The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era

330 Pages·2018·2.28 MB·English

by  Ellen Ruppel Shell

Copyright © 2018 by Ellen Ruppel Shell All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
currencybooks.com
CURRENCY and its colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780451497253
Ebook ISBN 9780451497260
Cover design: Evan Gaffney Cover photographs: (office) Walter Hodges/Getty Images; (woman)
4x6/E+/Getty Images, by_nicholas/E+/Getty Images v5.3.2
a
To Avery, whose work has just begun
In the highest sense, work is meant to be the servant of
man, not the master.
—EDMOND BORDEAUX SZÉKELY
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: A Measure of Our Sanity
Prologue: The Unbroken
PART I: OUR NATIONAL JOBS DISORDER
1: SUFFERING LESS
2: COMING OUT OF THE COFFIN
3: SHOULD ROBOTS PAY TAXES?
4: LET THEM EAT APPS
PART II: CHOICES
5: THE PASSION PARADOX
6: HABITS OF THE HEART
PART III: LEARNING TO LABOR
7: A CHILD’S WORK
8: MIND THE (SKILLS) GAP
9: THE THOUSAND-MILE STARE
10: WHEN THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU
PART IV: THINKING ANEW
11: THE FINNISH LINE
12: ABOLISH HUMAN RENTALS
13: PUNK MAKERS
14: HOMO FABER
Acknowledgments
Notes
Introduction
A Measure of Our Sanity
A man’s work does not satisfy his material needs alone. In a very deep sense, it gives
him a measure of his sanity.
—ELLIOTT JAQUES
Work holds dominion over us. It’s through work that we exercise our talents and
build an identity, through work that we fit into this world. And while our most
cherished memories don’t always revolve around our jobs, our hopes and dreams
for our future—and the future of our children—generally do.
Americans are raised to believe in the sanctity of work: whether in school, at
home, or from the pulpit, there is no higher praise than “a job well done.”
Political hopefuls can’t seem to say enough about work—in stump speeches the
word or its equivalent is more common than liberty and justice combined. In
most matters rhetorical, even freedom takes a backseat to work.
Little wonder, then, that Donald Trump’s campaign was built on a vow to
return “real work” to America’s shores, to wrench twenty-five million jobs back
from the grip of “not fair” trade treaties and “bad deal” immigration policies and
lay them at our feet like the spoils of war. “I will be the greatest job producer
that God ever created,” our future president bellowed. “It will be amazing to
watch. You watch, it’ll happen.”
And watch we did…how could we not? Jobs mean so very much to us, and on
so many levels. Americans spend more time on the job than in any other waking
activity: roughly six times the amount we spend with our families. Jobs are not
only our lifeline but our lifeblood, as individuals and as a society. The ebb and
flow of job numbers shape our national mood: they steer financial markets, sway
voters, and decide elections. They bring dread and hope. Yet while numbers can
tell us a good deal about many things, they can’t explain the way so many of us
feel today—namely, that work is just not working for us.
What we’re feeling is real. America was built on the “grand career narrative,”
by which almost anyone could, through hard and concerted effort, scale the
occupational ladder to a middle-class life and beyond. Not everyone followed
that trajectory, but enough did to make it seem like a reasonable expectation.
Thanks to this steady progress, the prospects of children were expected to
exceed those of their parents. And throughout most of the last century, those
expectations were largely met.
But that was then. In the twenty-first century, job growth has not led to a
significant decline in poverty or to a rise in the middle class. Instead, the
postindustrial “digital” economy has brought a trickle of fancy, high-paying jobs
and a torrent of not-so-fancy low-wage jobs, and with them a soaring inequality
that threatens the very premise of our free-market democracy: the promise that
hard work will take almost any one of us where we need—and want—to go.
Today’s glaring uncertainties make navigating a career seem less like scaling
a firmly braced ladder than like clawing up a rock face slick with ice, where any
misstep can lead to disaster. Even kindergarteners are hip to the drill. Chris
Brown, an educational researcher at the University of Texas, told me that five-
year-olds quickly “get the message that they’re supposed to worry not about now
but about what comes next—first grade, middle school, high school, college, all
pointed toward what they’ll do in the future. And by that I mean the job.”
Of course, it’s not unhealthy for youngsters to gravitate toward an occupation;
many of us as children dreamed of becoming firefighters or teachers or
ballerinas or—speaking for myself—a deep-sea diver. But how many of us recall
our five-year-old selves being worried about getting a good job? A middle-class
kid with dreams of becoming a deep-sea diver is one thing; a middle-class kid
growing up fearful of her future is quite another.
This was not supposed to happen. On the contrary, the digital age promised
abundance via unfettered access to information, networks, and markets by which
each of us would captain our own destiny. Certainly, that promise was fulfilled
for some. But technology did not—as predicted—level the playing field. On the
contrary, it rutted that field with steeper peaks and deeper pits. We’ve been
taught to believe that the best way to prepare for a life of good work is to hone
our skill set through formal education or training or a combination of both. But
as we’ll see, this advice is incomplete, as it fails to fully acknowledge that
progress has its price.
One of the central lessons of artificial intelligence is that a variety of tasks that
are easy for humans are difficult for machines, while a variety of tasks that are
difficult for humans are easy for machines. For example, the tasks of giving
manicures and pedicures or placing water glasses just so on a restaurant table,
while rather easy for many humans, can be extremely difficult for a machine,
while tasks that involve high-level reasoning—bookkeeping, accounting, many
banking functions, and the analysis of legal documents and medical scans—are
relatively easy for machines. For this and other reasons, skilled, middle-wage
jobs are often more at risk of being reduced or eliminated by technology than are
many low-paying jobs. The “middle” is under seige, and this does not bode well
for our sweet American dreams.
A twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur I spoke with in Detroit put it this way:
The Internet hollows out the middle and elevates extremes. What’s
in trouble is the in-between. To understand how this plays out on a
corporate level, think about how we buy books. Customers can go
online to track down rare volumes at a tiny bookstore run by some
grumpy old guy, so there is still that niche market. And then there’s
the mass market, which is Amazon. But the people who worked at
Borders Books and companies like it, well…let’s face it, those jobs
are gone. And what’s true for books is true for so many other
industries…most industries, actually.
The mantra of our time, “Average is over,” comes laced with an implicit
threat that the middle no longer exists—that if you’re not at the top, you’re at or
falling toward the bottom. But by definition, not all of us can be better than the
rest. Rather, in most things humans tend to fall along a normal curve, a sort of
inverted letter U with small numbers of us at each end and the vast bulk of us
crowded into the middle. So clearly, if average is over, so are most of us, at least
when it comes to a job suited to our needs, capabilities, and dispositions. At
least, that’s what many pundits argue and many of us have come to believe.
The mounting pressure to excel or to step aside for those who do pits us
against one another, and not in a good way. In matters of income, most of us
rank so far below the top that the “winners” might as well inhabit another planet:
a mere 1,600 Americans possess as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent
combined. Such dramatic disparities have ramped up public expectations of what
a job should—and can—do to elevate us above the norm. And it has inclined us