Jobless Experiences Contradict Political Claims

On Monday, President Obama hosted a video conference to answer questions submitted online and speak directly to a small group of voters and students. During the chat, a Fort Worth, Texas woman named Jennifer Weddel shared her husband’s personal story and used it to challenge the president on the nation’s employment situation. Her husband is a semiconductor engineer and has not been able to find permanent, full-time work in three years.

Weddel evidently recognizes this situation as contradicting the president’s claims about the availability of skilled labor jobs within American companies, but those same claims were precisely the response that Obama offered. He insisted that there is a great deal of demand for positions like those for which Weddel’s husband is qualified, and he reiterated the comments that he had made in the State of the Union Address to the effect that American high-tech companies want to hire American workers but cannot find enough of them with the appropriate skill sets. Furthermore, Obama offered to circulate the unemployed engineer’s resume among the companies that had been giving him that information.

Stories like this are all too familiar to me, and indeed to many of us. They illustrate the often stark, sometimes incredible differences between what private individuals experience and what persons and aggregates of persons claim from a position once-removed. There is clearly tension between Weddel’s story and the president’s claims. In this, it has to be that someone is disingenuous or misinformed.

Anecdotal evidence is unreliable in making general claims, but it is also the foundation for statistical data. Obama’s claims are based on anecdote, as well, provided to him by industry executives rather than low-level workers. At the same time, one surely need not look far to find other stories that parallel Weddel’s. Are those workers struggling because of some spectacular personal failing in their job search strategies? Conversely, are companies failing to connect with these workers because of deficiencies in their recruitment? If either or both of these explanations are entirely at fault, it’s a shame that the entire body of skilled laborers can’t channel their resumes through the White House.

I’m much more inclined to believe, though, that there are further explanations. For instance, perhaps the president’s industry contacts are not completely in earnest when they say that they want to hire American workers but can’t find them. That claim can be taken in different ways, one of which is that companies can’t find engineers whom they can hire for wages low enough to make it economically feasible for them to hire Americans over foreign workers. This might partly account for why according to figures utilized in last year’s Georgetown University study, of college graduates who majored in engineering, only thirty-two percent actually work in engineering. For many of those graduates, it may be economically preferable to take jobs that are outside of or only peripherally related to their field.

It seems to me that the president privileges the most optimistic interpretation of industry claims because he has been one of the most vocal supporters of the uncharacteristically simplistic assertion that whatever our problems are, more formal education will solve them. And the more fundamental assumption behind that thinking is that if one is qualified for a given type of job, he gets it. That too flies in the face of the lived experiences of many of the unemployed and underemployed (and those who, like me, are necessarily self-employed).

The president’s response to Mrs. Weddel could be seen as implying disbelief – a failure to comprehend why someone who purportedly has the skills necessary to be employed in a particular field hasn’t received a suitable offer. And the president should feel confused, because the great mass of citizens who are jostling for frightfully scarce positions feel that way with every resume that vanishes into the ether. But I worry that President Obama will not share in that feeling for long, because when his endorsement secures Weddel’s husband a job, it will be all too easy to believe that the only reason it took so long was because he hadn’t looked in the right place before. But that convenient explanation will do little good for engineer that I met who was working in a local café, or any of the unemployed lawyers and teachers I’ve known, all of whom have been told, frequently and with sincerity, that the jobs are out there.

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.