Mitt Romney's Delusion of Meritocracy

I always find myself inching towards a breaking point in my patience for political double-talk when I hear someone who has benefited from extraordinary material and social advantages preaching about the evils of “entitlement society” and how they undercut the meritocracy in which we are supposedly now living. And so it is with Mitt Romney’s stump speech. Much of his campaign rhetoric has sought to paint him as the ideological opposite to an Obama presidency that advances entitlement and discourages hard work and education.

You may disagree with the effectiveness of Democratic policies, but it seems asinine to fail to acknowledge that the initiatives of people like President Obama are precisely aimed at providing opportunities for work and education to all Americans. But Mitt Romney apparently identifies these efforts as aspects of “a society where government takes from some and gives to others; tries to make everybody the same.”

Nobody who isn’t a robot strives to make everybody the same. No Democrats that I know of think that is either possible or desirable. The goal is to prevent an unfair disparity in the opportunities that are available to different kinds of people from cradle to grave. And I suppose that only a person who has never been on the bottom half of that divide, or who has forgotten what it was like, would fail to understand that.

As such a person, Romney says:

“I believe in something I'll call an opportunity society, a merit society where people, based upon their education and their hard work and their risk-taking, are able to earn rewards.”

And looking closely at those words, I see a significant indication of the inability of people like Mitt Romney to so much as perceive the effects of existent inequality. I believe that virtually everybody shares the ideal of a society in which hard work and education lead a person to success and prosperity. It just happens that those of us who have put forth earnest and constant efforts, and obtained the fullest education available to us have found the reality to be far from that ideal.

Meanwhile, people who have never wanted for anything tend to believe that they were competing on a level playing field and that their own hard work and education and risk-taking provided them with the fruits that they have enjoyed throughout life. But that phrase “risk-taking” points to the cognitive dissonance implicit in believing both that personal investment is foundational and that preexisting advantages are irrelevant.

If risk-taking is part of a trifecta of personal behaviors that define an individual’s success, it requires some rather fuzzy logic to conclude that everybody has an equal shot at earning the rewards that Romney speaks of. Taking a risk for the sake of success means gambling with resources, and if you don’t have sufficient resources to start with, the prospect of taking a material risk means either venturing less for the sake of a more modest reward or pursuing the irrational course of action by putting more on the table than you can afford to pay should the risk fail.

After all, the term “risk” presupposes the possibility of failure. That’s well and good if your father was the CEO of American Motors by the time you were seven, and you therefore have the means to cover your losses. But if you were born working class, have the support only of working class people, or of no one at all, and are starting your education, career, and all else from scratch, a risk that fails can doom your life. If you’re on the bottom, you can work harder than anyone you know, and educate yourself to the utmost, but if you’re not presented with an actual opportunity to ascend, the bottom is where you stay.

Romney evidently thinks that hard work and education are not enough, and that risk-taking is the third requirement of meritocracy, and perhaps the very thing that creates those opportunities for ascent. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” they say. Fine, but what if you have nothing to venture – nothing, that is, but your hard work and education? It seems to me that the only response to such a person’s hardship that still maintains a belief in meritocracy is to fault them for either choosing not to gamble more than they own or for gambling so much and losing.

But in point of fact, I think the actual response to such people is to avoid looking down the cracks through which they’ve fallen, and to simply pretend that they never existed.

Please Stop Working for Free

I was pleased to see that Stephen Colbert levied brilliant criticisms against CNN’s iReport social network on his Monday night show:

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It’s wonderful to see a satirist or critic taking on the topic, but it’s important to keep in mind that CNN is far from being the only organization to uncompensated labor from the public, at the expense of actual jobs. If CNN is the worst offender, it is only by virtue of its being an exceptionally large and visible organization. But some content on the front pages of Yahoo! is drawn from its amateur contributor network. And while it does allow people to earn nominal payments based on page views, ultimately Yahoo! is relying on a large pool of writers and photographers who are willing to work for free and consider any compensation whatsoever to essentially be a gift. AOL and the Huffington Post utilize the same model, and of course the latter is also infamous for simply reposting paid content from other news sources. On top of that, there are various sites whose sole concept is to gather creative content from as many people as possible and then present some sort of prize to those that pay dividends on nothing. And each of them seemingly finds a steady supply of willing participants.

That willingness seems unlikely to become the focus of other critics, but I think it is the main issue here. So long as news outlets remain primarily concerned with making money, it is only natural that they will latch onto business practices that allow them to maintain output without the need to pay formerly requisite salaries. Quality be damned, if it brings them any revenue, it is worthwhile because it contributes nothing to overhead. There’s even a business term for this kind of acquisition of labor: crowdsourcing. It serves much the same purpose as outsourcing work to foreign countries, but is even better for the business, as outsourcing exploits the necessity of workers accepting appalling low wages because of their local conditions, whereas crowdsourcing exploits the willingness of workers to accept no payment at all because of their imagination of some future reward.

Certainly, I would be thrilled if there came a breaking point for the news media, and they came to realize that they have an obligation greater than the acquisition of capital. Each person can play a role in promoting that realization, primarily through his choice of what media to consume, but ultimately that breaking point is up to the executives of several corporations, and out of our hands. What ordinary people should realize instead is that they are enabling this sort of exploitation, and contributing to the rampant decay in the quality of news and popular culture. There is a breaking point that every writer and artist must reach, whereby we come to understand that we are being used, and that we are allowing ourselves to be used.

There’s really nothing in it for us if we keep giving away work for free. I’m sure that many people provide content for major websites purely in pursuit of fifteen minutes of fame, but I expect that many people also do so on the assumption that it will lead to some discovery of their brilliance, that the exposure to a wide audience of CNN viewers or Yahoo! readers will open doors for them. What they ought to understand, though, is that that pursuit of self-interest will ultimately prevent those doors from opening to anywhere. Every decent writer who offers free content in hope of future opportunities is evidently expecting someone to come along and pay for what everyone else is getting for free.

Of course, if the decent writers and artists realize this and drop out of the crowdsource, I suppose that would just leave behind the terrible writers and artists, and raise the question, would CNN, Yahoo!, AOL and the like continue to drink from a tepid pool? They might. But the subsequently accelerating deterioration of quality just illustrates the way breaking points work. If we keep quality content out of the hands of those who would exploit it for free, won’t there come a point at which the dreck they’re channeling into public view just isn’t worth looking at anymore? There simply must be a lower limit to what we’re willing to accept and popularize. There must be, even though there is apparently no lower limit to what many people are willing to accept as compensation for their creative efforts.

The Obama Jobs Plan: Last Stop for Compromise

I must say that I was intrigued by the strategy behind the jobs plan that the President unveiled in his speech last night. I can’t exactly say that I was inspired or impressed, though. I don’t think it’s the strategy that I’d have liked to see, but it is a strategy, and a proactive one, and that’s saying something. I listened to the speech on NPR, and the broadcasters who covered it seemed to have a fair sense of what was coming before the President took the podium. There was some alternative speculation about how the bill would be structured, but the dominant theory seemed to be that it would consist entirely of initiatives that had been supported by both Democrats and Republicans in the past. That turned out to be exactly the case, the strategy being to present something that could not possibly meet with partisan opposition unless the Republican Party was prepared to explain why it had changed its view on a series of positions it had formerly supported.

It’s a clever approach, and it may succeed in its goal, but there are two serious questions in my mind: is that goal ambitious enough, and what if it doesn’t succeed? I admire the effort and sacrifice that must have gone into identifying and advancing all of the points of demonstrated overlap between Republican and Democratic policies on jobs and the economy. But as far as I’m concerned, the main reason why there is so little progress in American politics today is that the Republican Party has an uncompromising political will while the Democrats have an obsession with compromise at the expense of any will whatsoever.

I value compromise myself. I’m not so naïve and egotistical that I think I think government policy and the future of America can be built according to my own narrow vision. I am a firm believer in incremental change, and I know that the very process of positive change sometimes requires a great deal of patience and a lot of frustration. Yet, in a situation where the most regressive elements of public policy provide an unmovable defense against even the most modest applications of liberal ideas, I don’t want more compromise. I want a stronger offense. I want a reason to believe that liberal ideas aren’t dying because all political resources are being directed to efforts at obtaining cooperation with people who see any Congressional action whatsoever as an unacceptable political defeat.

It seems to me that that is what the president and much of the Democratic Party have been doing. I fear that they are losing sight of the dividing line between compromise and capitulation. In fact, I think both parties lost sight of that line a long time ago. The clearest ideological difference between the two is that Republicans believe that giving up anything is capitulation, while Democrats think that giving up everything is compromise.

And what if the Republican Congress doesn’t pass a plan consisting entirely of initiatives formerly supported by both parties? What will be the new strategy, the next step towards gaining their cooperation? Introducing a jobs bill comprised entirely of initiatives supported only by Republicans? The current strategy absolutely has to be successful. But if it is, I hope that Democrats understand that there is nowhere left to go in the interest of establishing a common vision. They have already gone well past the center of the aisle, and it would make no sense to reach any farther without simply joining the Republican Party. Instead of that, if this strategy of asking the wall to move fails yet again, perhaps it will finally come time for the Democratic Party to regroup and begin assembling the machinery to tear through that wall. Perhaps then they will at least try to stand up for underrepresented liberal ideals. That may bear with it the risk of making little progress, but the Republican strategy has already guaranteed that, and no one seems to worry about the political consequences of that. If it’s impossible for anyone to take the right action, I’d at least like the right ideas to be in the public record.

Learn to Be Better at the Job You Don't Have

I will be posting a much more in-depth commentary on a related topic later on, but I've just heard about some news related to labor policy, which I'd like to address first. President Obama announced today that a new initiative in "winning the future" will be to invest in providing college students with training for manufacturing jobs. That spurs me to ask one question as loudly and vociferously as possible: Why college students?

If we believe that manufacturing jobs will help to turn the recession around, what benefit is to be gained from drawing candidates for those new jobs from among a pool of college-educated workers? Doesn't that background specifically make them differently qualified? Having formal education in the fields of physics or mechanical engineering might help you to better understand the processes and machinery involved in making industrial or consumer goods, but I don't see how it helps you to actually do a better job of working on the line, assembling those products, and running that machinery. Neither do I see how saddling future manufacturing laborers with student loan debt will help to ease their financial burden once those jobs come to contribute to an economic recovery.

Frankly, even if the government's investment was channeled into trade schools rather than community colleges, how does that actually help? This constant, unquestioned emphasis on both job training and college education relies on what is to me an obviously false premise: that the problems facing nine to twenty percent of American workers today is not a lack of available jobs, but a lack of qualifications among the labor force. The government seems to believe, against evidence and common sense, that increasing training and education will cause jobs befitting those qualifications to appear out of the ether.

Why does labor policy consistently place the burden of future recovery on the worker rather than the industry, those who are struggling rather than those who merely have reduced profit margins, the individual rather than the economy as a whole?

The Department of Labor recently reported that manufacturing jobs were cut in May. In light of that, on what is the government basing the assertion that increased manufacturing will spur the economy in coming months and years? What are they doing to make that happen, other than telling people "Get ready - we promise this is what you're going to be doing after you graduate"?

Manufacturing jobs, if I'm not mistaken, tend to be blue collar labor. And like much blue collar labor, and indeed like many jobs in sales and office work and other traditionally white collar positions, the ability to do the job effectively relies largely on on-the-job training. No degree program can teach you the exact skill set you'll need for a specific job, and unless in-depth background knowledge is essential for a particular career path, acquiring a degree is often just a waste of time and money.

But again, Obama and the government as a whole seem to think the reason there are so few manufacturing jobs is not that the industries are failing in the U.S. or outsourcing their labor to cheap foreign workers, but because employers are sitting in their offices, pouting that nobody in America has the training to do the jobs that they'd so desperately like to fill. But what I think is that if those jobs existed in greater numbers, and if there were incentives for employers to keep them in the United States, manufacturers would hire whomever demonstrated the overall competence and trainability to be able to perform the needed tasks.

As a matter of fact, that seems obvious to me. But I don't see labor policy ever developing to reflect that. I think we'll go on delaying people's entry into the labor market by pushing them through higher levels of education while waiting either for the economy to turn around on its own or for a greater collapse to drive us to a breaking point.