On Capitalism
I am once again finding myself at Capitalism’s front doorstep as it seems to be assaulting my senses as I prepare the next term’s syllabus for my business ethics course. Technically the course is titled Law, Policy and Ethics and I am being sure to add more connective tissue between the three subjects rather than have this be a philosophy course on the etymology of ethics in business. When I launch my thinking into an arena like this that seems to permeate everything I am about, and since I have now published 1,382 stories on this blog over three years, I find it helpful to do a word search through my story files for a word like Capitalism. There are several posts about Capitalism but only one with the word in the title, implying that it is the central theme. That was a story I called Capitalism on the Run and it was about the ongoing attempt by the right to label anything and everything it doesn’t like as Socialism. That is the new evil that sounds anti-American since Communism harkens back to McCarthyism and the Cold War in ways that belie its defeat at the hands of the great and powerful Ronald Reagan. If the right dislikes you they call you a libtard, if they hate you, they call you a Socialist.
The other day I watched Michael Moore’s 2009 movie Capitalism: A Love Story, which somehow got lost in the Great Recession era in ways that his other movies like Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine and Sicko did not. I almost think that the housing collapse and the follow-on Great Recession were too severe to make light of at the time and the dust needed to settle before we could find humor in it all. In many ways, Adam McKay did it the best with The Big Short, giving the common man a sense of the train that just hit him. But Moore’s movie on Capitalism got me thinking in ways that a focus on the 2008 debacle couldn’t. It threw into a cocked hat the economic system that we all swear by and that everyone defaults to saying seems to be the best economic model the world has ever had despite its flaws. The problem, however, is that it has been working so well for so long now that the flaws have grown outsized and are starting to dominate the picture rather than the benefits of Capitalism.
Then this morning I picked up on a New York Times Opinion piece titled It’s TIme to Stop Living the American Scam by Tim Kreider. This was a follow-up to a piece that Kreider had written a decade ago called The Busy Trap about how people were always so preoccupied with work that they were in a constant state of busyness (I just noticed that happy turns to happiness, but busy can’t really do the same into business). Kreider’ s reassessment of the American psyche in this era is completely different than it was a decade ago when being busy was a virtue. He made a statement that particularly caught my eye when he said “A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system.” It was less about his observation about the awareness of the youngest generation of Americans than it was about the casualness of his comment that capitalism is non-functional. It took me a minute to absorb that and decide if I agreed with it, but in the end, I found myself feeling that he said it completely right. I would use my two sons as examples. One was born in 1982 and the other in 1995. Technically, according to Pew Research’s definitions, they are both in the Millennial Generation (born 1981 – 1996), but they are more like their flanking generational cohorts of Generation X and Generation Z accordingly. Roger, the older brother, is much much more rooted in the hard work ethic that prizes busyness, where Thomas is prone to valuing how he spends his time and the more creative and esoteric sides of life. I think it is unfair to call one ambitious and the other unmotivated. They are simply motivated quite differently, and Tim Kreider’s article has helped me to explain it.
The culprit may not lie in the generational differences but rather in the experiences the two generations (as well as the Millennials in between) have lived through and are currently experiencing with regard to our economic system. Strangely enough, neither of the two have ever wanted to work in a big corporation though both have for relatively short periods of time. Roger dropped out of college because he had things to do and places to go and felt he could do them better and get there faster without the trappings of a formal education. Thomas stayed with it and graduated though he wandered rather aimlessly around the areas for his focus and ended up with the rather juxtaposed majors of performing arts and business, neither of which he fully embraces though he dabbles in each. Roger has positioned himself solidly with a project/business with which he has an incentive compensation arrangement that benefits him if he benefits it. Thomas is now freelance and takes jobs that suit his interests and works when and where he chooses. Roger spends 90 hours a week onsite. Thomas works mostly remotely. One is process-oriented while the other creatively flits. While I had recognized these tendencies in them both, before reading the Kreider piece, I had not linked their experience to the evolution of Capitalism. Horatio Alger is dead according to Kreider and American youth can now see that this system the world seems to have agreed is the only viable economic model, is simply not working for them. Student debt, unavailable benefits and healthcare that leads to the black hole of unfunded pension liabilities are the long term picture that they see before them and forces them to look away in fear. In the here and now they see a life of meager PTO (Paid Time Off, a term of art my generation never used) versus their peers in Europe getting month-long vacations. That just doesn’t work for them and Carpe Diem is now no longer a theoretical place like Valhalla, it is the only way they know how to make sense of their lives.
Thomas recently quit his job at an ad agency, a job that paid him 50% more than his prior corporate job. He quit because he was doing too little of what he wanted to do and too much of what he was required to do. While my generation used to call that “work”, his generation calls that stupid. So, he quit and went freelance, but not before taking an extended European vacation with his fiancé, followed by a weekend destination wedding of a friend (for whom he was Best Man). The hustle part of the freelancer equation got off to a slow start, but he just showed me that his first full month income was 50% better than his agency job paid, so maybe this will work out for him in dollars and cents. He didn’t do it for that reason, but perhaps if you do what makes you happy you make more all the while as well.
Kreider tells us that Capitalism is one big scam the way we in America have been playing it lately. As I watch the Republicans trying to dismantle the Roosevelt era Welfare State that served us so well for 80+ years, I have to admit that there is far too much scam in the pan and far too few benefits on the table. The common way has been brushed aside for individual freedom and fulfillment. Capitalism seems to be turning into a self-fulfilling and self-destructive system that is seeking an anarchic end-game. DirectTV, an already anachronistic satellite entertainment service that has been throughly replaced by streaming ran an ad with a Russian Oligarch kissing his pet miniature giraffe. It was the quintessential statement about where Capitalism goes to finally die. It says that the beast will die of its own excesses, perhaps sooner rather than later.