Some jobs are super fun.
Some jobs are super fun.
Some are not. How do we get labor markets to reflect human needs? A rant.
C. Montgomery Burns is of an indeterminant age but suffice to say he is very old. Hard-core Simpsons fans estimate his age as being between 80 and 104. He shows no signs of stopping, and why should he? He has an assistant who caters to his every whim at his ridiculously profitable nuclear plant! Why give up the money and the power?
The character is voiced by Harry Shearer, who is now 80. And he’s not the only old person in the game. One of my senators, Dick Durbin, is 79. Joe Biden is 81; he’s being challenged by Donald Trump, who is 77. The last article in the New York Times Magazine retirement issue is about corporate leaders who put off retirement (NYTimes gift link). They don’t want to give up their corporate jets, their power, or their prestige. A retired CEO is no longer a titan of industry, but instead just another guy hanging out at the yacht club.
A lot of jobs are more fun than sitting around and watching TV news all day, or even hanging out at a yacht club. Many jobs offer a nice combination of mentally stimulating but not physically or emotionally taxing work, with decent pay, solid benefits, and interesting co-workers. That can be hard to give up. When people at the top refuse to step down, it creates a bottleneck for younger folks looking for promotions.
Recently, Larry Fink (age 71) of asset manager BlackRock said that people need to work longer in order to keep the US retirement system adequately funded. Economically, he’s on to something, but there are two real problems. First of all, not everyone has a cushy CEO job, or any good job. Physical and emotional burnout are real conditions that lead to early retirement. Second, age discrimination is rampant in the American workplace. There are plenty of CEOs in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who prefer to be surrounded by younger people.
All of these things are true:
Some people can afford to retire whenever they want to.
Some people are able to continue working for years without creating a succession problem.
Some people should retire now, because they really should have retired ten years ago, and they are blocking younger people from good jobs.
Some people would like to work a few more years before they retire, but they cannot find jobs that make use of their skills.
This issue echoes another one, one that I cannot believe we are still discussing in 2024: whether mothers (and it’s always mothers!) should work or stay home with their children. Sure, it makes a lot of sense for one parent to stay home when the breadwinner makes millions of dollars and has a job requiring frequent travel (looking at you, Harrison Butker). For every commentator saying that mothers should just stay home, there are plenty of parents who would love to stay home but who cannot because they would otherwise lose their health insurance or be unable to pay the mortgage. They need real change, not platitudes.
It's not just Harrison Butker. Recently, author Sarah Menkedick wrote an essay (NYTimes gift link) for the New York Times that was essentially about how sad it was that some women think they can only be fulfilled by “rejecting the traditionally female realm, and achieving career and creative success.”
Fun fact, and I can’t believe I have to say this in 2024, but there’s nothing “traditional” about mothers staying home and fathers going off to the office or factory. Before the industrial revolution, the divisions between home and work were thin: on a farm, everybody must work. (Retirement isn’t “traditional”, either: on a farm, everybody must work!)
Just because middle-class white people in the United States did things one way in the 1950s doesn’t mean that that’s the right way for everyone to do things forevermore. It’s 2024, people!
Butker is arguing from the right, while Menkedick’s argument comes from the left: she says that women shouldn’t give in to capitalism by looking for fulfillment outside of the family because they should find in in the family instead. Apparently dudes can keep doing whatever, though.
I prefer to think that people are complex individuals. Things don’t have to be either/or. To me, the promise of feminism in family life is that families should be able to operate in ways that work for them, not according to predetermined gender roles. And given that we live in the most developed capitalist society in the history of the world, it should not be a surprise that parents feel that engaging in capitalism is the best way to support their families, or at least ensure that their children have health insurance.
All of these things are true:
Having a parent stay at home with young children is the best thing for some families, and they can afford to do that.
Having both parents work while their children are young is the best thing for some families, and they are able to make it work.
Having a parent stay at home with young children is the best thing for some families, but they cannot afford to do that.
Having both parents work while their children are young is the best thing for some families, but the adults are unable to find good jobs with good benefits and predictable hours.
Instead of arguing that some of these things aren’t really true, why not concentrate on the large number of families that cannot get the support they need to do what is best for them?
Childcare is thankless work in our culture. It doesn’t offer the same objective rewards as paid employment, volunteer work, or artistic pursuits. How do we say that a parent is doing a good job? By running out to buy a last-minute Mother’s Day card? That’s better than evaluating how their children turned out, especially because so much of what happens is the luck of the draw. My kid got an oxycontin prescription after he got his wisdom teeth pulled, and it made him sick. His staying away from opioids had nothing to do with my husband or I. Likewise, a lot of teenagers loved the oxy from their oral surgeon, and their subsequent addiction had nothing to do with their parents.
There but for the grace of God go I. Corporate objectives and key results are way easier to manage.
Instead of romanticizing motherhood, we could do something tangible like expand spousal IRAs, offer Social Security credits for family caregivers, and make health insurance universal. We could offer paid parental leave for all parents and universal preschool for young children. We could develop logical school schedules. We could do plenty of things to ease the tradeoffs that real people have to make every single day.
I don’t have a neat conclusion to all of this, except that we really need to rethink who does what kind of work in our culture because there are a lot of mismatches and inefficiencies. It’s 2024, and the old arguments are tired. Some people want to work and can’t; some people don’t want to work yet have to; and there’s so much in between. We need consensus that we don’t have in order to solve this.
What do you think?
All this is (sadly) so true.