Myth of Job Retraining

Obviously, each person is born with a particular set of genetically endowed skills and inclinations.  Equally obviously, each person is then shaped by environmental circumstances largely determined by luck (such as native birthplace, or language, or class.) Obviously a person changes over time from experience, fortune, and aging.

Society requires work, which is provided by individuals providing necessary skills to tasks in return for reward _ social, economic, or personal.  Generally,  some work is more important and harder to find people with the correct skills to perform.  The capitalist creed is that such people should be rewarded with more wealth than others who cannot do it.  Economic inequality is seen as a necessary part of that system in which the common good is accomplished.  The individual who does special work must be properly rewarded.

Imagine a static utopia.  Everyone has found their correct place in economic and social society.  The skills of each individual match the tasks which must be done.  Probably, that is a pretty long stretch to begin with, but just pretend it could be so.  Now imagine everything changing.  The highly skilled grow old or die _ a miner who once loaded 16 tons cannot get out of bed, the Olympic star is hobbling around with a cane.  Now imagine that the tasks keep changing, and the coal mines are closed, and the Olympics are reserved for one or two freaks of nature.

Imagine, for that matter, a baseball team.  You have players at the various positions, each of them in the prime of life and valued for special abilities like pitching, fielding, or hitting.  There are older managers and trainers, helping the players to be better; accountants and publicists who assure money comes in from the paying public; owners and suits who keep everything working; lots of “plain old workers” who variously perform security, ticket taking, beer sales.  And, of course, umpires, highly specialized with their own traits and backgrounds.  What happens if a rules change makes, accountants and umpires obsolete?  Can they be moved into the outfield, onto the pitcher’s mound?  Will they become owners or managers?  Or will they get a job at a tiny fraction of their previous pay as beer vendors and gate guards?  Can they be retrained as a pitcher, even if the rules change to allow more pitchers to be used?

Nobody can be “anything they want to be,” even when young.  Special traits _ intelligence, athleticism, beauty, health _ are required for certain jobs.  More than that, nobody can remain what they have become forever _ intelligence fades, the body thickens and slows, beauty rushes off, and health becomes problematic.  The clumsy cannot become agile, no matter how hard they work at it.  Even if there is a great shortage of short men or tall women, striving will not make it so for any individual. 

Reward in a capitalist system is not linked to society, but to economics, which in some magical way supposedly helps society via an “invisible hand.”  And perhaps it is so.  But it is not a completely sane human social system except in a padded ivory tower.  Society runs on a lot more than the exposed edges of its monetary exchanges _ love, trust, honor, and idealism, among many others.  That is obvious, but usually ignored in economic textbooks.  Idealism is only applicable after the invisible hand selects the happy few whose gifts match the job skills rewarded.

As for those poor umpires (and any other older person who watches their jobs vanish) _ retraining is a nasty hoax.  Turning a turnip into an airplane is almost impossible.  Lecturing the turnip that it must become an airplane is simply cruel.

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I only had to retrain a couple of times in terms of a career.  One was into teaching, which required not only a great deal of social learning and specific child-centered knowledge, but also required a healthy dose of empathy and involvement with groups of people (parents, for example) who were only indirectly related to the daily tasks.  The second, almost diametrically opposite, was computer programming which (those being the early days) I had to learn on my own, but which involved a strange logical single-minded mental attitude, little involvement with anyone else, and a dedication to tasks which were lonely and seemed so strange as to be almost incomprehensible to outsiders.

Each career, in its own way, required constant reevaluation and retraining and ongoing learning.  There was always something new in early childhood education, and computer programming evolved so quickly that it was commonly said that one year was as twenty five in the outside world _ what you knew today was one hundred years obsolete after four years went by.  Each career was demanding and ferocious and took a lot of time, and those who survived developed ways to find strength in whatever rhythms existed.  Nobody could say that switching from one to the other could be made casually.

From experience, for me, I would say each was equally hard.  Yet, in the beginning especially, computer programming was rewarded much better than teaching, for few knew how to do it, few could quite grasp the intricacies required.  Yet by the end, teaching _ protected by unions _ was more valuable as a career than programming _ but not so much if you were young and trying to start.  Nothing, in other words, was simple.

There is no moral here, really.  I retrained at thirty, early enough that a switch in careers was rewarding.  To change equivalently at the age of sixty I think would be impossible.  And in both cases, the universe changed in any case _ work itself, when I was young, was done in a kind of dedicated box, where you left home at home and devoted one hundred percent of your working hours to your job.  Now there are no boxes, and people work from home but also do much irrelevant to their jobs when they are at employment.  That change in the very meaning of job, for me, was something with which I was never comfortable.

Simply, then, from my own experiences, I believe job retraining is possible and necessary when you are young, but much less so when you are older than, say, forty.  I also think that if you are lucky and find a lucrative career when you are less than thirty, you may be able to ride it to a satisfying financial conclusion as you age, but if for one reason or another you miss, or if the need for your particular skill dries up as you grow old, there is absolutely no chance to find something equally economically advantageous.  The idea that a person from forty on is the same as a person from twenty to thirty is the real myth here, and one that should always be kept in mind when discussing job loss and reemployment.

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In Gotham’s fair city

Where the young are so pretty
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone
As she called on her cell phone
For deals that she had known
Crying “Stocks and financials,
Sell high and buy low.”

(chorus)

“Sell high and buy low, sell high, and buy low,”
Crying “Stocks and financials, sell high and buy low.”

She was an advisor

And no one was wiser
For so were here mother, and father before
And they lived in a penthouse
Quite free of rent house
Pushing  “stocks and financials,
Sell high and buy low.”

The crash took their money

And it wasn’t funny
And Molly could not find another career
So she wheels a wheelbarrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying “Hot dogs, knishes,
Come buy, I sell low.”
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You’ve no doubt been told that you will have many careers _ three or five or whatever _ and blandly figured ok, so what.  Once upon a time the myth was that you were stuck with whatever you tried first and that was no great thing either, since it is so easy to make a mistake in choice when you really don’t have enough information.  There have been many unhappy professionals stuck in careers they did not much like, it’s kind of refreshing to know there will be other chances.

But the chances, unfortunately, are never equal.  If you hit the gold ring on your first profession you are in great shape.  Your youth and energy and ability to learn and sheer enthusiasm will take you far, quickly, and you may in fact become a master of the universe in your small working universe.  The second career _ less so.  You are no longer quite so young, quite so energetic, a little more cynical.  Not only are there others there ahead of you (who made the right choice earlier and younger) but you have probably accumulated a few obligations of your own over time leaving you less able to pursue advantage with the monomaniacal intensity needed for success.  By the time of the fourth or fifth change you are completely worn out, less capable, and probably won’t be hired by anyone anyway so you need to rely on your business.  Unless you are somehow well off, that leaves only very grim prospects.

The other thing is that within a career there are supposed to be careers, only open to the initiates.  If you get into, say, a technical profession like software or engineering in your twenties, it is assumed that you will transition at some point to either independent consultant or internal manager.  The glide path ought to be fairly easy.  Likewise if you try teaching and become a principal, or flip hamburgers and open a franchise.  This is the myth of apprenticeship and natural progression within a career.  You will find that myth is no longer true.  The rulers seem to always come from outside these days.  And the new rulers hold only contempt for those who have slaved away in one place over time.

The disturbing facts are these:  It is true you will need many careers over your life, because careers themselves are changing, appearing, and vanishing with disturbing frequency.  But, first of all, changing a career is increasingly impossible as you get older.  Secondly, a new career (from your late entry point) will rarely pay nor offer opportunities on the scale of your last one (that is, if you are flipping hamburgers at twenty it is quite reasonable to think that in twenty years you may own the joint, but that is not true if you are doing so at sixty.)  And, finally, no matter what career you pick the jobs once available are increasingly filled by either machine and computer mechanization or cheap relatively unskilled labor where only the best of the best get rewards (basic clerical bookkeeping all but disappeared in the computer revolution, and it is probably that the same thing will happen to surgeons as operations continue to be more routinely computerized.) 

So the nasty basic truth from all this is simple.  The new myth that you will probably go through many careers is quite true.  But the old myth that if you screw up the first one you are in deep shit for the rest of your life is almost equally valid.

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Jonathan Swift famously proposed that the Irish eat their children, thus solving two problems at once.  We could use him today.  What shall we do with the economically useless?

The economically useless are those, of course, who contribute nothing to the accounts of civilization.  They have always included children, the old, the incapacitated.  They now also contain the untrained, the wrongly trained, the excess whose jobs are now done with machines.  Shall we eat them?  Or will they eat everyone else?

We should stop looking at industrializing England for examples of what to do.  The age of computers is potentially an age of plenty, our models should be the south sea islands and other “primitive” civilizations where the abundance of resources were beyond the capacity of inhabitants to use them.   For most people, there is little joy in work, and for society as a whole, little need for them to work hard.  Certainly some things need to be done, but they can be done efficiently and happily, like the fishing expeditions of the islanders, not like the grim commuters and grimmer corporate titans of today.

Everyone becomes economically useless, eventually.  We die, we grow old.  We may “contribute” by becoming consumers, but it is a grudging contribution.  The wealthy increasingly look for tiny fragments of separation _ eating peacock tongues while the less fortunate eat cake or nothing at all. 

As machines and computers provide wealth, income should go not to those who happen to own machines and computers, not even (as our happy fables go) to those who invent machines and computers, but to the society as a whole.  Adam Smith’s invisible hand is irrelevant.  The world increasingly must consider who gets what, not what gets what.  Such is morality in the new age.

Are you truly economically useful?  And are you adequately rewarded for it?  And what happens when you, or your children, can no longer be so?  These are the questions we should be asking, with more thoughtful answers than Swift’s interesting idea.

 

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