: Getting married lets couples avoid a lot of wasteful duplication of household expenses. These savings may not mean much to the rich, but they make a huge difference for the poor.
(+) non-remunerative crime: Drunk driving and bar fights don’t pay. In fact, they have high expected medical and legal expenses. The rich might be able to afford these costs. The poor can’t.
Yet as Charles Murray keeps reminding us, all of the pathologies on my list are especially prevalent among the poor. Does this show that Yglesias is wrong?
Hardly. Few claims are more obvious than “Being poor is a reason to save money, work hard, and control your impulses.” The right lesson to draw, rather, is that social scientists need to search for factors that cause both poverty and irresponsible behavior. Such as? Low IQ, low conscientiousness, low patience, and plain irrationality.
Isn’t this just “blaming the victim”? No, it’s something more radical: disputing the poor’s presumptive status as “victims.”
Quite right. The poor aren’t victims. I can roughly divide the poor into three groups:
those who are incapable (mentally ill, addicted, disabled, etc.). Some of them could become capable if they self-improved considerably, so resources should be devoted to that.
those who are capable but aren’t trying. Do you think that every poor person would prefer to not be poor? I agree with you. The question is whether they want to get out of poverty so badly that they would be willing to save money, lose weight, avoid sex, apply for work, build credentials, etc. There are many single mothers and young men (etc.) who have no absolutely interest in getting a job or improving their situation. Interestingly, such people often talk a big game the discussion turns to values and self-help and ambition and respect. I imagine that this is just a psychological defense mechanism but it’s very common.
those who are capable and are trying. Their situation is perversely made more difficult by the existence of entitlement programs. They often reach a point at which they must choose between free government money and paid work, for instance. Also, the project of working for years to pay for things that one’s neighbors are essentially getting for free is a frustrating and mentally taxing undertaking.
Why do I mention all of that? Our public policy should be geared towards helping those in group (1.), dissuading and motivating those in group (2.), and incentivizing and rewarding those in group (3.).
The same kinds of incentives should exist in the job market. It would be inaccurate to say that dressing up and networking and perfecting a resume and demonstrating work ethic are all fool’s errands. These kinds of displays absolutely have value. But their value has diminished in the past few decades, I suspect. The job market is a layer cake. There are well-paid positions speckled throughout the thing (school administrators, union electricians, successful salesmen), but aside from these fairly rare opportunities the creamiest sections at the top are reserved for those with credentials (who nearly always come from privileged backgrounds). The layers below that offer some opportunity, but slivers of it have been cut away and reserved for certain groups, or consumed by government spending and regulation. Then you have the dry and flavorless base. In this part of the cake, wearing a suit jacket and having good references will avail you nothing. Are you a felon? Do you have an IQ above 80? Can you show up to work every day and perform some of your appointed tasks? Congratulations - you’ve got the job.
It seems to me that in an economy that is as wealthy as ours we could incentive a great deal more independent action and flexibility and effort, but we would have reduce the influence of credentials, discard some of the power of the HR bureaucracy, limit employer liability, and streamline the selection and hiring process. Most poor people want to succeed and they’re willing to work in order to do so. Some of them simply have too much in the way of external commitments (single mothers, for example). Some of them have criminal records. Most of them look around the landscape of the job market, and they see little opportunity. Unless you want to pay a college or university (meaning: unless you want to go into debt) for 2 or 4 years of education (the lion’s share of which is thoroughly worthless) you will find few open doors. Talk to school nurses and engineers and flight attendants and police officers and therapists and schoolteachers. In every case you’ll find an encrusted structure of quotas, irrational regulations, required credentials, and opaque hiring processes.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Postscript
I don’t think that people should require a professional career or a graduate degree from a private school to find a stable, fulfilling occupation. In many cases they don’t require this, of course. Plumbers and builders and truck drivers and police officers all go to work each day and many become quite prosperous. Wherever those jobs involve high status or influence, however, the pressure has been on to reduce the hiring of people like me. Wherever those jobs don’t involve high status, the pressure has been on to further marginalize the workers and the employers: tax them, regulate them, and keep them separate from policymaking as much as possible. Can you recall any police officer being asked for his opinion or professional experience during the BLM era, around 2020? Instead, we had a horde of journalists and activists telling us how policing should be done. I guarantee the same thing is happening in the effort to rebuild Los Angeles. No one is asking builders and construction managers how they should go about things. Such people are undeniably useful (much more so than Mayor Karen Bass, I wager), but they should be kept far away from the levers of power. There’s a tremendous amount of contempt for such people among progressives these days. At this point, I imagine that many people on the left rather wish that such useful workers weren’t even allowed to vote.
But why should activists and journalists and teachers and nonprofit managers require degrees? Can anyone really say that an education at Cornell or Oberlin vastly improves the work performance of such employees, commensurate with the barriers to entry of a 4-year degree and $100k in student loan debt being erected around the field? How about firefighters and barbers and cosmetologists and nurses? Are associate’s (or bachelor’s!) degrees really necessary to do these jobs? Or have we just created a vast system to enrich and bloat the academic bureaucracy, while making our job market less free and nimble and diverse?
I’ve always struggled to integrate my passions and my work. I’ve done most of the entry-level jobs used as examples in this essay. I’ve been a commission-only salesperson. I’ve stood in the aisles of Walmart to sell phone plans. I’ve washed windows and cut lawns and been a custodian, all on full-time bases. I’ve worked in warehouses and offices. After work, I would go home and read and write, knowing that I live in a society where I would probably need to go to school for additional years (which isn’t feasible for me) to use any of my skills or knowledge professionally.
The United States is at an unprecedented level of credentialism and labor market ossification. But I live in a state in which a crack in the growing bureaucratic edifice appeared. In my state, veterans and first responders can receive temporary eligibility as teachers on the basis of only a bachelors’ degree (in something other than education or early-childhood education, two more bogus degrees that gum up the employment works and artificially reduce the pool of available teachers). I love kids. I’ve worked as a freelance tutor for years. This time, I’ve decided to lean into the credentialist structure, rather than opposing it. In a few weeks I will begin teaching (civics and science, it appears). I feel more secure and relaxed than I have in many years, knowing that I will finally have the aegis of professional protection that a credentialed career provides (and I’m very excited about becoming a teacher). It occurs to me that many people enjoy this protection for their entire adult lives, without even knowing or appreciating it. I wish there was a way that those people could be stripped of their privilege (just for a few weeks, like a kind of extended Saturnalia, the old Roman festival in which slaves acted as masters and masters as slaves for a day) and thrown into the job market. I truly wish they could experience the dehumanizing and Kafkaesque process that regular people must often engage with in order to find work. They would realize that sympathy and performative concern shouldn’t just be limited to women or ‘queer’ people or illegal immigrants. There’s plenty of marginalization to go around, just among white, working class men. The most exorbitant privilege you can have in this country is a stable career, and valuable credentials. All other factors fade into irrelevance next to these. What is it that they say? “Check your privilege”? Indeed.
" often get messages from people with “job offers” too. The work is vague and amorphous, the pay is implausibly high, and it’s usually a ‘remote position.’ Apparently a company wants to pay me $6,000 per month (and the pay is often denominated in awkward periods like this - ‘per month’ or ‘per week’) to send out some packages! It sounds like a pretty good deal. Of course these jobs don’t exist. It’s yet another attempt (I believe) to gather one’s personal data."
Actually it is often an attempt to recruit mules (aka designated fall guys) to launder the proceeds of internet scams. Your job is to buy things (or receive things bought) with stolen credit card details and then pass them on to the crooks. Since you are the recipient when LEO is involved you are arrested for handling stolen goods. Oh and you probably won't get the $6000 promised. You'll maybe get $1,000 but probably not even that as there will be excuses made as to why they can't pay you
Glad to hear you have something lined up. You obviously have much to offer, and I hope your students will understand and appreciate that. Also, given that you will be teaching in Desantis' FLA perhaps you will have the support of the administrative structure.
I am hopeful that going forward credentialism will matter less and everyday skills will matter more because we more than ever need the latter and no longer can fully afford the former.