A Tragic View

Another great article by VDH on America. Money bits:

A State of Mind

The strange thing is that these wild swings in civilization are at their bases psychological: decline is one of choice rather than necessity. Plague or lead poisoning or famine did not destroy Rome. We could balance our budget tomorrow without a great deal of sacrifice; we could eliminate 10% worth of government spending that is not essential; we could create our own energy with massive nuclear power investment, and more extraction of gas, oil, and coal. We could instill a tragic rather than therapeutic world view that would mean more responsibilities rather than endlessly more rights. We could do this all right — but too many feel such medicine is worse than the malady, and so we probably won’t and can’t. An enjoyable slow decline is apparently preferable to a short, but painful rethinking and rebirth.

Read the whole article.

What's great and strange about VDH is how he articulates a lot of ideas I've thought about for a long time and never quite put into full formation myself. I remember graduating from college in year 2000 and thinking about my job options and thinking to myself - I want to work in an industry that makes something. And for some reason this was not easy for me to find. Isn't that bizarre? Isn't the whole idea of business and commerce to actually make something and sell it? I majored in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics because those were the subjects that most interested me and I was good at and seemed somewhat serious (vs. film or media studies or some sort of bullshit major). For whatever reason, perhaps partially due to my lack of imagination or access, all I could think to do after college were the following:

1. Go to grad school of some sort
2. Get a consulting job
3. Get a job in Silicon Valley
4. Get a job in Hollywood

That was really it. I don't remember thinking about many more options and perhaps that was a bit narrow of me. But looking over that list - few of them actually make something - in the traditional sense. Sure, Hollywood makes movies, but the jobs I would get weren't responsible for the crafting of movies. Silicon Valley makes stuff, but so many of those jobs at the time were weird speculative companies making internet crap I didn't understand. One of them became Google and others became Amazon and Ebay, but a lot of those little shops were making totally meaningless things.

In any case, it all felt distant and intangible and odd to me...here I was, a fairly smart person with decent resume and grades with a good work ethic wanting to build something of quality and there wasn't a long list of options in front of me. So much of the American economy had become about "service." Some form of client service. I ended up working for a couple years at a Consulting company. In the rawest sense, we were doing Client Service for law firms or law departments of big corporations. It just seemed strange that there were more opportunities to do service jobs than make something or provide something. Isn't that somehow backwards? How can we have more people servicing than building? There is something very counter-intuitive about how an economy like that can thrive.