July 8, 2010, More things that don't work
Our friend Roy Edroso identifies the latest brilliant and on-point observation as set forth in the pages of the Grey Lady, to wit, wait for it, certain rich kids don't want to take standard issue entry level corporate jobs that they feel are beneath them, Roy gives a most excellent meta-analysis of why he thinks The New York Times is behaving in this seemingly clueless way of presenting the "plight" of a most unrepresentative comparator for purposes of assessing just how bad the job market is right now for so many millions of people, to wit, a recent elite college grad from a family of deep means (a number of whose members have gone to law school as a fall-back).
Among the options considered by Roy is that the Times is simply presenting the world through the standard lens of the Upper East Side Upper Class readership it so desperately craves. Another is simple laziness based on a reporter's simply being able to find this particular young man of unlimited self-worth, but evidently limited drive to bring it to job-market fruition.
Roy (himself not merely an excellent blogger, but an excellent journalist) does hint at the explanation I would give...a sadder explanation: so many of the people who work at and run the Times, along with so many other large American institutions, private or public, elite or merely prosaic, are... dare I say it... just not very good at their jobs. To be fair, it's not as if they'd be good at any jobs, since our entire economy is, to quote the great IOZ, a castle made of bullshit built on a bullshit foundation foundering in a swamp of bullshit... well, let me give you the broader quote from him for some context:
Persistent unemployment is not a problem because employees and employers are "mismatched," one of those callous Management euphemisms that will one day take its rightful place alongside such Third-Reichisms as "transport." It's a problem because our economy is a castle made of bullshit built on a bullshit foundation foundering in a swamp of bullshit. It is not an absence of skills and abilities that curtails and limits the prospects of gainful labor; it is an absence of any industry requiring any labor. Yes, it was lovely that we had a decade or two in which fake jobs full of people pimping their fake skills abounded, but that wave crested and rolled back.
Honestly,.. I can't think of a more likely explanation for so many things, these days, or a better justification for simply concluding "if it's going to be, it's up to me," and that includes everything from fixing your own bicycle to gardening (and home canning) to befriending as many useful people as possible who will help- rather than hinder- you and your family's survival in a world where seemingly everything is breaking down around us much faster than the ever dwindling number of competent people left can fix it.
People who will also have the good sense to laugh a lot at all of this will be especially useful. Just saying.
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