This Swan is White

When I floated the not-very-new idea that things had gotten to the point where the world of business might have a vested interest in helping to improve the education system, commenter “r” noted:

Your reduction: Colleges and universities will/can only be saved by businessmen. Small businessmen to be sure, but small businessmen nonetheless. Small sometimes is better. I never noticed that small businessmen are any different than large businessmen; all capitalists to be sure; somewhere on the scale between ruthlessly and modestly selfish; and typically uneducated, entitled, and given to amazing feats of consumption compared to the neighbors in their communities. Car dealers come to mind in most towns. So by my analysis, car dealers will save our colleges and universities.

Well there's nothing quite like a stab at a little, left-handed reductio ad absurdum with a passive aggressive cherry on top to juice me up, so...

to that analysis/spectacular-Evel-Knievel-Snake-River-leap-of-premise that “All business people are car dealers” let us also add that:

“All liberals are smelly hippies.”

“All Democrats hate America.”

“All Mexicans are lazy.”

“All Irish are Drunks.”

“All women say ‘No’ but really mean ‘Yes’.”

Also All Swans are White.

This is quite separate and apart from commenter tech98’s very reasonable observation in the same thread that:

“Or corporations will just outsource the brainwork to India and China, using "the sorry state of our universities" as an excuse, when the real problem is not the quality of minds but cheaper labor.

”I've worked in IT organizations that are indifferent to the deteriorating quality of work as they drive out their smart employees with heavy-handed micromanagement, but very attuned to cost cutting.”

I agree that tech98 that some (maybe lots of) “brainwork” will continue to be shipped across the Pacific. Also most anything that can be digitized and done anywhere, or any arena in which you compete on the basis of labor cost alone...Gone and Gone. But anything that requires the local, personal touch, anything that requires thinking-on-your-feet innovation, anything that needs or can benefit from the “hand stitching” that only a competent craftsman/artisan/knowledge-worker can do…those jobs stay and their value grows.

Is this inevitable? No, but all I argue is that there is cause for something other that dirges of pervasive and unremitting doom, and that the situation is salvagable if we have the will to save it.

But back to “r”s broad-brush business hatin’…

Look, I know there are some tiny colonies of unreconstructed Marxists who live on in the Land That Epistemology Forgot and I’m glad they are there. With luck they will be one day joined by Lazier-faire Capitalists, Fascism, Skinnerians and Conservative Fundamentalists in a kind of “Colonial Bad Ideasburg”: a living history museum of all the destructively idiotic notions of the 20th Century.

Like Greens or Randites, they make for lively “idea factories” that from time to time churn to the surface interesting and revolutionary concepts, but they are not designs for living. I have no use for any program that prescribes stomping a razor-edged, stainless-steel abstraction down over basic human nature and shrugs off as a necessary sacrifice to The Cause the lopping off all the human pieces that don’t fit.

Which usually comes down to millions and millions of people.

More to the point, I have not noticed any evil car dealers with problems hiring people to push their tin.

What I have noticed, however, are several of those dealers are now much more customer-focused and much less high-pressure-sales oriented. Do they behave less insultingly and more transparently because they luuurve me? Good God no. They do it because they want my dinero and I have choices. Which is what markets do when they operate well and fairly: drive the low-value/high-slime-factor shit-shovelers to the periphery.

And even more to the point, while I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of the hiring needs of car dealers, I cannot help but notice by picking up virtually any article on the subject published in the last 10 years that there are any number of important parts of the national economy that are so severely understaffed and undertrained that in banding together to save their mutual bacon, business and labor have been able to find common interest. Areas like nursing and technology. Transportation. Lots of different kinds of manufacturing. Logistics. Biotech.

Without trained workers, these businesses are out of business.

I also couldn’t help but notice that a lot of owners are getting kinda long in the tooth themselves, and having succeeded in sending their kids to the better diploma factories, have no kin who want to come back and run the business, whether it’s profitable or not.

Which certainly sounds to me like a golden opportunity for partnerships between local banks, the communities where the businesses and jobs are, and women and minority entrepreneurs.

I would never look to the business world for social justice heroics, but I do look to them to act in their own rational self-interest. I also note that we, as a species, make things. We add our sweat and expertise and joy to matter or processes and we make them more useful for our fellow human beings. We shelter and nourish our fellow men in this way and I find nothing obscene or corrupt or awful with the idea of a fair profit for a job well-done.

Nor do I think it is in any way perverse to suggest that if you are better than me at dressing granite, you should be paid more than me for dressing granite. However what I do demand is that we as a culture insist that those of us who do well in this big, complicated and interdependent world kick into a common fund for the common good.

That’s the principle: who, how much, and what the “common good” can be fairly defined to mean are details which we negotiate and renegotiate, generation after generation, through a process called “politics”.

Which is why “Politics” is not a God Damned dirty word.

Anyway, as an English statesman -- Lord Palmerston -- once famously said,“Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” Movements can certainly say the same, and it certainly appears obvious to me that we now have the right combination of economic, demographic and political factors that would allow for a social justice, employment and education agenda to pull in harness with a specific kind of pro-business agenda.

Or as Patton said, “Now I have precisely the right instrument, at precisely the right moment of history, and exactly the right place.”

It would make a formidable coalition, and to make headway towards a better world I will take my allies where and how I find them.

But hey, what do I know?

I am, after all, just a smelly liberal hippy Irish drunk.