Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.

| Nye Bevan

…

The news of student-led protests around the world — some are calling this global protest The Great Fuckoffening — shows that in places as diverse as the Philippines, Albania, France, and Serbia, people are coming together to call for a response to the polycrisis. A long list of issues generally treated as distinct and separate are reactions to widespread neoliberal policies designed to benefit the monied, not the many.

Paolo Gerbardo argued (in The Great Recoil) that there is a central theme behind people’s response to authoritarianism, the environmental death-spiral, bad educational institutions, inadequate healthcare, economic inequality, and more: in a word, insecurity.

The Left needs to develop a politics of protection that addresses the real reasons behind the popular feeling of insecurity.

[…]

Coextensive with the idea of a socialism that protects is the idea of a society of care. This political platform is fundamental in alleviating people’s fear of exposure and fragility, as is the struggle to establish and reinforce various “minimums” (minimum wage, minimum income, minimum working conditions, and environmental standards) to reverse globalization’s race to the bottom.

People are demanding a commitment to, at least, the minimums. Otherwise, fuck off.

And in a time where millions — 160 million — of Americans have their healthcare covered (in part) by employers, the first place to start should be minimum healthcare for all. After that, all the other minimums.

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Shifting Healthcare Costs Onto Workers

Reed Abelson breaks down the numbers to get at the trend in American business to make workers pay for more of their healthcare expenses. A few factoids [emphasis mine]:

• ‘Roughly six in 10 adults reported they were very or somewhat worried about affording care.’

• ‘The majority of Americans — about 157 million — get insurance through their employer. But as costs for coverage have spiked, with increases in the high single digits, businesses have been shifting much more of the additional expenses onto their workforces.’ This should not be the model for healthcare coverage in 2026.

• ‘Many people are also paying thousands of dollars in medical expenses when they get sick, because companies have increased the plans’ deductibles to offset increases in premiums.’

• ‘The yearly price, on average, for employees to cover their family is now $7,471 a year, up 9 percent from 2025. The total cost for a family plan, including the amount the employer contributes to the annual premiums, has reached $28,303.’

• ‘Overall, the average deductible for U.S. workers is approaching $2,000 before insurance kicks in.’

• ‘“People tell us in polls that their health care costs are their top cost-of-living concern, tied with gas prices. The fact that workers’ share of premiums went up almost three times faster than inflation in 2026 helps explain why,” said Drew Altman, the president and chief executive of KFF, in an email.’

• ‘Harder hit are employees of small companies, defined as those with fewer than 200 workers, whose paychecks have been shrinking as premiums increase, according to the KFF survey. On average, they are paying $9,687 a year for coverage.’

• ‘More than a third of people working at a small employer have annual deductibles of $3,000 or more.’

Josh Allan Dykstra shares the bizarro-world reason for us relying on employers for healthcare [emphasis mine]:

During World War II, the government froze wages. Companies couldn’t compete for workers with bigger paychecks, so they started offering health insurance instead. The government said thumbs up and even added tax benefits for both employers and employees. Then the war ended, the wage freeze lifted, but the tax break stayed. So companies kept doing it. Not because it was the right system, but because it was cheaper than paying equivalent wages, incentives. And let’s be honest, if your healthcare is attached to your job, you’re a lot less likely to quit. Congratulations, here’s your leash, sir. And the kicker is, nobody really designed this at all. A wartime accounting rule became a tax loophole, which became corporate retention, which became the foundation of the American social contract.

For the last 80 years, the U.S. has built its entire social safety net on this rickety foundation. Not as a public system like the rest of the developed world, but as a private system delivered through your employer. You want healthcare here? Get a job. You want retirement security? Get a job. You want to be able to afford your bills when you have a baby? Get a job... maybe. Better hope it’s a good job with a company that likes babies and make sure you don’t tell them YOU like babies before they hire you... it’s a whole thing.

[…]

Now to make our social contract worse, let’s bring in neoliberalism. […] Starting in the late 1970s and accelerating through the 80s and 90s, the dominant economic logic became: markets are efficient, government is not. So we privatize everything, deregulate everything, and just trust that the “invisible hand” will sort it out. […]

One of the quieter effects of this era has been the systematic weakening of the institutions that could have provided some alternatives to this employer-based social contract. Unions, for example, might have helped, but they were being actively undermined by Reagan and others. Private pensions could have helped, but they were quietly replaced with 401ks. Public housing was deliberately stigmatized and then pretty much demolished everywhere, leaving the market to “solve shelter” for working people. And a LOT of propaganda — including the creative use of some powerful bogeyman “-isms” like “socialism” — helped ensure universal healthcare has never gotten traction in the U.S. (You might notice some of this is still happening right now, today.)

The logic was, and in many ways still is, “The market will handle it.” “Your employer will handle it.” “You’ll be fine.” But my friends, we are clearly NOT fine. Look around... I don’t think I know anyone that feels like things are “fine.” To me, it seems clear... the invisible hand is giving us the invisible middle finger.

FDR’s New Deal did not include nationalized healthcare, despite including it in his 1944 Economic Bill of Rights state of the union address, and Harry S Truman failed in his attempt to enact it in 1945:

Truman’s plan was that all Americans would pay a certain amount in fees and taxes each month to cover the new healthcare program’s costs. With a Democratic controlled House, Truman’s proposal turned into a bill that would end up as part of the Social Security expansion, but it was quickly shot down as people began to fear an increase in taxes. Some people even feared the program would be a “Communist” act, giving too much control to the federal government. This fear was spread specifically by the American Medical Association (AMA). The bill was also halted by Republican Senator Robert Taft’s Taft-Smith-Ball Bill, which would allow states to make healthcare private. As Republicans regained control of the House in 1946, Truman’s healthcare bill died. Truman considered this a failure of his presidency.

So, we are living in a crappy system, where democrats have tried and tried to make piecemeal changes, with a few small victories like LBJ getting Medicare passed in 1965 for people 65 and over, and Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010.

Conservatives and the entrenched medical and insurance lobbies have been crying ‘communism’ every time the idea returns, and so the fundamental lack of a nationalized healthcare system has continued, 81 years later.

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Short Takes

• We Spend Billions Designing Workplaces. Two Thirds of Workers Still Need to Fix Them1 | Libby Sander

  • ‘A recent survey of 16,400 employees across 16 countries found that two thirds of workers make adjustments to their workspace to overcome shortcomings in its design. That hardly seems like a design success. If so many employees are having to compensate for their workspace, we need to ask whether we are designing workplaces around the work people actually need to do.’

  • ‘In one study in our lab, my colleagues and I found a causal link between open plan office noise and a 34% increase in objectively measured physiological stress, and a 25% increase in negative mood. A causal relationship shows that A is causing B, controlling for any other factors.’

She cites a Gensler survey that found

65% of workers use meeting rooms for individual focus work because quiet space isn’t available elsewhere.

64% take calls in hallways due to a lack of appropriate spaces.

43% have cancelled meetings outright because rooms weren’t available.

Workplaces just don’t work, it seems.

…

• Do You Have ‘Purpose Anxiety’? | Christina Caron

  • ‘The phrase “purpose anxiety” isn’t commonly used in psychology, but it is a familiar concept to both researchers and clinicians. The phrase appears to have been coined in 2014 by a psychology graduate student who studied the topic, concluding that most people crave a sense of purpose in life, but “nearly always encounter purpose anxiety during their search process, no matter the searcher’s age.”’

  • ‘Finding purpose can be difficult. A survey of more than 2,400 Gen Zers published in June found that about 45 percent of respondents reported lacking meaning or purpose in their lives.’

I recommend this post of mine on Ikigai, to help think about purpose and meaning in life and work.

Meaning is a muscle, not a mood. Meaning emerges from the myriad activities associated with the circles and loops of purpose. It’s not a medal or a parchment with a seal of wax, but something that animates the space between us and others the way that a carpenter’s workroom smells of wood shavings, and how a crowded city square hums with ten thousand sounds of people walking, talking, and maneuvering their passage past each other and through, all happening at once, at once independent and dependent on each other.

There is no summation of meaning, it must be considered as both tiny and enormous at the same time.

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Which economic system serves the most people?

On one side of the economic debate are those who believe in largely unfettered markets, in which companies are allowed to agglomerate market power or pollute or exploit. They believe firms should maximize shareholder value, doing whatever they can get away with, because bigger profits serve the common good.

[…]

Neoliberalism expanded the freedom of corporations and billionaires to do as they will and amass huge fortunes, but it also exacted a steep price: the well-being and freedom of the rest of society.

| Joseph Stiglitz, Time Is Up For Neoliberals1

A few paragraphs later, he wrote:

The road to authoritarianism is not paved by government doing too much but too little.

Stiglitz is a Nobel Laureate in Economics, so take notes.

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Of Course They Will

Jesse Drucker reports2 on one of the many ways large companies are cutting their taxes through tax dodges:

The New York Times reported in August that big companies are setting up subsidiaries in Malta, often in empty offices, to shield their profits from taxes around the world. Companies including Crocs, Victoria’s Secret, Abbott Laboratories and Thermo Fisher have used the tiny archipelago to exploit its near-zero effective corporate tax rate, shifting taxable profits away from countries where they have actual employees and customers.

The Big Four accounting firms — KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PwC — have advised companies on the arrangements, engineering schemes to cut their clients’ tax bills by navigating the differences in tax laws of various countries.

KPMG declined to comment. Deloitte, EY and PwC did not respond to requests for comment.

What a bunch of assholes: the companies and their advisors. Just remember, the companies’ boards had to approve this, including their CEOs.

Put this on the 2027 congressional agenda: close the loopholes. Oh, and raise corporate tax rates and taxes on the 10% by undoing the Trump One Big Beautiful Bill.

From Wikipedia [emphasis mine]:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the law will increase the budget deficit by $2.8 trillion by 2034 and cause 10.9 million Americans to lose health insurance coverage. Further CBO analysis estimated the highest 10% of earners would see incomes rise by 2.7% by 2034 mainly due to tax cuts, while the lowest 10% would see incomes fall by 3.1% mainly due to cuts to programs such as Medicaid and food aid. Several think tanks, experts, and opponents criticized the bill over its regressive tax structure, described many of its policies as gimmicks, and argued the bill would create the largest upward transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history, exacerbating inequality among the American population. It has also drawn controversy for rolling back clean energy incentives and increasing funding for immigration enforcement and deportations. According to multiple polls, a majority of Americans oppose the law.

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Work Stress Is Not Always About Workload

According to recent research3 by Gargi Sawhney and Mallory McCord, stress at work is growing:

In Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report, 40% of employees worldwide said they had experienced “a lot of stress” the previous day, and 56% said they were struggling.

The knee-jerk response? It must be workload. But [emphasis mine]:

Work overload is only one stressor—and not necessarily the most damaging one. The research identifies three distinct culprits, each with different consequences: role ambiguity (unclear expectations) most erodes job satisfaction and performance; role conflict (incompatible demands) drives burnout and turnover; and role overload (overwork) produces emotional and physical symptoms.

Role ambiguity might be the worst.

Among all the factors we studied, role ambiguity emerged as the most detrimental stressor across many organizationally relevant outcomes, such as lower job satisfaction, work engagement, organizational commitment, perceptions of fairness, task performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors, such as sharing information, showing courtesy, or helping colleagues complete a task.

One reason ambiguity may be especially harmful is that it undermines employees’ basic sense of direction at work.

It may be difficult, but clarifying people’s roles — for example, at the start of a new project or initiative, but also through regular one-on-one check-ins — is essential.

Role conflict comes from competing demands.

Remember in the movie Office Space, when Peter Gibbons tells some organizational consultants he has eight bosses? Each of which might steer him to do different things? That’s a problem of management, not Gibbons. And like Gibbons, even though workers may be able to stay on task despite role conflict, it can lead to burnout and a desire to leave.

The researchers boil this down:

The goal is to keep unresolved leadership disagreements from landing on employees.

Sometimes, though, people just have too much to do.

Overwork seems like a time management problem, but it is more comples than that. One problem arises from not managing how new work enters the system, and little may be done to reassess what work should be stopped or not taken on in the first place.

An additional problem is the paradox of overwork and engagement:

Additionally, our study found that overwork was positively associated with employee engagement, perhaps because employees view heavy workloads as a challenge that rewards sustained effort or because heavy workloads demand high engagement just so workers can keep their heads above water. This engagement may mask the substantial emotional and physical strain that overwork produces over time.

It’s all bad management, at core.

The researchers soft-pedal it, but these are three flavors of bad management:

Workplace stress is not one problem. Rather, it often reflects three distinct challenges: unclear expectations, incompatible demands, and excessive workload. Each has different consequences. Each requires a different leadership response.

For senior leaders, the implication is clear: Well-being cannot be delegated entirely to wellness programs, HR initiatives, or individual resilience. It must be built into how work is designed and managed. Organizations that make progress will be those that treat clear expectations, competing demands, and workload as central leadership responsibilities.

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The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

| Vladimir Lenin

…

Lenin’s words ring true in our current economic straits. Trump’s tariffs are a tax on everyone in the US, and inflation continues to rise as his wars grind on. But it isn’t the communists that are doing it to us. Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo, wrote:

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

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Capitalism.edu

Chris Marquis has written1 a full-throated (and overly long) takedown of the modern business school. Marquis has a long history as a business school professor with over 20 years at Harvard, Cornell, and Cambridge.

I’ve come to realize that business schools don’t just reflect our economic system — they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structures driving our overlapping global crises. Tinkering at the margins with a class on corporate responsibility or ethics is not going to help. We don’t need to “fix” business schools. We need to abolish them.

Marquis lays out a fatal error of business schools: they are founded on anecdotal knowledge. Unlike hard science — like medicine, engineering, mathematics, or physics — business schools sidestep the scientific method of testing hypotheses and verifying theories through experimentation and logic. They also differ from law, which relies largely on deeply argued case law and the precedents set by jurisprudence.

As he frames it [emphasis mine]:

Business schools have always struggled to justify their place in the university. A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school’s is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen identified this tension a century ago, criticizing university schools focused on commerce because they “need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good.”

I have summed up this system as ‘Capitalism.edu’.

Those who founded business schools adopted the case study model from medicine and law departments, but it has been skewed into propaganda, since the companies featured in the case studies have massive influence on their preparation and presentation. These case studies also focus on companies deemed winners, not losers.

Before Enron’s fraud was exposed, its business model was presented in admiring terms by at least five H.B.S. case studies. More damning still, the strategies that later led to its collapse — its asset-light model, its trading platform — were portrayed as innovations. Questions about deregulated energy markets, revolving-door oversight and opaque accounting went unasked.

[…]

Real organizations don’t move in clearly delineated phases toward a decision point, but business school teaching materials often do — compressing timelines, dropping messy subplots and smoothing over contradictions to produce clean narrative arcs and satisfying problems to debate.

[…]

The result is a curriculum built around false narratives. Some of the most celebrated ideas in management have not been the ones that survived peer review or replication, but the ones that could be turned into TED Talks, consulting frameworks or airport best sellers. Faculty members are rewarded not for knowledge but for performance — selling a big idea with a memorable label that promises “success” or “disruption.”

I recommend Jill Lepore ferocious disemboweling of Clay Christensen in The Disruption Machine2, the father of the ‘disruption’ meme. He is a perfect example of the prominent business guru — in the mold of Michael Porter — whose models don’t hold up to real scrutiny. She wrote:

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved.

But Marquis is not just arguing that business schools offer bogus theories of winning at business, or how best to climb the greasy pole into the professional-managerial class. It’s not just that they advance the incantations of charlatans. They are grounded in the pathology of ‘stakeholder capitalism’, which makes their work schizophrenic:

Business schools have a divided mission: They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain while also developing guardrails to tame it. They found a remarkable way to manage this tension: the “win-win” story in which the conflict between private gain and public good simply evaporates.

[…]

These aspirations are built on the delusional but widely accepted idea of “stakeholder capitalism”: that companies can produce climate stability, fair wages, healthy communities and functioning democracies while also delivering profits. Executives promise that technology will solve our environmental problems; voluntary measurement systems are offered as appropriate alternatives to public accountability; ethics is rebranded as competitive advantage rather than moral obligation.

In the midst of the AI explosion, we see the same panacea of self-regulation being advanced by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., and the federal government, while we slide down the slippery slope into yet another crisis.

At the outset, Marquis stated that business schools can’t be fixed: they need to be torn down. But, unsurprisingly, he does envision an alternative near the end of his essay. He clarifies his thesis first:

Business schools are not malfunctioning institutions; they are highly efficient machines doing exactly what they were designed to do.

He then highlights the efforts of Stuart Hart at the University of Vermont who started a program centered on sustainable business:

In this program, sustainability is not a lone elective but runs through the whole curriculum, and students spend the summer embedded in a mission-driven company.

Which seems like only a mild tweaking of business schools, after his impassioned buildup.

And then a hand wave for another lightly sketched idea:

What would that clean-sheet logic mean across an entire university? One starting point is the organization theorist Martin Parker’s call to create “schools for organizing” rather than schools for business, centered on how humans coordinate for shared ends.

Sounds like Elinor Ostrom’s economics work on what I have come to call commonsism: how people can come together to protect and sustain shared resources, and often as a counter to market-based (capitalist) approaches.

Marquis closes with an appeal to not forget the students:

Many of my students arrive on campus wanting to work on the crises that our economic system has created. What they lack is an institution that is worthy of their better impulses.

Dethroning the MBA might be the way to avoid losing those who aspire to higher goals, instead of being swept up in the paper chase of aspiring capitalists.

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Relationslipping

Gretchen Gavett introduces3 us to a new term: relationslipping:

When people begin turning to AI more often than their coworkers for help, their trust in each other and ability to coordinate diminishes.

[…]

In worst case scenarios, they argue, “a worker would rather receive a worse answer from AI than a better one from a teammate.”

This term is an outgrowth of research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford University, who offer ways to counter this slippage:

Some steps leaders can take to “continue on [the] path of technological exploration, while maintaining the strong connective tissue required for teamwork”:

• Increase asynchronous communication.

• Build psychological safety.

• Rethink teamwork with new team norms and aligned incentives.

• Use AI to prepare for conversations instead of replacing them.

Or, of course, to simply say no to AI.

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Ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?

| Wendell Berry

…

Berry was writing about political decisions and how we — as citizens and politicians — should judge proposed changes in society. And since we honor democracy so highly, we should approach business decisions in a more democratic way, instead of the one-sided, autocratic approach that plagues business culture. Business leaders should be compelled to answer such questions before irrevocable decisions are made.

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What Happened To Hybrid?

Two years ago Lauren Hirsch spoke1 with various knowledgeable observers of the hybrid work wave. Her bottom-line question?

So why do so many employers that say they’re data-driven seem to move counter to science?

Because they weren’t thinking scientifically, but emotionally, and in a dark way.

Almost five years since the start of the pandemic, many C.E.O.s are ready to move on from an experiment they never wanted to start. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” [Andy] Jassy wrote in a memo about ending remote work at Amazon.

[Adam] Grant says C.E.O.s may not always methodically control for whether an effect was caused by remote work, the pandemic or something else, as an academic researcher would.

They also may not want to find out that hybrid work is better.

“Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” [Laszlo] Bock [a former senior vice president for people operations at Google] said.

There’s the darkness: they are justifying their desire for personal fun with a nebulous productivity issue, or claiming their business is unique, when the data show small, measurable productivity increases from hybrid work, and the same pros and cons across all businesses grappling with hybrid work. They just don’t want to.

“There’s a premium on decisiveness in the business world,” [Adam Grant] said. But “if you’re making a highly consequential, irreversible decision, you are supposed to slow down as much as possible.”

Yes, remember Daniel Kahneman‘s recommendation to defer important decisions for as long as possible. See With Decision-Making, You Have to Go Slow to Go Fast, where I quoted him:

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.

But they jumped to conclusions.

The economy and corporate policies play against individuals who might want to work remotely, and business leaders hold all the cards

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A Tribute To Claudia Goldin

Three years ago, economist Paul Krugman wrote An Economics Nobel for Showing How Much Women Matter2, following Claudia Goldin’s receiving the Nobel for Economics. He summarized her work on the Pill and its impact on women’s employment, and ultimately, how women came to view work as central to their identity by the ‘70s, and — to some extent — everyone else did too. Krugman notes that the Nobel committee overlooked her work on the decline in inequality and the rise of the middle class starting in the postwar 1940s.

His highest praise?

Claudia Goldin’s pathbreaking research, deeply grounded in history yet hugely relevant to the present, is a model of what social science should be. This is truly a Nobel to celebrate.

Hear, hear.

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The Tragedy of No Commons

In 2023, Douglas Rushkoff wrote a scathing response3 to a David Leonhardt essay. Leonhardt seemed to accept the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ theory from ecologist Garrett Hardin, in a companion piece to an otherwise rigorous report on the state of groundwater in the US.

Rushkoff wrote:

In the piece, [Leonhardt] correctly explains how if every person and every business use all the water they want, there won’t be enough. But he goes on to call this phenomenon “The Tragedy of the Commons,” crediting ecologist Garrett Hardin — a nativist, anti-immigration eugenicist.

[…]

As for the commons, well, [Hardin] was not writing about the commons at all. He was writing about chaos and over-extraction. His concern was overpopulation, particularly by non-Europeans who would use up all of white people’s resources. So he argued that we should seal up borders, stop giving any aid to poor nations, and purge cultural diversity from the US. Otherwise we risked “passive genocide” of whites by people of color who used up all the stuff. (No, this is not the environmentalist you’re looking for.)

What [Hardin] realized, in a sort of Malthusian, Club-of-Rome-meets-Steve-Bannon way, is that if everyone takes whatever they want, there won’t be anything left. And he called this “The Tragedy of the Commons.” But this situation does not describe a commons at all. A commons is when a group of people make rules about a shared resource, and then enforce those rules together. It’s how grazing land was managed in late medieval Europe, so that farmers wouldn’t overgraze. It worked so equitably and profitably for the lower classes that aristocrats decided to “enclose” the commons for the exclusive use of private owners — meaning, themselves.4 A commons is the most appropriate and efficient way to share a common resource so that it is not extracted and depleted for the sake of the market.

Having cleaned up the errors Leonhardt made, Rushkoff widens his scorn to ‘free-market advocates’ — which is to say capitalists:

Free market advocates love the phrase Tragedy of the Commons, because the only alternative to a commons is a market! Put prices on things, so that the market can negotiate its scarcity. But there’s a difference between a commons and an unregulated free-for-all. A commons doesn’t mean everyone takes whatever they want until there’s nothing left. It’s precisely the opposite.

[…]

The commons is not the tragedy at all, but the solution to over-extraction of resources by those looking to grow markets. Calling the commons a tragedy is like calling cooperation a form of failure — not to mention sharing, mutual aid, or social contracts. Whenever you see the disinformational phrase “tragedy of the commons,” remember who came up with it, and what it was intended to do.

And who it serves, when accepted as true.

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Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

| Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism (1946)

…

Welcome to my home. Thanks to everyone who follows, reads, and subscribes to this project, now years in the making.

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A Business Is Not a Family

Meaning, loyalty is dead.

Emily Grede, the cofounder of the Skims fashion business, is the latest advocate of cut-throat, heap-up-the-dead business practices, but she blurs the image by interspersing ‘empathy’ between pronouncements about ‘business needs’.

Amanda Goh did the work of listening to a podcast interviewing Grede, and writes1:

As founder and CEO, she said her first responsibility is to make decisions that serve the business, even when that means acknowledging that some employees may no longer be the right fit as it grows.

“As the leader, you have to make difficult decisions,” she said. “It is not my job to be your friend. It is not my job to treat everybody as though this were a family. But that doesn’t mean that you miss empathy or that you treat people badly.”

This translates into feeling little or nothing about firing people, it seems.

As the cofounder of several consumer brands, including denimwear brand Good American and sports fashion brand Off Season, Grede said she works in an environment where “radical honesty” is required.

That means employees are rarely caught off guard by feedback about their performance, Grede said — and because those conversations happen regularly, “nobody’s surprised.”

“It is not the job of me or any other woman in a position of leadership to have to kind of cottonball everybody along the way,” she said.

“We run a business just like anybody else, and that is with an enterprise mentality to do the best things that are right for the company,” Grede added.

And the implicit contrast is that company leaders shouldn’t have to operate their organizations to seek to do what is best for the employees. Or really to consider their employees at all.

Beyond her approach to leadership, Grede has also been candid about the demanding work ethic and level of commitment she believes are necessary to build a successful career and business.

In May 2025, Grede said she sees it as a red flag when job candidates talk about work-life balance. “Work-life balance is your problem. It isn’t your employer’s responsibility,” she said.

Anyone who wants to set meaningful work boundaries is, presumably, simply not hired. And if they start talking about it, there’s the door.

I wonder if Colin Newlyn was motivated to write Success Is What You Make It after hearing the newest CEO explaining that loyalty is dead:

Why are employers not delivering what their employees want them to but actively moving in the opposite direction?

“Well”, they might say, “we are not charities, we are not run for the benefit of our employees. We are here to make a profit and deliver a return for our shareholders, and we are in a competitive world.”

In fact, this is exactly what they say.

However, they never explain why the two things are incompatible.

Some companies manage to marry the two. I would argue that they are, in fact, entirely compatible. What’s more, organisations that give their employees what they aspire to are more stable, adaptable, resilient and, shock horror, profitable, than their competitors. More suited to thrive in the world we find ourselves in.

But that doesn’t fit the neoliberal dogma, does it? Or allow the massive accumulation of wealth and power by the few.

(By the way, you might want to subscribe to Colin’s newsletter.)

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Factoids

The Meaning of Work in the AI Age

Imagining the Digital Future Center has released a report — The Meaning of Work in the AI Age — and the top-line results are bracing:

• Work is a foundation of personal life. Among workers, 81% say paid work is extremely or very important to their role in their family, 70% to their sense of meaning and purpose and 64% to their personal identity. And (58%) call it extremely important to their sense of responsibility to their community.

• AI experience does not erase anxiety. Among adults who had used a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Gemini in the previous week, 80% expect net job loss, 65% foresee inadequate pay and 61% say less meaningful work would erode purpose and dignity.

• Confidence in learning exceeds confidence in control. Half of workers (50%) say they are extremely or very confident they can adapt skills for their current job; 40% are similarly confident they will control their career path. Yet, overall, these workers predict that most workers will have little control over their futures.

• Hope for a new social contract around work: Americans combine expectations of self-reliance with a desire for shared gains. Fully 60% of all U.S. adults agree that workers must adapt themselves rather than expect outside help and 59% agree that wealth generated by AI should be widely shared.

• The support system inspires little confidence. Only 11% of workers are highly confident government agencies will be helpful if AI significantly affects their jobs; 58% have little or no confidence. Every local institution tested is rated as being more unprepared than prepared for job market change.

Lee Rainie, an old friend and the director of the Center, writes [emphasis mine]:

“Americans’ concern is that – as AI inevitably spreads in years to come – the changes that lie ahead may not preserve enough work or other life roles that provide economic security, social value, self-identity, dignity and personal meaning and genuine human agency,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center. “These findings pose an enormous policy challenge. People see trouble ahead and seek a transition in an AI economy that makes human satisfaction, agency and purpose feel consequential. The immediate challenge for employers, institutions and others who serve the public is to develop and support an AI Age infrastructure to support human resilience – the vital factor enabling people to flourish.”

I won’t hold my breath.

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Hamilton Nolan on What To Do With Billionaires

Hamilton Nolan spells it out:

The most important political task in America is clawing back the vast fortunes (and the vast power they create) of the ultra-rich.

Just one excerpt from his recent post, The War Against Accumulated Capital, where he stops short of calling for jailing billionaires [emphasis mine]:

The level of billionaire wealth should be seen straightforwardly as a problem to be attacked. It is dangerous. It upsets, to a fatal degree, the balance of power that is necessary for any democratic society to exist. At a time when the 15 richest Americans are worth a combined $3.6 trillion—twice the gross domestic product of Australia, equivalent to the GDP of the entire Arab world—we are already in emergency territory. These people may be very nice but they have too much money. We need to take a lot of it away from them, soon, or no more democracy. It’s pretty simple.

In the long term, it is possible to strengthen the power of organized labor to allow working people to capture a bigger share of national income and thereby tilt the playing field back towards sanity. That will take decades, if indeed we ever accomplish it. We can’t afford to wait that long. (More to the point, billionaires will continue to use their own power to ensure that we never get far down that path anyhow.) In the near term, taxes and regulations are a faster and more direct way to rein in extreme fortunes. “Take away money from billionaires” is a necessary and appropriate policy goal and there is no need to couch it in fuzzy platitudes about fairness and free enterprise. It is just plain fatally destabilizing to American democracy for so few people to have so much money. Though I do not support the mass imprisonment of billionaires due to my belief in universal human rights, there is no doubt that imprisoning our nation’s billionaires and confiscating and redistributing their wealth would be a net positive for humanity by utilitarian standards.

Nolan believes there is no more important vote than the one-time 5% wealth tax on the ballot in California, called Prop 40. He acknowledges it may not pass, and he castigate the unions that have opted to not support it.

As he says,

Either we take a lot of money away from the rich or we all learn to love life under digital feudalism. Those are the stakes. Time to stop fucking around.

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Belief in the future is the unspoken baseline of the social contract.

| David Blaustein

…

Blaustein’s assertion comes as a response to what he considers the ‘institutional nihilism’ of Trump’s administration: an unconcern for posterity, or perhaps any span of time beyond the current news cycle. But people want more surety, more certainty, than feckless and unconstrained members of Trump’s cabal — and the man himself — are offering up.

This jettisoning of an articulated vision of the future is emblematic of Trump and matched by the rejection of the factual past and MAGA’s nostalgia for a time that never existed.

Part of that syndrome is Luuk van Middelaar’s politique événementielle — a ‘politics of events’ — where the timeframe of politics is drastically compressed. I first learned of this idea from Anton Jäger, who also quotes Ivan Krastev’s Trump’s revolutionary sense of time is changing politics 1[emphasis mine]:

The essence of the Trumpian revolution is... the implosion of time itself. Trump shows no interest in anything that has happened before him and is unconcerned with what will transpire after him. He acts as if history must come to a screeching halt when he exits the stage. This helps explain why he believes that all wars should be stopped in weeks, if not days. Trump’s experience of time is central to his political behaviour. The president doesn’t think in terms of long-term strategy but rather in terms of deadlines. He’s like a director who does not shoot films but only trailers for movies that will never be made.... Trump’s revolutionary sense of time, in the absence of any revolutionary project, is a source of both strength and vulnerability. He weaponizes the public’s growing sense of urgency. The existential anxiety that ‘there is no time’ forestalls the question: ‘Time for what?’

And Trump is not alone in this time implosion. There are echoes of this same disbelief in the future, and a self-aware rejection of agency, in the corporate sphere these days. Consider the unbridled investments in data centers and AI buildout as the world faces mounting challenges, like climate change, growing economic inequality, and geopolitical polarization.

This lack of concern for a way forward we can all push for, and dream of, is exactly the nihilism Blaustein highlighted. I am reminded of the line from Akira, by Katsuhiro Otomo:

There ought to be a future we can choose. It’s up to us to find it.

We can’t expect establishment politicians of any stripe or party, or the corporate overlords, to provide us a future to work toward or believe in. They have fallen prey to nihilism, anti-humanism, and what would be despair if they ever took time to reflect.

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Short Takes

Hamilton Nolan on Wealth Taxes

Californians will see a wealth tax proposed on the ballot in November, and one of our most astute observers, Hamilton Nolan, strongly supports it and related efforts. Here’s why [emphasis mine]:

The most important political task in America is clawing back the vast fortunes (and the vast power they create) of the ultra-rich. This task is more fundamental than all of the other important things—climate change, immigration, health care, you name it—because if we do not do it, then the path to democratic achievement of all of the other things will be permanently foreclosed. The second Trump administration is a preview of the model of governance that comes next: An indulgent, hollow-minded elected leader who gives billionaires and their companies carte blanche in exchange for their corrupt support. This is fascism. While most of us pay attention to the various abuses of the regime, the oligarchs themselves don’t care very much. What they want is for their own interests to sit on top of those of the public and the government, and for democracy to dissipate under the pressure of corporate control. If we do not do something about the fact that a handful of centibillionaires are indistinguishable from the White House now, this is our future.

The level of billionaire wealth should be seen straightforwardly as a problem to be attacked. It is dangerous. It upsets, to a fatal degree, the balance of power that is necessary for any democratic society to exist. At a time when the 15 richest Americans are worth a combined $3.6 trillion—twice the gross domestic product of Australia, equivalent to the GDP of the entire Arab world—we are already in emergency territory. These people may be very nice but they have too much money. We need to take a lot of it away from them, soon, or no more democracy. It’s pretty simple.

In the long term, it is possible to strengthen the power of organized labor to allow working people to capture a bigger share of national income and thereby tilt the playing field back towards sanity. That will take decades, if indeed we ever accomplish it. We can’t afford to wait that long. (More to the point, billionaires will continue to use their own power to ensure that we never get far down that path anyhow.) In the near term, taxes and regulations are a faster and more direct way to rein in extreme fortunes. “Take away money from billionaires” is a necessary and appropriate policy goal and there is no need to couch it in fuzzy platitudes about fairness and free enterprise. It is just plain fatally destabilizing to American democracy for so few people to have so much money. Though I do not support the mass imprisonment of billionaires due to my belief in universal human rights, there is no doubt that imprisoning our nation’s billionaires and confiscating and redistributing their wealth would be a net positive for humanity by utilitarian standards.

A future that we choose will require debillionairing our economy and governance.

…

Mark D. Levine on AI in NYC

Mark D. Levine, the Comptroller of New York City, is keeping an eye on AI for the city:

Early warning signs are mounting that AI is already impacting the job market in NYC.

New data just out show entry-level job postings in the city are way down in the careers most exposed to AI. Below chart shows change in NYC since 2022:

This is coming fast and we are doing almost nothing about it.

We have got to slow the AI wave, and as Hamilton Nolan (in the previous section) notes unions are too weak and small to mount an effective holding action. We’ll need bottom-up mass organizing to halt the displacement of millions as corporations enclose work. We need a #NoKings sort of movement to curtail work enclosure, just like the grassroots pushback on data centers.

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Recently

I don’t usually dedicate a section of the newsletter to updates on workfutures.io, but some recent milestones are worth noting.

Over the past few months, I've shifted my focus at workfutures.io to the politics and economics of work. One result? Subscriptions, including paid subscriptions, are up:

So, I guess it’s working; maybe I am finding a community more interested in the place of work at the center of a range of critical issues, rather than inward-focused reporting on how companies are seeking to eke out the next slice of productivity, or how to maintain wellbeing in workplaces that could care less.

Apropos of that, a recent post (from September 2026) —

— has climbed into the top four posts on workfutures. Take a look if you haven’t already.

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In science, novelty emerges only with difficulty.

| Thomas Kuhn

…

Kuhn is the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to whom we owe the notion of paradigm shift. Via Wikipedia:

Kuhn contrasts paradigm shifts, which characterize a scientific revolution, to the activity of normal science, which he describes as scientific work done within a prevailing framework or paradigm. Paradigm shifts arise when the dominant paradigm under which normal science operates is rendered incompatible with new phenomena, facilitating the adoption of a new theory or paradigm.

Kuhn did not extend his thinking outside the natural sciences, but the premise of paradigm shifts carries over into other realms, like art, music, fashion, and, yes, even business.

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The Cycle of Management Models

Back in the pre-pandemic, I first came across a tantalizing analysis by well-regarded academics, Zlatko Bodrožić and Paul S. Adler, that laid out a historical analysis of the rise and replacement of management approaches over the past few hundred years. Entitled What explains the evolution of management models over the past two centuries?1, the quite short piece attempts a great deal, and falls short in some basic ways. But the core concept is worth understanding.

At the core, the authors assert that scientific management, human relations, and strategy-and-structure are ‘well-known management models in the history of business’ and then pose an implied question: ‘we still understand little about why a given model succeeds in competition with other models.’ They answer this question in the same introductory paragraph:

Our analysis of the historical record led us to conclude that management models succeed when they respond effectively to the organizational challenges and opportunities created by successive waves of technological revolution.

In a way, that top-level take is not too surprising. I find it strange that they don’t cite other work on these ideas, like Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership2 from the ‘90s, or David Ronfeldt's groundbreaking Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Social Evolution. Also odd that company size goes unmentioned; perhaps we can assume these trends impact the largest companies first and the rest follow?

Here’s the ‘tech revolution’ diagram at the heart of their model of models. (Forgive the small fonts; they are in the original.)

Along the bottom are a sequence of technological breakthroughs, arrayed temporally, but not on a precise scale. An arrow points up from each, impacting the organizational form of the time. For example, Railroads & Steam led to a transition from Traditionalistic Management to Professionally Managed Firms. In each cycle, there are two parts: first, the overthrow of the status que ante model of management — in this case, family-run firms — and the creation of a new model, as in the adoption of a Line and Staff model of organization. Second, there is a counter-revolution: an effort to address the new problems introduced by the transition to a new model. In this case, Industrial Betterment.

The authors explain:

This cycle also led to a degradation of working and living conditions for the workers who staffed the railroad operations and who were thus scattered far from their communities and families. This degradation exacerbated industrial conflicts, which in turn led to a secondary cycle that gave rise to the “Industrial Betterment” model. Industrial Betterment did not undo the Line-and-Staff model, but added a counter-balancing social function that was responsible for improving workers’ living and working conditions. Occupationally, we see the emergence of the welfare secretary role (which subsequently evolved into the personnel manager).

Left unsaid is a great deal of context. Just a few exxamples: the rise of suffrage for unpropertied working men (in the UK, the Second Reform Act of 1867; in the US, by 1860 just five states restricted suffrage to male taxpayers and only two required property), unionization efforts, and labor-oriented political parties also paralleled these management shifts, which on a societal level also involved strikes, riots, anarchy, and the dissemination of socialist thought. The chart and descriptions lack those societal inputs/outputs.

Also left unmentioned is the original sin of slavery. One commenter on the essay notes that in the 1861 census ‘the largest single occupational category of managers, identified as such, was on US plantations worked by enslaved human beings. Four million enslaved people were worked for profitable production, integrated into the US and the global capitalist economy, not least through the work of 38000 salaried managers.’ Yes, this was agricultural work, but it set the context for organizational models prior to and during the rise of railroads and steam. No discussion or acknowledgment by the authors.

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The next cycle?

The steel and electricity revolution of late 19th and early 20th century yielded the Scientific Management model based on workflow optimization and capitalizing on the acceleration of production afforded by the new technologies. This inaugurated a transition to a new organizational paradigm that we call the Factory, symbolizing a unitary, centralized organization. This model also led to high turnover and low morale of workers due to the close control over how and how fast tasks were performed. The resulting conflicts provoked a secondary cycle that yielded the Human Relations model, based on counselling and supervisory techniques that responded to the alienation induced by rationalized workstation operations. Human Relations did not undo Scientific Management but rebalanced the Factory paradigm.

Note that the concept of worker alienation is originally from Marx3: he asserted that under capitalism, workers are alienated from the products they make, the work they do, other workers, and their personal well-being. Again, a great deal of context is left out. Consider, for example, this4 from Nelson Lichtenstein:

Nor did wage labor mean truly free labor in the new factories. That was a nineteenth-century conceit designed to distinguish the proletarian labor of the industrial heartland from slave labor elsewhere. Whatever the difficulties of agricultural labor or proto-industrial home production, few workers, and certainly not adult males, were eager for employment in the new factories where close supervision and unrelenting work requirements created a prison-like environment. That was one reason that a huge proportion of those so employed were women and children. One landowner spoke of factory villages as a “convenient asylum” for those displaced from their farms when enclosures snuffed out their rural livelihood. Meanwhile, in the cities, vagrancy laws targeted the “idle and disorderly poor,” while Britain’s Master and Servant Act of 1823 made workers criminally liable if they left their employer before the contractual end of their service. In Prussia, workers who left work without permission could be punished with a fine or fortnight’s imprisonment.

Factory work of that day sounds like slavery by another name. I don’t think adopting Human Relations was really enough5.

Returning to Bodrožić and Adler, and more recent history:

The automobile and oil revolution of the mid-20th century yielded the Strategy-and-Structure model based on differentiating internal structure and business-unit strategies so as to support the production, marketing, and sales of differentiated products to different customer segments. This contributed to the establishment of an organizational paradigm that we call the Corporation, representing the multi-divisional mass-production firm with strategic integration but operating autonomy in the divisions.

The new model eventually led to poor quality and service, low worker involvement, lack of cooperation and political games among managers. These problems provoked a secondary cycle aimed at quality, organization culture, and organization learning. The Quality Management model that emerged in this cycle recommended a management system that involved personnel at all levels in continuously improving product and process quality. It did not undo the Strategy-and-Structure model but remedied its dysfunctions and stabilized the Corporation paradigm.

I won’t belabor the greater context of the late 20th Century, and all the social turmoil, because this is too long already, and I would like to focus on the last of their cycles:

Our analysis of the most recent wave is more tentative because that revolution is only now reaching the critical inflection point where computers and telecommunication begin to transform a wider range of industries and functions. As we see it, the first cycle of this revolution yielded the Business Process model, based on the redesign of business processes up and down the value chain, redrawing internal and external boundaries, and externalizing “non-core” activities.

Buried in this are workflow automation, reengineering, the email revolution, cell phones, instant messaging, social media, offshoring, and outsourcing, to name just a few of the novelties that have arisen in the past 30 years.

This model contributed to the establishment of a new organizational paradigm that we call the Network, where units within and across organizations are interlinked by rationalized processes supported by digital technologies. This cycle seems to have led to the neglect of the human element and thereby weakened the innovation-generating capacity of firms. These problems, in turn, have provoked a secondary cycle that has encouraged the emergence of a cluster of concepts that appears to be cohering around Knowledge Management and novel types of communities of practice.

How very 2019. Knowledge management? I buy into the Network notion, though, that work is increasingly atomized and our reliance on communication tools has led to increased alienation and disengagement from work.

This was penned pre-pandemic, so the authors wrote without the perspective of today’s hybrid, always-on, pervasively web conferenced, burned-out business. With today’s hindsight, it would be interesting to see what the rebalancing trend might have been; I doubt Knowledge Management would have been seen as a bandage for the wounds inflicted by aggressive corporatism. Just as one glaring instance: consider how large US corporations continue to fight against unionization drives, or other organizing by employees. Starbucks continues to drag its feet, and the writers’ strike in Hollywood are just two examples that come to mind. I won’t get into the perturbations that AI is introducing into this vortex of swirling forces, but that’s worthy of a separate, longer treatment, in the works.

The larger context for the Networked model is perhaps the general sense of brokenness around the work contract, as I have written about before. It’s an element of the greater societal perception of brokenness in our institutions, as Alana Newhouse writes in Brokenism:

The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.

[…]

At its base, brokenism revolves around the idea that institutions and even whole societies can and do decay—sometimes in ways that are obvious, often in ways that are not.

Consider me a brokenist, then.

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The greed-is-good consumerism endemic to capitalism, particularly the post-1989 variety has, without the danger of communism keeping it in check, run amok like a species with no natural predators.

| Katherine Alejandra Cross, The End of History and the Final Girl1

…

Katherine Alejandra Cross, The End of History and the Final Girl

Cross turns Francis Fukuyama’s End of History on its head. She says, comparing it to the recent Hyperpolitics by Anton Jager, Fukuyama ‘doesn’t just seem dated; parts of it have aged quite badly’.

Her analysis is brilliant, and the piece is far too long to summarize.

I strongly recommend reading it closely. In particular, her closing takes the perspective of the ‘final girl’ in slasher-style horror movies, the one that makes it through the night, as an antagonist against a capitalism run amok:

The ground is shifting because the Final Girl is waking up to the Last Men and we are going to do more than mark time: we are going to survive the night.

We do not have to yield to the car dealership owners who have made their midlife crises a geostrategic problem for the entire world.

We can yet end this madness. Bloodied, frightened, unwilling, but also unbowed. We can pick up a knife and live to see dawn again.

Cross cites the authors of The End of the End of History, Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe, who argued that Fukuyama was wrong: it is not liberal democracy that triumphed once the Soviet Union collapsed, but capitalism. Cross herself, though, buys the idea that the nascent socialism finding a place in the US is the reclamation of earlier dreams of liberal democracy:

The struggles of the future will be fought over the shape of liberal democracy. The battle will be fought not between liberal democracy and a fully-formed alternative with its own institutions and militant cadres, but between liberal democracy and a screaming void.

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Capitalism Run Amok

Let’s pinpoint exactly what ‘running amok’ means, over the past decades since Fukuyama declared the end of history: the ascendance of liberal democracy. Which really meant the ascent of unfettered capitalism.

Let’s zoom into one aspect of this, one that hits us as individuals directly: the shrinking percentage of money flowing to workers in our economy as a whole, as employees in American organizations. Just a few charts from a recent report, Wage suppression in 10 charts, by the Economic Policy Institute. [All emphasis mine.]

The stakes of rising inequality for middle-income households in the United States are enormous. By 2022, steadily rising inequality was costing these households roughly $30,000 per year.

Figure 1 compares actual income growth of the middle fifth of nonelderly households since 1979 with what this income growth could have been had inequality not increased. The graph highlights market-based incomes because rising inequality was driven entirely by this income category—earnings from the labor market and business income like dividends and interest payments. We focus on incomes of nonelderly households because inequality largely stemmed from unbalanced labor market power, and nonelderly income is dominated by labor earnings.

In 2022, the average market income of the middle fifth of households was $96,335. But their income would have been $127,011—roughly 32% (over $30,000) higher—had inequality not increased after 1979. Put another way, if the middle fifth of households had seen market income grow at the overall average rate—an overall average pulled up by stratospheric growth at the very top—their income could have been roughly $30,000 higher by 2022.

The rising inequality is a function of 1/ the changes in tax policy over time, where higher earners benefited from lower taxes, and 2/ corporate policies to divert the results of growing productivity to capital and away from labor.

The inequality in market-based incomes highlighted in Figure 1 was overwhelmingly driven by unbalanced power in labor markets that prevented typical workers from seeing their paychecks keep up with overall economic growth. Figure 2 shows hourly pay (including benefits) for the roughly 80% of the private-sector workforce who are not managers or supervisors and a measure of economy-wide productivity—defined as the income generated in an average hour of work in the U.S. economy. The rising gap between these lines is how we define wage suppression—keeping typical workers’ wage growth slower than growth in incomes in the rest of the economy.

In the three decades following World War II, hourly compensation for the vast majority of workers rose 2.1% on an annualized basis, roughly in line with productivity growth of 2.5%. But for most of the last five decades (except for a brief period in the late 1990s), pay for the vast majority lagged further behind overall productivity. Over the entire 1979 to 2025 period, hourly pay for a typical worker rose just 0.6% while productivity increased 1.4% on an annualized basis. This means that workers have been producing far more than they receive in their paychecks and benefit packages from their employers, and this wedge has grown substantially over time. Some of those gains in productivity went to greater profits for corporations but an even larger portion went to highly paid managers and professionals, resulting in a vast increase in wage inequality over the last five decades.

Had we pursued policies to support broad-based wage growth—instead of wage suppression—typical workers would have much higher pay today. In fact, if annual pay for production and nonsupervisory workers had instead tracked productivity growth since 1979, their pay would be 45% higher, or $30,000 more than it is today.

Why can’t people save to buy a house, or pay rent, or afford a $100 cash emergency? Because corporate policies, adopted across almost all companies and industries, deviated from the post-WWIII, New Deal trend lines, with politicians working hard to shift tax policies to benefit the few at the expense of everyone else.

The largest portion of the growing wedge between productivity and pay can be explained by the astronomical wage growth for those at the highest end of the wage distribution. The ability of those at the very top to claim an ever-larger share of overall wages is evident in Figure 4. Annual earnings for the top 1% have grown 182% since 1979, while wages of the bottom 90% have grown just 44%. If the wages of the bottom 90% had grown at the average pace over this period—meaning that wages grew equally across the board—then wages for the bottom 90% would have grown by 65%, far higher and roughly 50% faster than the actual growth experienced. Earnings are so concentrated at the top that average growth is well above the 90th percentile of the earnings distribution. That means workers need to be among the highest 10% of wage earners to even experience average earnings growth. And everyone else—more than 90% of the workforce—saw less than average growth over the last four and a half decades.

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Any progressive movement in America should start by fixing glaring wage inequality.

In 2025, the labor share of ‘corporate value added’ fell to 55.3%, from a peak in 1980-2000 of over 64%. George W. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 contributed strongly to the post-2000 labor share falling, according to The Legacy of the 2001 and 2003 “Bush” Tax Cuts:

High-income taxpayers benefitted most from these tax cuts, with the top 1 percent of households receiving an average tax cut of over $570,000 between 2004-2012 (increasing their after-tax income by more than 5 percent each year).  Despite promises from proponents of the tax cuts, evidence suggests that they did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.

The chart above and the following description of two critical tax laws from Trump’s time in the White House are from Why the Labor Share Keeps Falling: Taxes! [emphasis mine]:

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 did two things that mattered on the labor share front. It cut the C corporation rate from 35 to 21 percent. And it created the Section 199A deduction, which lets pass-through owners shave their top rate to 29.6 percent (provided they aren’t in a “specified service” business like law or medicine). The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 then made the 199A deduction permanent, kept the 20 percent rate, held the top individual tax rate at 37 percent, and loosened the limits on who qualifies for 199A. The latest pass-through regime cost about $740 billion over ten years.

Basically, business owners and top management have sheltered a much larger share of corporate profits from taxation, and distributed it to themselves, thanks to Congress and various presidents. Notably, those funds were not shared with labor and were not taxed at earlier 1980-2000 rates, so the government saw significantly less money as well.

So the next time you hear that the country is $36 trillion in debt, remember that corporate policies, tax laws, and pointless wars are the cause, not welfare fraud, too many immigrants, or overly generous health insurance subsidies. Realize that business owners and managers choose to shortchange their non-managerial workers.

The affordability crisis is two-sided: on one side, wages — except for top management and specialized professionals — are being suppressed, and on the other side, the necessities of life are rising much faster than the rate of pay increases. In both cases, the working and middle classes are squeezed by policies and politics that benefit only the top few percent.

The only way to get our economy working for everybody is to change tax and corporate regulations so capitalism is no longer running amok.

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My ‘dream job’ is… not working. No work. I don’t dream about labor.

| @thetrudz (2019)

…

@thetrudz now limits her feed to known Xers, so you can’t access the tweet directly.

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In If You “Don’t Dream of Labor,” You Should Organize for Socialism1, written in April 2023 by Caitlyn Clark, we see a highlighting of the ‘I don’t dream of labor’ meme:

That’s the theme of a popular TikTok meme, which started off life as a viral tweet with a quite different meaning. The saying “I don’t dream of labor” has been everywhere on social media in recent years, most notably in a TikTok audio featuring the voice of user @mrhamilton stating in a mock mid-Atlantic accent, “Darling, I’ve told you several times before, I have no dream job — I do not dream of labor.” The audio has since been used in over 51,400 videos. The quote is often falsely attributed to the likes of James Baldwin; in fact, it seems to have originated with Twitter user @thetrudz, whose tweet “My ‘dream job’ is . . . not working. No work. I don’t dream about labor” went viral in 2019.

How different it all is now in 2026. Especially young college grads looking for their first job, but also people who feel stuck in their existing roles, blocked from promotion by the ‘slow fire, slow hire’ economy we are living in. Not to mention the threat of layoffs or the looming impact of AI replacement.

I first wrote about this meme in

One excerpt:

This vignette is another example of how a thought that holds up a critical mirror to our culture is merchandized into selling mirrors instead of reflecting on the original intent of the thought.

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What Leaders Do

In What Leaders Really Do2, from 2023, John Kotter carefully parses the facets of leadership, debunking some myths along the way:

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having “charisma” or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it.

Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.

No surprise: since he has characterized the business environment as ‘complex and volatile’, that sets the stage for his split between leadership and management:

Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.

Management, complexity (planning and budgeting). Leadership, volatility (setting direction).

[Leaders] don’t make plans; they don’t solve problems; they don’t even organize people. What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it.’

Leaders are gardening, not engineering. Kotter warns ‘Most discussions of vision have a tendency to degenerate into the mystical’. Which is not where they should reside:

One of the most frequent mistakes that overmanaged and underled corporations make is to embrace long-term planning as a panacea for their lack of direction and inability to adapt to an increasingly competitive and dynamic business environment. But such an approach misinterprets the nature of direction setting and can never work.

Long-term planning is always time-consuming. Whenever something unexpected happens, plans have to be redone. In a dynamic business environment, the unexpected often becomes the norm, and long-term planning can become an extraordinarily burdensome activity. That is why most successful corporations limit the time frame of their planning activities. Indeed, some even consider “long-term planning” a contradiction in terms.

Kotter should be closely read and integrated into our understanding of the yin-yang of leadership and management.

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The problem with business is that it is afraid of dealing with the business of people.

| W. Edward Deming

…

This Deming quote reminds me of the first meeting I attended with Google’s ‘collaboration tools’ group, after signing them as an advisory client.

They had a slide showing on the giant monitor in the meeting room: a quote from a post I had written, making a distinction between tools for people at work and tools for businesses to manage people.

They informed me that they had decided to rename the next release of Google’s collaboration suite as ‘Google for Work’ instead of the originally planned ‘Google Enterprise’.

It was a great start. However, a new SVP (who shall remain nameless) arrived quite soon after, and the suite was recast as a lowly, lowly element of the Google Cloud, and the emphasis on people was dropped. Instead, we saw the return of ‘Enterprise’ everywhere in their marketing and messaging.

Remember: names matter.

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Words are slippery; both in meaning and in time.

Some terms are likely to be used forever; others fade quickly.

Overemployment

A vestige of the post-pandemic hiring spree, the term ‘overemployment’ was directed to those who were ‘secretly working more than one full-time job’, as reported in 20221 by Fadeke Adegbuyi.

All of her points are informative, and some are very insightful:

For a time, Murphy [one of the overemployed] thought she had stumbled upon a novel way of working—something she alone was experimenting with. But it wasn’t long into her new work arrangement that she realized there were scores of knowledge workers doing the exact same thing and discussing it online. On TikTok, the tag #overemployed has over 4.3 million views. The subreddit r/overemployed has over 89,000 members, and the accompanying Discord community has more than 32,000 users; during active periods of the day, a new member joins every few minutes. Both the subreddit and Discord exist under the banner of the Overemployed website, a resource hub and the home of this emerging work movement. These internet communities and online spaces have become a lifeline for people experimenting with or considering this new mode of work.

The online mentions for the term have risen and fallen over the years — spiking in 2022 when Adegbuyi wrote about it — and are now at a relative low. Not surprising, given the employment picture in tech:

The overemployed have cynical views of the relationship to their employers [emphasis mine]:

• The overemployed are rarely seeking self-actualization and meaning-making at work.

• Antiwork and OE have an overlap. Antiwork talks about how the system is against the workers and we should tear that system down. OE thinks the system is against the workers and says ‘let’s exploit it.’

• Overemployment is more than just a style of work. It’s an ideology of individualism and self-reliance held by many who feel that corporations have turned their backs on workers.

They know work is broken.

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Greedflation

In 2022, Lydia DePillis summarized2 a growing perspective of progressives called ‘greedflation’. Namely, it wasn’t only impartial inflation of that post-pandemic era that was driving up prices but deliberate profiteering:

Increasingly dominant corporations are taking the opportunity to jack up prices more than they otherwise could, which is squeezing consumers and supercharging inflation. Or “greedflation,” as the hypothesis has come to be known.

Well-known economists — like Ben Bernanke and Oliver Blancard — attempted to reassert the historical ‘wage-price spiral’ as the source of this inflation, in essence putting the blaming on increases in pay, and that corporations were only of necessity raising prices.

A 2023 article3 by Emily Peck pointed out that the concept of greedflation was gaining ground:

Once dismissed as a fringe theory, the idea that corporate thirst for profits drives up inflation, aka “greedflation,” is now being taken more seriously by economists, policymakers and the business press.

Fewer commentators and policy-makers were fooled by the corporate smokescreen and directly challenging the conventional wisdom:

In a speech in January, then-Fed vice chair Lael Brainard said wages weren’t the main driver of inflation and pointed to a “ price-price spiral,” where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs.

In March, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, published a note on “profit margin-led inflation,” describing how in late 2022 and into this year, companies — particularly retailers and consumer goods makers — convinced consumers that they needed to raise prices. (They didn’t really.)

As just one example of someone who had been considered a conspiracy theorist for advancing greedflation as a major factor in rising inflation, consider Isabella Weber:

By May [following Donovan’s note], the Wall Street Journal published a story on how corporate profits were keeping inflation high, citing the work of Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was derided for her work on the topic back in late 2021.

In a stunning comeback this month, The Times of London profiled Weber’s rise from a lone voice to star economist who’s drawn attention to the notion that companies and certain sectors can drive inflation — she calls it “sellers’ inflation,” not greedflation.

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman pulled an about-face after his criticism of her work:

Krugman deleted tweets attacking Weber’s article as “truly stupid” and made a public apology.

Even Jerome Powell pivoted in 2022 away from his more conventional views in 2021.

The term has stayed in use, but fallen from its peak in 2023.

I choose to interpret this as the widespread acceptance that inflation — at least to a significant extent — can be influenced by profiteering. So where people talk about inflation now, it’s shaded by that awareness: we know they are taking advantage of the exogenous rise in the cost of their inputs to gouge us on the price of their outputs.

Class Ceiling

A recent piece4 by Noam Scheiber introduced the term ‘class ceiling’ to me.

• Being female or a person of color has long been seen as a disadvantage in hiring and promotion. A new study of college professors shows that class may loom as large.

• According to a recent paper, such a background [first-generation scholar] can also hurt a scholar’s career. The paper, in the prestigious journal Econometrica, found that scholars whose parents did not graduate from college are less likely to land tenure-track jobs at major research universities and less likely to get tenure.

• The researchers, Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez, found that the disadvantage of being a first-generation college graduate could be even greater than the disadvantages associated with being female or nonwhite.

So, for example, a female, Black PhD with college-educated parents might be more successful than a male, white first-generation PhD.

This effect boils down to social capital, in several ways:

First-generation graduates appeared to have less social or cultural capital than people from more privileged backgrounds.’ Fewer relationships with those with higher social capital, who might be able to open doors, make introductions, or teach graduates how to play the game.

This extends beyond academia:

“In many other elite professional settings, the qualities on which you’re judged — on which you’re getting ahead, getting opportunities — are somewhat subjective,” said Dr. Stansbury, an economist at M.I.T. Lawyers, bankers, consultants and middle managers typically advance when higher-ups perceive them as crafting strong arguments or giving good presentations. But there’s no way to measure these skills precisely.

Instead, just as for aspiring professors, “networks, social capital, perceptions and bias of how you present yourself — cultural capital — are a big reason for how it plays out,” Dr. Stansbury said. And those criteria put the working class at a real disadvantage.

And the first-generation doctorates enter the workforce beyond academia the ceiling still plays:

First-generation college graduates with Ph.D.s earned less when they entered the private sector and were less likely to hold senior management jobs than Ph.D.s whose parents had a graduate degree.

This is a quite new term, and one that is already rapidly fading, but that doesn’t mean the effect is:

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What counts is not the things that happen, but what we do with them.

| Annie Ernaux

…

Back from a brief beach vacation, where I mostly read, and wrote only a little. Here’s some bits that resurfaced from 1964 and 2025.

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Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics1, is a timeless classic. He was strongly influenced by Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt, and Barry Goldwater’s efforts to paint the United Nations as a tool of ‘international communism’: [emphasis mine]:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Personally, my view is that 'paranoid style' may not go far enough. Hofstadter is detailing instances of mass psychopathology when large groups are infected by conspiracy theories about 'others' -- Catholics, Jews, anarchists, Communists, and immigrants who are purportedly attempting to secretly subvert politics and society, up to and including overthrowing the government. These are largely movements of White supremacist nativists calling out these 'enemies' as dangerous and 'un-American'.

Instead of his title, he might have used ‘The Paranoia of American Politics’.

A point of departure for me: I don’t believe that people who fall under the sway of paranoid mass movements are ‘more or less normal’. I think they are nuts, no matter how many of them there are.

I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

He tracks various historic conspiracy theories, from the 1800s to his era, the 1960s: the Bavarian Illuminati, the anti-Masonic movement, Goldwater and the anti-UN movement, McCarthy’s anti-Communist frenzy, and the anti-Catholic movement.

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

This sounds like Trump’s coterie, up to claims that the Dems are communists, attempting to destroy America. The ‘dispossessed’ argument hits home in 2026, as more Americans think everything is broken, and become increasingly antipolitical.

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.

By ‘free capitalism’ I interpret him to mean ‘free trade’ which is shorthand for ‘unfettered, pro-growth-at-all-costs globalist capitalism’.

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

‘The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.’

In sections entitled Emulating the Enemy, Renegades and Pedants, and The Double Sufferer, Hofstadter details the psychology of the ‘paranoid spokesman’, in a psychiatric style.

Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.

Everything is reduced to good versus evil, us against them, zero-sum absolutes.

A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop.

An inability to learn how things do and don’t work.

He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

This reminds me of Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing’s concept of the ‘self-contained’, who cannot be changed by experience, articulated in The Mushroom at the End of the World.

Hofstadter wraps up with his epigraph on the double suffering of the paranoid:

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

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Anne Helen Petersen on Death of the Corporate Job

In September of 2025, Anne Helen Petersen responded to Alex McCann’s blockbuster essay, Death of the Corporate Job. By blockbuster I mean it created a lot of chatter, but at its core, it seemed to me to be a rehash of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs script (repudiated by Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs | Magdalena Soffia, Alex J Wood, Brendan Burchell, which I explored in Nice Doggy).

Petersen starts by pulling a few quotes from McCann:

The corporate role isn’t dying in some dramatic collapse. It’s dying like religion died for many people—slowly, through diminishing belief rather than disappearing churches.

The structures remain. The offices still gleam. The meetings still happen. The emails still flow. But the faith that this activity means something, that it’s building towards something worthwhile, that it justifies the life hours it consumes—that faith is evaporating.

And finally:

I know developers who do their “official” job in the morning and build their own products in the afternoon. Marketers who run their agencies from their corporate desks. Consultants who’ve automated their actual deliverables and spend most of their time on side projects.

They’re not quitting. They’re using the corporate infrastructure—the steady salary, the laptop, the stability—as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn’t died; it’s become a funding mechanism for actual work.

One person I spoke to called it “corporate entrepreneurship”—not in the LinkedIn way where you’re an “intrapreneur” innovating within your company, but in the sense that you’re using your corporate presence to subsidise your real work.

This is particularly acute for people in their twenties. We entered the workforce just as the illusion was becoming impossible to maintain. We never had that period where we could believe our corporate roles were meaningful.

Then Petersen lets loose [emphasis mine]:

It’s all very Fight Club and Office Space meets Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, isn’t it? Maybe a little Graduate, a dash of Say Anything Lloyd Dobbler-ism, and certainly some David Graeber, who first published his essay on “Bullshit Jobs” in 2013 (and who Alex, to his credit, references directly).

I don’t mean to be paternalistic so much as highlight how every generation arrives at a similar point of disillusionment: most jobs involve bullshit. What you do with that information, once gleaned, is usually a pretty good barometer of character. But the realization that the corporate career can feel meaningless — that’s nothing new.

The highlighted sentences above motivated me to use the Annie Ernaux quote for this issue. We all run headfirst into the bullshitty, corporate, cringey parts of work, usually pretty soon after starting to work in the first place.

You can mistakenly take that collision as a personal shortcoming; that somehow you are failing at the corporate game. Or, perhaps with more time toiling in the mines, you might reach a realization: corporatism is not about helping workers to find purpose and meaning in their work. It is simply a machine designed to derive profits that can be — to the greatest extent possible — directed to the owners, and as little as possible to the workers. The solution to this is a different economy, where the returns on all the participants’ contributions — capital and labor — are shared more equally.

Petersen does not lean as far to the left as I do in her discussion, but she spends the rest of her analysis making the case for self-employment as a means to get out of the machine [emphasis mine]:

Self-employment has remained somewhat steady for the last decade at just over 10% of the working population. There was an uptick after Covid, and current numbers suggest that the demographics with the greatest job loss — see: Black women — are also the demographics with the biggest increases in self-employment. We have woven a rhetoric around the current job market to convince us that the problem isn’t the way we’ve organized the economy, or the ongoing erosion of the safety net, or the erosion of worker’s rights, but the jobs themselves. In that paradigm, the solution isn’t to vote to create a different economy, with different incentives and different allocation of profits, but to create your own job.

It’s rich, I know, that I’m writing all of this from the perch of a seemingly secure freelance job. But it’s also telling that even though this enterprise has been successful beyond my wildest dreams, I worry constantly: about my partner losing his full-time employment and, by extension, our access to good healthcare; about developing brain fog or a disability; about Substack’s viability as a platform; about my relevance as I age; about how much I need to set aside each month to ensure that when I can no longer write the way I do, I will be able to survive.

So here’s my contribution to this genre of job market writing. After years of navigating failing industries and labor exploitation, I finally have total control. I know exactly what I do, and who I do it for, and why I do it. I have almost entirely rid my workday of bullshit. But because nothing about the larger system itself has changed, I can have all that control — a seemingly perfect job! — and operate, every day, in total fear.

We need to change that ‘larger system’ to counter that fear. Now.

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In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.

| Albert Camus

…

The quote by Camus is contested. Apparently, it was originated by Howard Zinn in his A People’s History of the United States, with the added clause, ‘according to Albert Camus’.

But I offer it up for its intent, not its provenance. And, to slightly soften the language, and broaden the context, I will paraphrase:

In a world of division, a world of the powerless and the powerful, it is the job of thinking people to stand with the disempowered.

My motivation in this recasting of Zinn and Camus to set up the backdrop for a discussion of ‘being yourself’ at work. Or more accurately, the arguments as to why we should — or should not — take on that challenge.

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Be Yourself, Or Not?

As I was preparing to write this section of the newsletter, I read an article in today’s Economist with this at its head:

Workplace training can confer useful skills. It can also prevent legal trouble and fulfil compliance obligations. And it can be a very easy way to try out time travel. You only have to watch a typical corporate training video to feel the clock rewinding.

First, and most obviously, some of these videos were filmed before you were born, on a subject that is so evergreen it has never needed an update. The footage is grainy. Men wear ties and women wear pleated skirts. They have names like Rodney and Carol. No one has a tattoo or brings their whole self to work. If they had an illness, it wouldn’t be a mental-health issue but something from the distant past, like consumption or scrofula.

I include this fragment, not to delve into the woeful state of corporate training videos, but to note the use of the phrase ‘brings their whole self to work’, which serves as an indication of time: We are in a time where people purportedly do bring their ‘whole self’ to work, in distinction to the olden days, where people didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t. (Likewise, tattoos: another digression.)

We’ve come to a time in which being yourself on the job (or ‘bringing your whole self to work’) is taken almost as a given, that authenticity is a positive factor for the individual and for the enterprise.

But is that true?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, one of the most insightful commentators on work, says that it’s not. In When Authentic Leadership Backfires1, excerpted from a book of the same name, he musters evidence that debunks that conventional wisdom. He takes a very micro/personal view of 'being yourself' at work and boils down its pros and cons to appearing competent and leaderlike. He writes,

Simply put, when our behavior feels consistent or aligned with our self-concept, we experience a sense of internal coherence and harmony that lubricates our ego. Conversely, when our actions clash with how we see ourselves, we feel inauthentic, fake, and guilty, and our self-esteem suffers.

However, feeling authentic does not equate to being perceived as talented or competent by others. Despite the subjective benefits of authenticity, being true to ourselves does not translate into being better colleagues or leaders.

So, in effect, if the point is to convince others you are competent and/or talented, being yourself at work is not the way to get there. He backs up his reasoning with research:

In a recent meta-analysis of 55 independent studies, impression management (rather than self-perceived authenticity) was positively related to leadership emergence and effectiveness, as well as to both task-oriented and relationship-oriented leadership behaviors. Even if feeling authentic feels great, you are more likely to become an effective leader if you focus on gratifying others and adjusting your behavior according to what the situation demands. So, it’s not authenticity, but knowing where the right to be you ends and your obligation to others begins, that makes you effective in work settings.

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Turning that around: your obligation to others (and, by extension, the organization) is to manage the impression that others have of you, as competent and effective, rather than letting it all hang out.

He goes on, and the negative undercurrent of inauthenticity and façade-building starts to build:

In short, life is about choices, and one of the most fundamental choices we face in daily interactions is whether to impose our raw, unfiltered selves on others or to regulate our behavior for the sake of relationships. To be sure, this ought to be done with social skills and emotional competence, for there is a high cost to being seen as overly diplomatic or as a social chameleon.

[…]

Skilled self-awareness and sensitivity to how others see you will enable you to seem genuine rather than fake, even when you are making an effort to not be yourself.

[…]

The irony, then, is that by disciplining or editing our authenticity, we may actually come across as more trustworthy and competent to others. People don’t judge authenticity by how you feel about yourself; they judge it by whether your behavior seems appropriate, effective, and considerate.

This echoes a line by the sociologist Erving Goffman, from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:

When the individual does move into a new position in society and obtains a new part to perform, he is not likely to be told in full detail how to conduct himself, nor will the facts of his new situation press sufficiently on him from the start to determine his conduct without his further giving thought to it.

Yes, we have to actively choose how to behave in both public and private settings. Still, it is not intuitive that we should begin with the premise that inauthenticity — acting a part — should seem the highest form of work performance.

And we have to keep in mind one question: who is served by the role-playing involved? Chamorro-Premuzic is pretty clear in his formulation: if you want to be perceived as effective and competent it’s likely to be necessary to act like effective and competent people act. He expressly says that if you want to be considered leaderlike — to move up the ladder — you have to adopt the behaviors associated with leaders.

But consider the costs. The extra work involved in playing the role, and the suppression of other behaviors, has to be taken on by the individual, for the benefit of the company.

Kathi Weeks, in her magisterial The Problem With Work, addresses this perspective directly:

In these latter sectors of employment in particular, the dimensions of the self that are considered part of the human resource to develop — and, thus, legitimate targets of managerial concern — continue to expand into new territories of subjectivity. Consider, for example, the new terrains opened up by the recent interest in “wellness.” As the authors of a recent overview of contemporary management concepts and regimes observe, “the idea that one’s employer provides some sort of totalized care for the worker’s wellness opens up a powerful horizon for expanding the boundaries of organized work”.2 Or consider what Peter Fleming3 describes as the “just be yourself” managerial discourse that asks workers to bring their “authentic” selves from outside work into work, attempting thereby to incorporate “the whole person into the production matrix”.

Flemings hits the ‘be yourself’ discourse as a mechanism for the organization to blur the boundaries between our who we are and what we bring to work.

Traditional distinctions between work and life are increasingly blurred by management in these its most self-consciously biopolitical modes. Whether or not the watchwords of such programs — empowerment, participation, responsibility, flexibility, and enrichment — involve empty rhetoric or meaningful improvements in the experience of work for employees, they do give employers opportunities to induce new modes and degrees of effort, and in some cases of identification. Thus, worker empowerment can boost efficiency, flexibility can serve as a way to cut costs, and participation can produce commitment to the organization, thereby “embroiling the subject in the act of organizational control” and internalizing organizational discipline.4 In short, often programs presented under the rubric of work enrichment are also methods of work intensification. In a kind of bad dialectic, quality becomes quantity as the call for better work is translated into a requirement for more work.

Week’s perspective changes the presentation of being a better participant in the machinery at work as a means of intensifying work, of taking on more work — both directly by the play-acting, and indirectly, as the increase in effectiveness creates a margin which workers are then supposed to fill with more labor, somme of which is becoming enmeshed in that same ‘organizational control’ they have already personally adopted.

Weeks takes this to the final end: by accommodating the inherent blurring of organizational control and the need to remain independent of work’s psychic demands, are we losing the ground on a demand for better work?

The problem, therefore, is how to advance demands for better work — how to make good on work’s promises of social utility and individual meaning — in a way that does not simply echo and reaffirm the prescription for a lifetime of work. The question I want to consider is whether the kind of affirmation of work at the heart of the work ethic can be used successfully in the struggle for better work: is it possible to demand both better work and less work without one demand neutralizing the critical force of the other? Muirhead5 offers one attempt to combine these efforts.

To recall the earlier discussion, both Gini and Muirhead call for new ethics of work that can continue to celebrate and encourage commitment to waged work, while insisting that such work should be adequately compensated and personally satisfying. But Muirhead goes further, recognizing that these two commitments, to the affirmation of work’s inherent value and to the improvement of its conditions, can function at cross-purposes. As a way to manage this, he adds a third commitment: to keep work, even good work, in its place so that it does not consume the whole of life, which would moderate the claims about work’s value by simultaneously pursuing a politics directed at work’s reform and reduction. “Tempering the value of work,” Muirhead explains, “also protects against the abuse of that value in the name of practices that are exploitative— an abuse to which the work ethic is particularly prone”.

As my paraphrase of Albert Camus (via Howard Zinn) implies, thinking people have an obligation to stand with the disempowered in the unequal struggle to make work better. We should never have to settle for becoming part of the machinery.

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Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

| Frederick Douglass

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Quit versus Grit

Lindsay Crouse writes1 a well-researched and well-reasoned essay that adds a new dimension to the ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ trope. Apparently, women are much more likely to grind away when confronted by impossible or difficult situations, while men will simply walk away.

Some excerpts [emphasis mine]:

Under stress, women downshift but make it through. Men under stress go to extremes. They take more risks and walk away with nothing or all. It tracks with what the masculinity scholar Richard Reeves argues about how we’re raised: Boys are like orchids. They are fragile and protected. Girls, he says, are like dandelions — surprisingly tough.

Now I think those men were onto something I missed. Too much grit can work against us. I thought my willingness to push, no matter what, was bold (and virtuous). But what is the point of overcoming every obstacle if the effort leaves you exhausted and stuck? In a marathon, there’s a finish line. In life, we can grind forever.

Women like me are eager (and able) disciples of the “Never give up” dogma. We might benefit from opting out, but we dismiss that option before we ever consider it. Then we pay the costs. We start out as resilient dandelions, but what good is that if it sets us up to be trampled on?

Research starts with kids:

When researchers examined children’s responses to ineffective teaching methods, they found that boys tended to abandon approaches that led nowhere and seek better options. Girls were more likely to continue following directions, even when those directions led them to fail. Girls learn to work. Boys learn to win.

And what about in business?

Researchers tracked nearly 30,000 management-bound employees and found that when women were passed over for promotion, they were more likely to stick with their companies than men in similar situations. The men were more likely to walk away. And they were rewarded for it. They got retention benefits where they were, or they left.

Jumping for advancement is a winning game.

The final takeaway:

Giving up on things that don’t work is the only way to find things that work better or to go farther than before.

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Sidetracked

I read a deeply researched report this week, Sidetracked: The Hidden Crisis in Mid-Career Professional Economic Mobility2. The NYU School of Professional Studies analyzed 1.3 million career histories and learned that

nearly one in four mid-career professionals in the United States is stalled: steadily employed, but experiencing years of flat wages, no promotions, and no clear path to advancement. Unlike unemployment, this crisis is invisible in official statistics. Its consequences are not: underutilized talent for employers, and significant cumulative lost earnings for workers. For the average stalled software developer, the financial penalty exceeds $43,000 over 15 years.

The data is sliced and diced in dozens of ways: by industry, occupation, region, and demographic group.

The researchers diagnose three forces — occupational structure, credential quality and alignment, and early-career trajectory — that play against the individual:

The report also maps real pathways to recovery. Strategic reskilling into adjacent, higher-mobility roles can reduce stall risk by as much as 86%; the gains come not from starting over, but from pivoting into positions where existing expertise unlocks a steeper trajectory. Mid-career stall is a structural problem, not an individual failure. Detected early and addressed with targeted intervention by employers, educators, and policymakers, career momentum can be rebuilt.

Absent is any deep discussion of the failings of employers in this dynamic. Although they offer this;

The infrastructure of upward mobility—internal promotion ladders, job-to-job transitions, scope-expanding roles—has weakened in ways that constrain these outcomes.

Note that this is expressed in the passive voice, although management makes these policy choices deliberately. After all, when employees stall, the company saves money.

But, as usual, the individual is pretty much on their own in the late capitalist economy. But, if you think you are stuck at mid-career, you might take a long look at what you might do to shake loose.

The biggest takeaway:

Three core insights anchor this discussion. First, mid-career stagnation is not simply an outcome—it is a time-sensitive condition that becomes harder to reverse the longer it persists. Second, its foundations are often laid in early career, meaning that early detection and prevention matter as much as remediation. Third, it does not have to be a permanent sentence; targeted strategies involving skill development, credentialing, and occupational pivots can help workers facing, or already in the grip of, career stall overcome the economic obstacles in their path. Together, these findings shift the focus from treating stall as an isolated event to understanding it as a compounding risk that emerges early, can be detected before it hardens, and may be preventable through timely intervention.

Prevention is more powerful than remediation: by the time stagnation is visible in mid-career data, compounding mechanisms are already deeply at work.

And, as Lindsay Crouse laid out: it’s better to jump than to grind.

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Whereas personal nostalgia peoples the mind with real memories, political nostalgia often travels back to a time that is as unreal as time travel itself.

| Eula Biss, The Theft of the Commons

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From Ground Water To Enclosure

I undertook the newish Resurfaced section here on workfutures.io as a way to reconnect with my own reading and thinking from past years, a way to rethink and explore paths lying latent in earlier notes and writings.

The Eula Biss quote above resurfaced from a newfound approach to personal nostalgia.

First, on 2026-08-29, my Obsidian daily note search offered up an article by David Leonhardt from 2023-08-29, entitled Uncharted Waters1, an evocative name for a prosaic topic. The subtitle is less poetic: The threat to groundwater is a classic tragedy of the commons.

Leonhardt gets the thrust of ‘the tragedy’ of the commons wrong. He cites the infamous Garrett Hardin who said the tragedy was inevitable. It isn’t, as Elinor Ostrom proved, but she goes unmentioned, about which more later.

But Leonhardt’s stats -- from Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle -- are terrifying:

• ‘Over the past 40 years, groundwater levels at most of the sites have declined. At 11 percent of the sites, levels last year fell to their lowest level on record.’ Another cornerstone of our economic system based on resource extraction, like energy from fossil fuels. Except now we are talking about eating and drinking.’

I searched but couldn’t find recent data on nationwide ground water stats, but the localized ones — like the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer which supports much of the agriculture in the midwest — are continuing to decline, and rapidly.

Leonhardt continues:

• ‘The U.S., in other words, is taking water out of the ground more quickly than nature is replenishing it.’

He makes the implicit claim that this is a proof of Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. But Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom disproved his theory through her work with many different groups in many different places, where bottom-up agreements among those sharing a common resource—like grazing land for cattle in the Alps—avoided overuse of the commons, in some cases for hundreds or thousands of years. (A good analysis of her contributions can be found in A Review of Vlad Tarko’s Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography by David D’Amato2.)

I had made a link in the Leonhardt note I made in 2023 to an article by Eula Biss, The Theft of the Commons3, from which I pulled the opening quote. Among the many things she tied together in that essay was the tale of Laxton, the last village in England that has not been enclosed. Enclosure means the displacement of ‘commoners’ from the ‘commons’ from which they could gather wood, graze sheep and cows, and fish. In Laxton, they have been communally farming for over 700 years.

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But her debunking of Hardin’s thesis is compelling [emphasis mine]:

The idea that shared resources are inevitably ruined by people who exploit them is sometimes called the tragedy of the commons. This is not just an attitude that passes for common sense but an economic theory: “The Tragedy of the Commons” was the title of a 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. His essay has been cited so often that it has kept the word commons in use among people who know nothing about the commons. “The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” Hardin wrote. “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.”

Hardin was a white nationalist who subscribed to what is now called “replacement theory.” He believed that the United States needed to restrict nonwhite immigration, because, as he put it, “a multiethnic society is insanity.” In 1974, he published an essay titled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” in which he warned of the dangers of creating a world food bank: “The less provident and less able will multiply at the expense of the abler and more provident,” he wrote, “bringing eventual ruin upon all who share in the commons.”

Hardin was writing long after the commons had been lost to enclosure, and his commons was purely hypothetical. Actual, historical commons weren’t the free-for-all he imagined. In Laxton, villagers who held rights to Westwood Common could keep twenty sheep there, or the equivalent in cows. No one was allowed to keep more animals on the commons in summer than they could support in winter. Common rights were continuously revisited and revised in the course of centuries, as demand rose and fell. In 1662, the court fined a Laxton man “for not felling his part of thistles in the Town Moor.” As E. P. Thompson observed, “Commoners themselves were not without commonsense.”

What Hardin considers the “inherent logic of the commons” is actually the logic of capitalism, the dominant logic of our time. That logic dictates expansion, no matter the consequences, and it has brought our world, as Hardin warned it would, near ruin. “Ruin,” he wrote, “is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.” Freedom, in this context, is what we might call free enterprise, freedom having been redefined, in our age, as access to profit.

So, the tragedy of the commons lies in taking the commons away, appropriating what smallholders might have conserved, and instead placing the common resource — like the groundwater beneath the Midwest — into the gears of capitalist markets.

That’s fossil water, that was deposited there thousands or millions of years ago, and its recharge rate is less than an inch a year, while we’ve see the water level drop more than 200 feet in many locales.

The water being sucked from the ground at enormous rates is not principally being used by small farms, but by massive agricultural and industrial corporations, which are sucking the land dry. Like they enclosed the commons across England at the start of the Industrial Revolution, displacing the commoners who streamed to the cities to become factory workers, and ‘improving the land’ for industrial-scale farming.

In the US today, we are seeing the end result of industrial-scale farming: the last drops of groundwater are pumped out so alfalfa, soy, and corn can be sold and transported far away, along with the water still in the crops.

And when the farms fail, where will the farmers go? What factories will hire them, when all the water is gone? Have we lost our commonsense?

…

(By the way, the Eula Biss essay is a wonderful piece of writing, linking romantic poetry, her trip to Laxton, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism in glorious prose. Read it. You’ll thank me.)

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The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.

| Walter Lippman, Public Opinion

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A diagnosis with no way out is just a more sophisticated despair.

| Lough For Ever

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FOBO

A new term for our times: FOBO, or ‘fear of becoming obsolete’. This spirit haunts the corridors of the workplace under the specter of AI.

I first encountered the concept in an Economist piece1, in which Bill Winters became the poster child for heartless capitalism in the age of AI job threats.

Bill Winters, the chief executive of Standard Chartered, an emerging-markets bank headquartered in Britain, made waves recently when he talked about a planned 15% reduction in back-office jobs over the next four years. Four words in particular landed him in trouble: a reference to the replacement of “lower-value human capital” by financial capital invested in automation. The kerfuffle provides an instructive case study in a problem now faced by almost every manager: how to talk about the effect of artificial intelligence on jobs.

I doubt he will live down the dubious distinction of saying out loud what corporate boards and the C-suites have been saying — and calculating —behind closed doors.

The Economist continues [emphasis, here and above, is mine]:

Even if the numbers do not point to widespread lay-offs yet, an AI backlash is well under way. It has spawned the acronym “ FOBO ”, for “fear of becoming obsolete”.

A literature review by Magnus Sverke of Stockholm University and his co-authors—published in 2019, before the start of the generative- AI age—found that [job insecurity] is generally associated with worse health outcomes and decreased job satisfaction. But firms suffer, too. In theory, job insecurity might benefit organisations if it spurred greater employee effort. In practice, it seems to lead to impaired performance.

A paper by Wen Wang of the University of Leicester and her co-authors analysed data from a national survey of British employees and employers, covering over 16,000 respondents at 1,100 organisations. The researchers found that objective measures of job insecurity, such as cuts in working hours, were generally associated with lower levels of employee commitment, but that this effect was weaker if workers viewed bosses as being honest, reliable and fair.

In one way, Winters was right: by increasing job insecurity, he decreased productivity and therefore the value of those made more insecure.

The anonymous author of this Economist piece starts by acknowledging the inherent adversarial nature of workers and management, but then slides into defeatism, asserting that governments will have to clean up the mess made by companies dumping the newly ‘obsolete’.

Firms and employees have different incentives—they are not all in this together. And the burden of managing widespread disruption will fall largely on governments.

Alternatively, governments could get ahead of this catastrophe, regulate the wholesale rollout of AI, slow the transition, and give people more time to transition careers where necessary.

Remember the China Shock's impact on blue-collar manufacturing, which rusted out manufacturing industries and from which the Rust Belt still has not recovered, 25 years later. A similar AI Shock may be on the near horizon.

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AI Shock

Annie Lowrey, earlier this year2, tried to assess how bad a massive downturn in white-collar work could get, and she starts by saying no one knows:

Businesses really are shrinking payroll and cutting costs as they deploy AI. In recent weeks, Baker McKenzie, a white-shoe law firm, axed 700 employees, Salesforce sacked hundreds of workers, and the auditing firm KPMG negotiated lower fees with its own auditor. Two CNBC reporters with no engineering experience “vibe-coded” a clone of Monday.com’s work-management platform in less than an hour. When they released their story, Monday.com’s stock tanked.

I don’t think anyone knows what will happen, or even what is happening now. AI technology is changing at an exponential pace, and changing the workforce in a thousand hard-to-parse ways. But if AI quickly eliminates white-collar work, the country is going to end up in something much stranger than a downturn, and something much harder to recover from too.

[..]

If white-collar layoffs cause a downturn, Washington might not be able to restore hiring and lift consumer spending as it has done before. Businesses wouldn’t need the skills workers possess. Firms wouldn’t want to hire the legions of accountants, engineers, lawyers, middle managers, human-resources executives, financial analysts, PR types, and customer-service agents they just laid off. (Writers would be fine, I choose to believe.) The United States would have a “structural” unemployment problem, as economists put it, not a “cyclical” demand problem.

She quickly shifts from the macro to the micro view: away from mass economics to people and their lives.

If AI eliminated the need for office work, many people would be unemployed for years; their earnings would potentially fall, their mental health would deteriorate, and their chance of finding a new position would diminish with every month that passed. Plus, the unemployment system isn’t designed to support six-figure earners. Most state payments max out at $500 or $600 a week, a quarter of what many upper-middle-class employees earn. Young workers would face their own challenges: The pool of entry-level white-collar jobs would shrink, as it already is, pushing recent graduates’ income down for years, even decades.’

She makes the obvious comparison with the rise of the Rust Belt:

White-collar workers would go through what blue-collar workers went through beginning in the 1970s. Advances in machine technology improved productivity and depressed employment in Detroit; Pittsburgh; Gary, Indiana; and Worcester, Massachusetts. Rust Belt communities fell apart and never recovered. Then China joined the World Trade Organization, and globalization spurred another round of job losses, causing even more permanent damage. Affected workers ended up poorer, less happy, and less healthy. They died sooner. Their kids were worse off too.

Retraining/upskilling has a terrible record for blue-collar workers, and for jettisoned white-collar workers it might be worse: a 50-year-old accountant might not be open to becoming a plumber, for example, and a 30-year-old middle manager at a software company might not want to become a nurse.

And UBI is no answer; just a band-aid [emphasis mine].

UBI is a dystopian outcome, not a utopian one. For families to thrive in this new post-work paradigm, the government would need to redistribute a lot more than $1,500 per person per month, necessitating confiscatory taxes on corporations—taxes they would fight tooth and nail. The bigger problem would be that Americans would hate a world without work, where the jobless rate floats at 30 percent instead of 4 percent. Many Americans like working.

And what are the societal implications of widespread unemployment?

Long-term unemployment destroys people’s mental and physical health, and generates toxic societal unrest. Politicians love saying that Americans want a hand up, not a handout—and they aren’t wrong.

Lowrey doesn’t explore the unrest angle very deeply, but the unemployed elite is a well-understood powder keg, a source of revolution.

Edgar and Co, in Surplus Elites and Revolution, looked into historical revolutions where ‘elite overproduction’ (to use Peter Turchin’s term3) led to countries being turned upside down:

What happens when elite supply vastly outstrips elite demand? You get a massive pool of highly educated, hyper-ambitious, wealthy “game-losers.” These frustrated individuals become counter-elites. Because they cannot enter the existing structure through traditional means, they have a rational incentive to use the “popular immiseration” (the angry, underpaid working class left behind by the wealth pump) to attack and consequently overturn the system. This oversupply of surplus elites fuels the bitter ideological warfare seen in media and politics. Factions of elites weaponise populist anger to destroy their rivals through the dry, deadwood created by popular immiseration, and the desperate leaders willing to strike the match are produced by elite overproduction.

We’ve seen the glimmerings of populist anger pulling the US and Europe into warring camps, already. Now push millions of well-educated, relatively flush, and now furious ‘elites’ into a growing pool of joblessness.

Lowrey ends ambivalently:

I don’t really think society will come to this. Throughout history, people have used technology to become more productive and prosperous without reducing the demand for human labor overall. Then again, maybe I’m just in denial.

Tell it to those who lost well-paid jobs in the manufacturing centers of the Rust Belt, and who have never rebounded. But they didn’t have a wave of well-educated, ambitious elites to lead them.

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What spark of humanity, of possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at 6 every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures?

| Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

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Raoul Vaneigem

I confess that until this week, I was unaware of Raoul Vaneigem and his highly influential writings, like The Revolution of Everyday Life. Adam Nossiter’s obit makes clear his lasting impact on French and global discourse [emphasis mine]:

Mr. Vaneigem’s prescience in diagnosing French discontent with post-World War II prosperity, reiterated in dozens of subsequent books that tapped into a rich vein of national unease, made him an intellectual reference point in France over the next 50 years. When French citizens took to the streets, as they so often do, journalists frequently came calling to get Mr. Vaneigem’s take.

[…]

The world of mindless work, of materialism, of authority; the state’s instruments of control and repression — these were the targets of Mr. Vaneigem’s poetic prose, honed into easily remembered phrases that were well-suited for a street demonstration or a university wall.

“Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?” he wrote at the outset of “Revolution.” The question perfectly captured the anomie of the generation that would take to the streets less than a year later. Material well-being was as unsatisfactory as a safe 9-to-5 job, in his view.

Mr. Vaneigem hit communism as hard as capitalism. “The great collective illusions, anemic from shedding the blood of so many, have since given way to the thousands of prepacked ideologies sold by consumer society like so many portable brain-scrambling machines,” he wrote.

Vaneigem’s anti-work — and anti-Maxist and anti-establishment — positions may be ripe for reassessment in the 21st Century. Are we returning to the ‘ecstasy of revolution’1 that peaked in 1968 Paris?

Vaneigem was an early member of the avant-garde Situationist group, along with Guy Debord and others, decrying the dark negatives of capitalism. But his way diverged, focusing more on the tensions of everyday life, leaving grander political theory to Debord, whose The Society of the Spectacle stands as a takedown of both mainstream and Marxist dogma. As Robert Zaretsky wrote in 2017 during Trump 1.0,

With the presidency of Donald Trump, the Debordian analysis of modern life resonates more deeply and darkly than perhaps even its creator thought possible, anticipating, in so many ways, the frantic and fantastical, nihilistic and numbing nature of our newly installed government. In Debord’s notions of “unanswerable lies,” when “truth has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to pure hypothesis,” and the “outlawing of history,” when knowledge of the past has been submerged under “the ceaseless circulation of information, always returning to the same list of trivialities,” we find keys to the rise of trutherism as well as Trumpism.

In his later work, “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,” published almost 20 years after the original, Debord seemed to foresee the spectacular process that commenced on Jan. 20 [Trump’s first inauguration]. “The spectacle proves its arguments,” he wrote, “simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space left where anything can be publicly affirmed …. Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it likes, once or three times over, and change the subject, knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte.” After Trump’s inauguration, the actual size of the audience quickly ceased to matter. The battle over images of the crowd, snapped from above or at ground level, simply fueled our collective case of delirium tremens.

Debord and Vaneigem turn their smudged mirror to reflect today’s world, just as much as that of the Twentieth Century. And in Vaneigem’s quote, at the top of this issue, is a perfect echo of today’s disaffection in work, and its place in our lives: ‘bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures’.

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Short Takes

More AI Slop

And here is a company that sent a job application rejection email to a candidate that read, “Write a warm but generic rejection email that sounds polite yet firm. Do not mention specific reasons for rejection. Make the candidate feel like they were strongly considered even if they weren’t. Remember to use candidate name and company name variables.”

| Jim Edwards, Fortune

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Yes, we are still workaholics

This article uses labor force surveys from 160 countries to build a new microdatabase on hours worked covering 97% of the world population in cross section. We also construct time series spanning over 20 years in 86 countries. Hours worked per adult slightly decline with GDP per capita but are weakly correlated with development overall. Hours worked by the young (aged 15–19) and elderly (aged 60+) fall with development, driven entirely by growing school attendance and public pension coverage. Hours worked among prime-age adults (aged 20–59) are stable with development but undergo a great gender reshuffling: falling hours per male worker have been exactly offset by increases in female labor force participation in many countries. Labor income taxes are strongly negatively related to hours worked across countries. This correlation is attenuated when controlling for social spending and disappears when further controlling for working hours regulations. Both social spending and working hours regulations are associated with lower hours worked.

| Amory Gethin, Emmanuel Saez, Global Working Hours

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Resurfaced 2026-07-19: Job applicants have rights, don’t they?

In The Hunt for a Job Has Never Been Worse. These Applicants Are Fighting Back.2, Jessica Grose makes the case that job applicants have rights, no matter how AI-ified the hiring process is.

She says AI doesn’t seem to be helping employers find the candidates they (say they) need, or shortening the time involved. Meanwhile, applicants interact with AI systems and often receive no feedback on their applications.

As employers continue to use A.I. to rationalize the process of identifying strong applicants, applicants have begun to use similar tools to game the systems evaluating them. The vicious cycle thus begins: Employers buy or build new tools, which job seekers cotton on to, and on and on. It becomes a futile “Spy vs. Spy” showdown instead of a useful way to meet the ostensible goal of giving qualified people jobs.

This is a problem that seems as if it could be solved only through a return to some analog processes and better regulation at the federal level that forces employers to make their current methods of evaluation more transparent and fair.

Or just make the process legible for the applicants.

And what sort of regulation could be employed?

The most important remedy for job applicants is likely fixing the laws around automated hiring at the federal level so that there is much more transparency about the use of A.I. and your personal data.

New York City’s laws could be a model for such legislation, my newsroom colleague Steve Lohr pointed out in 2023. “The city’s law requires companies using A.I. software in hiring to notify candidates that an automated system is being used. It also requires companies to have independent auditors check the technology annually for bias,” he wrote.

[Emory University law professor, Ifeoma] Ajunwa also thinks that the Fair Credit Reporting Act should apply to all A.I. companies that collect data on applicants and then give them a score. Applicants should be able to access that score and “check it for inaccuracies, and also demand a correction from whoever holds that file,” she said. This is the argument behind a class-action lawsuit filed in January against Eightfold AI, a company that uses a data set that includes the profiles of more than 1 billion people. The plaintiffs want transparency into how they were scored and what information was used to assess them.

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In some sense capitalism is already behind us. We live here in its fevered midst, to be sure, but a recognition is emerging, especially among younger generations: It isn’t sustainable. The devastation of the natural world; the mindless consumerism; above all, the human misery that corporations trawl the world to extract,…

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[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.

| Suzanne Langer

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Peter Turchin says elite overproduction leads to an increase in inequality, and then a decrease in societal cooperation:

How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects a direct, causal connection. High inequality is corrosive of social cooperation and willingness to compr…

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