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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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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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, like ore, from souls as divine as yours or mine. All of it, increasingly, in service to the pathological greed of a few thousand mentally ill men. It cannot last. What comes next may be better, or it may be worse. But it won’t be this.

| Charles Finch, Her Job Was Real. So Why Did Her Work Feel So Fake?

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2025-08-15

Robert D. Putnam, Richard V. Reeves, Boy Crisis of 2025, Meet the ‘Boy Problem’ of the 1900s

Many boys and men are struggling today, too, in an America once again disrupted by technological change, immigration and growing inequality. Since 2010, suicide rates among young men have risen by a third — they are now higher than they are among middle-aged men. The share of college degrees going to men has fallen to 41 percent, lower than the women’s share in 1970. One in 10 men aged 20 to 24 is effectively doing nothing — neither enrolled in school nor working. That’s twice the rate in 1990. This crisis demands a response equivalent to what the Progressive era delivered, not just in public policy but equally important, from our civic institutions.

We continue to fail our young men.

2023-08-15

Economists Reconsider Industrial Policy | Dani Rodrik, Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane

Better economic techniques are leading to a broad reappraisal of industrial policy, like Bidenomics [emphasis mine]:

As policymakers around the world embrace industrial policy in pursuit of a wide variety of objectives – supply-chain resilience, green technologies, geopolitical advantage, good jobs – the debate over its effectiveness is reaching fever pitch. Typically, this debate is portrayed as one where sound economics is squarely on the skeptics’ side. “There is a strong case against industrial policy in economics,” intoned one recent commentary, and embracing it “just wastes money and distorts the economy.” This is an increasingly outmoded view.

While it is generally true that mainstream economists have responded to industrial policy with knee-jerk hostility since at least the 1970s, things have been changing fast, owing to new academic research that is less driven by ideological hostility to government intervention and better grounded in rigorous empirical methods.

In the past, economists too often focused on simple indicators such as import tariffs, capturing only limited dimensions of industrial policy and conflating its objectives with others (such as raising government revenue or playing special-interest politics).

For starters, industrial policy has been ubiquitous, and its prevalence predates the recent rise in its use and prominence in public discussions.

And the prevalence of industrial policies tends to increase with income: advanced economies use it more often and intensively than developing countries do.

The results of [modern statistical research] are much more favorable to industrial policy, tending to find that such policies – or historical accidents that mimic their effects – have often led to large, seemingly beneficial long-term effects in the structure of economic activity.

Newer studies also shed light on the long-standing controversy over the contribution of industrial policy to East Asia’s economic miracle. [...] The early economic literature on East Asia’s rise had argued that industrial policies were at best ineffective. Newer analyses paying closer attention to the structure of upstream and downstream linkages in these economies reach considerably more sanguine conclusions. [...] Critics of East Asian policies thought governments could never pick the right sectors because they lacked information on where market failures were more prominent.

Princeton economist Ernest Liu has recently provided a useful guide for policymakers confronting an economy where market imperfections occur across multiple, linked sectors. In such settings, subsidizing upstream sectors generally minimizes policy mistakes. Liu shows that the actual policies used in China and during South Korea’s HCI were in line with this guidance.

Some commentators have recently criticized US President Joe Biden’s industrial policy because it “lacks a rigorous economic foundation.” The reality is that plenty of good economic research already exists on industrial policy.

I wonder if the economists stuck in the past on industrial policy are also the ones who wanted Powell’s Fed to raise interest rates — post-COVID — because they believed high unemployment was necessary to avoid a recession?

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

| Suzanne Langer

2025-08-14

Working, Fast And Slow | Greg Satell

More about slow productivity than behavioral economics, despite the homage to Kahneman.

Creating something new and meaningful is slow, often tedious work. And for long stretches, it’s not clear whether you’re making progress at all.

Like the discovery of penicillin, which languished in a journal article for ten years before a group of researchers—not the original discoverer—turned it into a widely available medicine after years of hard, slow lab work.

Apart from Fleming’s initial accident, every step required teams of people performing mundane, repetitive tasks: maintaining lab equipment, preparing cultures, and logging data. Despite the historical impact, that’s what most days looked like.

Even people who do exclusively creative work devote only a few hours a day to it. Hemingway, quite famously, wrote each morning and stopped by noon. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport notes that this pattern is common. I’ve found the same to be true in my own work. The rest of the day is spent handling more routine tasks.

Reminds me of how Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist, composer, and Prime Minister, put it:

Before I was a genius, I was a drudge.

Satell returns to his central example, penicillin, to hammer his point that the slow drudgery of daily practice is the wellspring of work of value, not just the lightning strike of insight or discovery:

Producing work of lasting value requires learning to mode shift —from reactive execution to reflective creation, and back again. The story of penicillin shows why. Each breakthrough led to a flurry of activity, with tasks that needed to be performed with efficiency and skill in the moment. Yet inevitably, that progress led to unsolved problems, which needed much slower, more reflective modes of work and thought to overcome.

2023-08-14

How Economists Missed the Big Disinflation | Paul Krugman

Inflation optimists -- like Krugman -- and pessimists -- like Larry Summers -- were both wrong. The optimists were wrong that inflation would prove small and transient. The pessimists were wrong that inflation would be high enough to require large increases in unemployment for a long period of time to bring down inflation. The optimists seem to have learned from their mistakes, but the pessimists haven’t. The Fed got lucky, because it tried to engineer a recession to bring down inflation, but the economy just muscled the recession away.

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America’s logistics boom has turned to bust | The Economist

The logistics sphere -- trucking, warehousing, freight -- has been whipsawed by economics. Overhiring and overbuilding is now being reversed as the supply-chain bottlenecks of the pandemic have straightened out and people aren’t buying rice cookers or Pelotons anymore. Yello goes out of business, Amazon closes or delays hundreds of warehouses, and 20,000 truck operators have gone bye-bye since mid-2022. However, some companies are holding onto excess workers:

Lay-offs in the industry have thus far fallen short of what one might expect given the stagnation in consumer spending, argues Aaron Terrazas, chief economist of Glassdoor, an employment portal. Having long suffered from labour shortages, many firms have been reluctant to lay off workers, reckons Tim Denoyer of ACT Research.

…

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 compromise, and waning cooperation means more discord and political infighting. Perhaps more important, economic inequality is also a symptom of deeper social changes, which have gone largely unnoticed.

Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.

| Peter Turchin, Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays (2013, but in my notes from 2023-08-12)

Given time, these surplus elites can become a counter elite, fighting the system. Look at the polarization against establishment politicians in 2026 elections.

…

I recently rejiggered my workflow in Obsidian so that files I created one, two, and three years ago are shown in each day’s daily note. This is to prompt me to scan them and to decide if I should retire them or reconsider their subjects.

It occurred to me that I should pick notes surfaced by this mechanism that are worth sharing, and post them.

Welcome to Resurfaced.

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2023-08-12

Samuel Moyn’s ‘Liberalism Against Itself’ | Becca Rothfeld

‘The central thesis of Samuel Moyn‘s daring new book, “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times,” is that Cold War liberals and their contemporary heirs do not champion a stirring vision so much as they adopt a self-protective crouch.’

She reminds us of the adage, often attributed to Robert Frost, ‘A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel’.

Rothfeld thinks Moyn is too dismissive of Isaiah Berlin, whose words she elevates:

A liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats.

…

The Hidden Value of Time | Esau McCaulley

A very family-centric polemic against time poverty, and McCaulley argues that the poor have the worst time poverty of all. He then contrasts the challenges his impoverished mother faced and his own, but as a well-off public intellectual.

McCaulley makes an oblique argument for basic income, and comes up with a great one-liner: ‘A living wage should be one in which there is space for something beyond work’. Kind of a weak ending for what should be either a direct call to action or a stronger condemnation of the status quo.

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2024-08-12

How San Francisco Longshoremen Made Their Union a Powerhouse | Benjamin Fong

San Francisco was a strong union town. San Francisco dockworkers went on strike in 1919, as in many other American workplaces, cities, and industries after World War I. That union was racially exclusive, like other unions before it in San Francisco. And not surprisingly, employers used African Americans and black West Indians as strikebreakers in 1919. That was one of the reasons that that strike failed. And then that ushered in an anti-union era in San Francisco, which was and would be the biggest and most important port on the West Coast for decades.

Employers had used divide-and-conquer tactics very effectively. And many white workers were hung up on racism. And, of course, California was the heart of the anti-Chinese xenophobia of the nineteenth century. That also played into the anti-Black racism that persisted. And so employers cleverly, cynically but brilliantly, played race in San Francisco on the waterfront. And as a result, San Francisco dock workers suffered the consequences. They lost their union. Their wages went down. The shape-up persisted. All the bad things that happen when workers are weak occurred on the San Francisco waterfront in the interwar era.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has been a strong player—although a small one—in the integration of American unions, despite efforts of all arrayed against them.

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2025-08-12

AT&T CEO’s Memo Just Made It Official: Workplace Loyalty Is Dead | Aki Ito

John Stankey says the quiet part out loud, and says the unwritten compact between workers and company have been rewritten:

‘It’s not every day that a CEO’s 2,500-word response to an employee engagement survey goes viral. But that’s exactly what happened last weekend, after AT&T CEO John Stankey sent a memo to his managers that my colleagues Dominick Reuter and Katherine Li published for the entire internet to see. Upon first reading it, I laughed at just how blunt Stankey was in his admonishment of his staff who apparently complained in the company’s survey. Here goes another executive lashing out at frustrated employees, I thought.

But the more times I read it, the more I saw something deeper: perhaps the clearest attempt yet by a major CEO to rewrite the terms of the workplace in contemporary corporate America. Last year, in an essay about the changing relationship between employers and employees, I argued that decades of layoffs, slashed benefits, and hardline management killed off our long-held norms around workplace loyalty. But I had never heard the head of a large corporation actually admit that. Now, here was Stankey — the CEO of a 140-year-old company that once epitomized corporate loyalty — declaring the death of loyalty himself. “Some of you may have started your tour with this company expecting an ‘employment deal’ rooted in loyalty,” he wrote. “We have consciously shifted away from some of these elements.”

He’s laying his cards on the table, say, this is no bluff. Take down all the inspirational posters in the cafeteria. The deal is now nakedly transactional. Late-stage capitalism sheds all posturing and mushy mumbo-jumbo about the intangibles of the relationship between the organization and the people that comprise it. The implicit mutual regard between management and the managed is erased, and all that is left are the steely jaws of the machine.

‘That “employment deal” Stankey references is known by another name in organizational psychology: the psychological contract. As I wrote last year, it’s the set of things that employers and employees believe they owe each other and are owed in return. Usually, these beliefs go unsaid — they’re more inferred by the totality of a company’s culture. What’s unusual about Stankey’s note is that he goes on at length making the implicit explicit, telling employees what they’re right to expect from the company and what they aren’t. Stankey says his workers deserve a transparent career path, a functional office, and the proper tools to do their jobs. But he says they’re wrong to expect promotions based on tenure, the flexibility to work from home, and something about “conformance” that I can’t decipher for the life of me. Most of all, he says, don’t expect loyalty.’

We don’t, Mr. Stinky.