Jobs of the Future, Not the Past

Liberal nostalgiacs don't understand jobs of the future, reads a Michael Barone headline. Liberals live in the by-gone era of the lifetime unionized assembly-line manufacturing jobs and white collar mega-corporation careers. That nostalgia shapes liberals' economic policies and thwarts opportunities for today's job-hunting, career-building young people. "The good news," writes Barone, "is that information technology provides the iPod/Facebook generation with the means to find work and create careers that build on their own personal talents and interests."

Barone draws attention to a "brilliant the-american-interest.com blog" post by Walter Russell Mead, who challenges the Left's backward-looking vision of "wealth and celebrity for a handful, hunger games for the rest."

But here, I think, is what they miss. The young people who find that the doors to secure upper middle class lives as lawyers or as members of other safe and respectable professions are closed aren’t going to sit peacefully in their parents’ garages for the next forty years. Some may — more, if marijuana is legalized and prices fall.

But there are going to be a lot of people who are well-educated, ambitious, and expect something more out of life than a beanbag chair, a sound system and a bong. The creativity and enterprise of this generation is the resource that can (and in my view, will) power America’s economic renaissance and lead us into a new kind of economy.

These kids have been raised to point toward bureaucratic, institutional success. Go to school, stand in line, keep your nose clean, get the grade, get into the next good school, and repeat until you get a job offer. At that point, get on the escalator of success — as an associate in a law firm, for example — and if you do your job well, you will have a reasonably smooth ride to the top.

Graduating into a world that looks less and less like the world they’ve been led to expect, these young adults are going to have to figure out new ways to get ahead. They are going to have to become entrepreneurs. Some will go to work as freelance college and educational consultants. There are lots of parents who don’t think their kids are getting all the help they need from their guidance counselors. Some will come up with new products or new services and take advantage of today’s open media and low costs to develop smart niche businesses that haven’t existed before.

Mead also chastises state governments that woo big corporations at the expense of new small business start-ups.

If local, state and federal governments want to prep the country for a brighter future and get us through the transition doldrums into a new era of innovation, growth and full employment as quickly as possible, they need to try to figure out what they can do to help a new and hungry generation of entrepreneurs launch businesses and careers.This is almost always going to be about dismantling barriers rather than creating new “helping bureaucracies.”...

The Mikes (and the Debbies and the Kishawns and the Chantelles and the Maliks and the Fatimas and the Juans and the Marias of this world) do need help. The career paths they’ve been trained for are narrowing and they are going to have to launch out in directions they and their teachers didn’t expect. They were bred and groomed to live as house pets; they are going to have to learn to thrive in the wild.

Yet the future is bright, Mead argues, if the politicians in charge remove the obstacles.

To give them a chance, America is going to have change directions. We have to stop issuing new and more complex regulations every year — and start to tweak, redesign, simplify and in some cases roll back what we’ve got. We have to stop focusing so much on making this country a safe and predictable environment for big business and large corporations, and look to make it a more welcoming place for start ups.

The faster we do this, the faster our future will start to look brighter. The future is filled with enterprises not yet born, jobs that don’t yet exist, wealth that hasn’t been created, wonderful products and life-altering services not yet given form.

It’s time for America to start clearing a path for this brighter future; a cornucopia is headed our way, but we need to demolish the obstacles that stand in its path.

Mead's article, Post Blue Jobs: Part Two is worth a full read.