The Graduate: Why Should Everyone Else Pay for Other People’s Dumb (and
Hedonistic) Career Choices
January 2, 2012 - 8:10 am - by Barry Rubin
I’ve recently made the acquaintance of a young man who has a problem. He is
28 years old; smart, of good moral character, and willing to work hard at
part-time jobs. He does not expect anyone else, including the government, to
support him. Yet he is puzzled and increasingly bitter that he cannot make
a good living.
What’s his difficulty? It’s not the economy (in this specific case) but
the fact that he has a degree in linguistics and is now studying Oriental
philosophy at a fine university. His case is not altogether typical, but is
immensely revealing.
Here’s the secret: He cannot make a living because the market for people
with degrees in linguistics and in Oriental philosophy is limited. He should
have known that. Someone should have told him that. The calculation of
practicality should have been made. It wasn’t.
As I said, this individual does not want handouts and he has not taken
student loans. Many others have. A large proportion of the Occupy Wall
Street-and-other-places movement seems to consist of those who have made
similar “career” (or non-career) decisions but want others to pay for
their pastimes and mistakes.
There are at least three important lessons here of the greatest importance.
First, young people should be taught, as the old saying goes, that the world
doesn’t owe them a living. Nothing could seem more obvious, yet this has
largely been forgotten. This is especially true in the United States, a
country whose prosperity was built on understanding this point. Of course,
telling them that the world does owe them a living can be rather popular and
lead to one’s election to public office.
Despite the rhetoric employed, the current dominant idea in the United
States seems to be not so much that the “rich” (and, in practice, the
middle class) have to pay “their fair share” to those who are starving to
death in rat-infested squatter camps (of whom there aren’t many), but that
they must subsidize upper middle class people who are non-productive yet
living very nice lives, often better lives than those who are hard-working
and subsidizing them. Those to be subsidized include those who want to work
in cushy, unproductive, useless but prestigious jobs but cannot find them,
or those who want to work in cushy, unproductive, useless but prestigious
jobs and do find them working directly or indirectly for the government,
supposedly doing good things.
Indeed, the siphoning off of potentially useful citizens who might possibly
engage in some economically productive activity (insert lawyer jokes if you
wish) into all sorts of made-up and useless jobs is bleeding society. The
problem is not the economic elite’s greed, but the oversized “intellectual
” greed. Why do you think university tuitions have skyrocketed?
Know this for sure: a lot of these latter people (in contrast to the former
group) do not work very hard and their work is of low quality, in large part
because they don’t have to meet serious oversight and their “products”
don’t bear any real value. In other words, their main achievement each day
is to have good conversations over lunch.
Since when have Americans fallen for the idea that government bureaucrats
are so useful and productive that the answer to their problems is to have
more such people?
Terrorist attack? Create a giant Homeland Security office so people can
write each other memos. Improve education or the environment? Raise the
budget of the Department of Education or the Environmental Protection Agency.
Being unable to find a job is quite understandable in the current economy.
Being unable to find a job because you have made decisions resulting in your
having no qualification for a job and making no attempt to do so is
something else entirely.
Glorifying the kinds of jobs that — at this point in history — make things
worse, not better, is suicidal.
Second, the mistaken idea has taken root — and been encouraged by the
federal government by making loans even more available — that everyone
should go to college and even get money for doing so no matter what they
want to study. I received a small scholarship to study Arabic at a time when
that was deemed to be a strategic need of the United States (that was a
wise decision), but I wouldn’t have received one to study “conflict
management” or some other useless made-up subject.
All too often I see too many young people trying to get into my field when
they lack not only the personal qualifications but the needed willingness to
make an effort. The university education they have received gets in the way
of their understanding reality just as the proliferation of jargon makes
them incapable of writing clearly, or — indeed — of having anything useful
to say. At one point, we took on ten interns after making it clear that
hard work could lead to employment. Nine of them did almost nothing despite
the opportunity offered.
Masses of people with degrees decide that they should be writers, policy
analysts, and academics (especially the kind who indoctrinate rather than
teach anything truthful) far more than the numbers ever conceivably needed
to fill these professions. And you can imagine what the political worldview
of 90 percent of them is. Those who don’t find jobs are bitter that the
capitalist economy has “failed.” Those who do find jobs will spend their
career telling this to their students.
The governing idea of all this nonsense: Everyone who wants some elite, non-
economically productive job should get one. This of course is a worldview
that fits their “class interest.” That’s followed by the idea that any
society which doesn’t perform this task is “unfair.” Massive deficits
follow.
And after that comes the idea that the job of government is to take money
from those who do something useful in order to pay not to those who cannot
earn a living because of intense poverty, disease or other affliction, but
rather to those who don’t want to do so because they have been crippled by
miseducation and excessively high education.
After all, where do the new jobs come from for the highly trained experts in
all these new fields? A surprising number are supported by George Soros. In
some cases there are foundation grants and donations, but those are going
to be limited. So the answer is: from the government. Either they could go
for a government job or a government-subsidized job, or a job based on a
government grant. Hence the political base for Barack Obama and the left-
pretending-to-be-liberal among these people.
That’s why politics have been flipped: we aren’t seeing a radical
proletariat resenting rich fat-cats, but a conservative mass of working
people resenting rich fat-bureaucrats and government-paid people they
subsidize at higher living standards than their own.
A recent study of a specific public school system shows that more and more
money is spent and people hired, but the proportion of actual teachers has
gone down. Businesses are stuffed with people whose jobs are rather
undefinable in terms of real productivity. Officials or consulting firms
teaching you how to be politically correct or how to comply with government
regulations seem to proliferate without end.
Fewer people invent, make, or sell things. More and more make sure that
those making or selling things have the right ethnic mix, air and water
quality, number of bathrooms per square feet, and so on. A friend of mine
who runs a school has to use a huge amount of his limited funds to pay
someone’s full-time salary to fill out government forms. In military terms,
the tail gets bigger and the teeth get smaller.
Or, to put it another way, the horse gets thinner; the rider gets heavier.
The outcome is obvious.
Don’t get me wrong. If you have a profound passion for art, literature, or
other such things, go for it. But be aware of what’s likely to happen
afterward. There is nothing nobler than for people to engage in hobbies,
pastimes, and cultural activities. The explosion in leisure time has made
this possible; the Internet is glorious in unleashing talent. My 12-year-old
son took me on a tour of YouTube showing the comedy, musical, animation,
and other artistry that sometimes attracts hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Internet video is like television in its early period during the 1950s. Some
of these people are making a living because they are either good or they
are providing what a lot of people want (not necessarily the same thing);
others are having fun and expressing their inner needs. And few of these
people have any expensive professional training.
Third, and that’s precisely the point. Studying the social sciences and
humanities, not to mention all of the phony degree programs that have sprung
up, does not make one employable, nor does a degree have written on it “
hire this person at a high salary.” Even as they charge more, universities
— especially certain departments in them — are creating neither qualified
professionals nor serious intellectuals.
Get a useful education, a job, and a hobby in that order. And don’t expect
the hardworking people, who have had to make compromises in their own lives,
to pay for you to do whatever you want.
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