But we've decided to press ahead. The business of thinking can be messy, so it's perhaps suitable that the business of recording one's thoughts should be messier still. Perhaps this is why we still occasionally maintain a blog that no one reads. Public catharsis, and all that.
About two months ago the griding remorseless cogs of the economy finally caught up to our place of employment. There was a certain inevitability about the proceedings. We have long been profitable without much profit, always productive but never quite prolific. We are, in other words, an agreeably irrelevant mid-sized financial firm, proudly serving a dwindling group of clients who will not always be able to support our existence.
There are a thousand banks like us across the country. Some will rally, some will be bought out by their competitors, and some will fade to the margins before disappearing entirely. Not a bad fate, that. There's something to be said for serving your customers faithfully for as long as you're able and then packing it all in. But of course the CEOs and presidents of replaceable mid-sized financial firms don't like this.1 Irrelevancy doesn't suit them. They're dynamic folk - relevancy is kind of their thing. Not the sort to go quietly into that good night, and all that.
So, like many others in our position, we've begun the messy process of restructuring. The consultants have been hired - they ghost about the place with pale faces, bloated little demi vampires fed with too little sunlight and too much recycled air. Business lines will be folded and amalgamated, new processes put in place, and cheery new corporate diktats issued to put a gloss on the process. And, of course, many people will be summarily terminated. A great many people, if the rumors are at all to point.
Now, don't go fearing for your assailed and assaulted blogger. We're an inadequate person of mean skill, but we've always benefited from the same sense of survival that benefits rats and other low rodents. We are rarely pleasant but almost impossible to kill. Corporately-speaking, of course. Bouncebackability is our preferred term.
But many of our coworkers will not be so lucky, and in accordance with the law of averages, many will be our dear friends. It is a painful ugly business. No one wants to be sent home to face their wife and family, forced to explain that they won't be going to work tomorrow, or the day after that, or any day from then proceeding. No one wants to see it happen to a friend.
Like past times of adversity, these recent events have rendered us unusually reflective - as time passed, it seemed suitable to transcribe at least some. So what follows, however incoherent and contrary, are our thoughts on the business of business, that is regularly inflicted on the people around us.
We apologize for any inadequacies that follow. They are entirely of our own making.
Part I - Homo Homini Lupus
We've been dwelling for some time on a this. It certainly wasn't preordained. Doctor's son, a smattering of private education. Never bereft of the silver spoon. We cheered against Clinton in '92. Again in '96. We read The Fountainhead when we were fifteen - surely enough to condemn us to life as a cynical, unserious misanthrope.
But for all its allure, conservatism eventually left us cold. And why, we wonder. Why, when we were preaching the good news, did the doubt creep in. Why did we stray from the path?
Around twelve years ago we read Jonathon Kozol's Amazing Grace, which described life in America 's poorest urban communities. Loyal readers will no doubt inform us of it's many faults but, for a young boy raised in sheltered circumstances, it made a remarkable impression. It challenged our view of the world in a way we'd previously avoided.
Chief among these doubts was a simple thought: What if it was us? As a son of privilege, we are (if we may modestly suggest) fairly near perfect. We work a stable job. We are are well read and well travelled, and have an education of enviable expense. Perhaps we fell short of the peak of our powers, but we've certainly achieved a life of some credit. And good for us!
But in the back of the mind, in the niggling recesses, are the whispers of doubt. The laziness and the arrogance, the self righteousness, the fatal inattention to detail. Not terrible faults, to be sure. But what things had been different? What if I was born different?
Such a tasty question: What if you were born poor? Forced to answer, we think most conservatives would say this: It doesn't make a damned bit of difference. We are who we are, and this world is of our own making.
Liberals disagree. We say that life provides some with challenges that are all but impossible to overcome without assistance. It is the responsibility and the measure of a right society to alleviate the suffering of the needy to the best of our ability, with the common resources at our disposal.
The conservative regard for the poor can only be sustained if you strip them of their basic humanity.2 They can't be poor because they were born poor. They are poor because they are lazy, because they are prone to crime and addiction, because they are incapable of making something of themselves. Conservatives say that for us it would be different. We would not be unemployed, or in jail, or leave our wives. We would not have failed to graduate high school, depend on TANF, or use food stamps. We would not have subsidized lunches.
Perhaps this sounds unfair. For our many conservative family and friends, we agree. But for the political body of conservatism, who's behavior has surpassed inimitable? When you cheer Paul Ryan's road map as a blueprint for destroying Social Security and Medicare, when you advance a budget that cuts SCHIP and nutrition assistance but protects farm subsidies and defense, then you've shouldered the burden of proof.
We used to believe this. The interminably lazy poor. The insufferably needy needy. We weren't just conservative - we were good at it. As you've no doubt noticed, no one does scorn like we do scorn.
But then there were the statistics. There is no single greater corollary for poverty than being born into poverty (that, and divorced parents. Sorry Dad). Not race, not intelligence, not background or education, not location. Be born poor, live poor, die poor. The self made man is such an outlier he borders on myth. Most who struggle against poverty lose.
More recently, we've had an increasingly difficult time justifying our treatment of the poor with our own Christianity. Disdain for poverty only works if you assume that Jesus wasn't being particularly serious whenever he discussed the subject. Redacting large portions of the New Testament struck us as heretical.
Deus Ex Machina
But ours is not a popular position. It hasn't been since the expansion of the Great Society under Johnson, or the heady days when Truman took Social Security and transformed it into something with bite, something that mattered.
Since the 80s, the field of economics has advanced as the preferred description of our society.3 Perhaps this was due in part to the long prosperity of the Great Moderation- we leave that discussion for another day. But increasingly, political action can only be undertaken if it can be seen to benefit to business interests and support the free market.
Health care reform wasn't justified because millions of Americans had no access to health care, and that some died. Instead, they said it improved the long run budget outlook. Charter schools? The free market can fix education. Social Security? Privatise it. Financial reform? Far too onerous for banks that haven't crashed the world economy in nearly three years.
It worked because, at least at the beginning, economics promised so much. A truly rigorous science to maximize production and development. But somewhere along the way, we confused the free market for morality. It used to be that the free market was good because it advanced human prosperity. Now, humanity is only good if it moves the market.
Somewhere along the line, we confused the phrase, "The free market is good when it advances human interests," with the more digestible, "The free market is good." Now that phrase elides a world full of damaging inefficiencies.
Free markets may be the best of the rest, but they are still sub-optimal. Free markets aren't perfect. Free markets produce oligarchies, monopolies, and insider trading. They reward asymmetrical information, the manipulation of stock prices, rent-seeking, and the brutal maltreatment of labor. If it's profitable, it's permissible.
Indeed, it's not even accurate to call America a free market at all. Better to describe as a regulated capitalism. Thank God for that. A cursory glance at working conditions prior to the organized labor movement should cure you of any latent nostalgia. God forbid we live in any year prior to the invention of penicillin or the founding of the SEIU.
The free market may produce moral outcomes - that does not make it moral. But somewhere along the line we abdicated our responsibility to basic human decency. We no longer ask ourselves if we've treated others well, if we've cared for the unfortunate, if we've done our part to give voice to the voiceless. Businesses are responsible to shareholders, not a community, and we're responsible only for our businesses.
Where does this lead us? We prefer the original:
"It was not a nice world this, not a nice world at all. It was an Old Testament land he found himself in, a land of barbarity and retribution."Part III - Veritas
So to the end, and back to the beginning. About a year before they deemed our beloved coworkers surplus to requirements, one of the executives of our firm sat down and my desk and asked me a question. "Why is it," he wondered, "that young men like you have so little loyalty to your employers?"
"In my day," he continued, "we were happy to get a job, work hard, and wait for our turn. People these days just don't want to wait. Why is that?
A very good question. We are infected with the mercenary spirit.
Perhaps it began when the network of subsidies for higher education were dismantled, saddling us with crippling debt for an education we could barely afford, but couldn't afford to miss.
Perhaps it was when pensions rendered American companies "economically uncompetitive" with their foreign counterparts, and they were offloaded in favour of worker-funded 401ks.
Perhaps it was when libertarians attacked the minimum wage as market distorting and unconstitutional.
Perhaps it was at the start of the right-to-work states that began the long slow degradation of the organized labor movement.
Perhaps it was when health care was deemed, not a right, but a privilege, and we watched the people we love struggle under the burden of onerous medical bills.
Perhaps it was when the Republican minority blocked the extension of unemployment benefits during the longest recession in modern history.
And perhaps it was when our employer, in an effort to increase profits and streamline costs, began the process of summarily dismissing our fellow employees, who's only crime was to show a modicum of loyalty to a company not capable of showing the same.
So what gives? Beats the hell out of us.
1For much more on this, consider Matthew Yglesias in the original.
2The poor, not the conservatives. Actually it works either way.
3It would be poor of us to suggest we thought of this. Hardly. But for the life of we cannot locate the blog that inspired us. So, for fear of being accused of plagiarism, send us your thoughts on where this comes from. Suggestions welcomed. Update: Can we get a what what? It's Barbara Kiviat. Shame on us for forgetting.
