November 29, 2020
Why do Harvard seniors take jobs they're going to hate?
Welcome to the Weekend Reccs. Today’s world is curious and cacophonous. This newsletter delivers an eclectic sample to read, watch, and ponder over your weekend. There’s a lot of economics and politics, but there is also so much more.
New here? Be sure to subscribe to never miss an issue and please share a post with your friends. The links marked with asterisks (*) are the recommended reads.
Hi friends,
I hope you all had a restful Thanksgiving. Read to the end for a special announcement.
The Long Read: Prestige and its Discontents*
This week’s long read jumps off from a piece by one of the smartest people I know, Wes De Silvestro.
Wes takes aim at the tendency of Ivy+ graduates to enter consulting, tech, and finance roles in a certain set of firms (e.g. McKinsey, Google, Goldman). His piece is centered around the concept of prestige and how it weighs on career calculus. I don’t think any of his analysis is necessarily inaccurate. I do, however, think there is another version of the story that is worth considering — not because I think Ivy+ navel-gazing is that useful but because I think, as Wes implies, we can learn something generalizable from it.
Perhaps these students at elite institutions are making rational career decisions in a world facing an overproduction of elites, a struggling middle class, and poor alignment between economic value and societal value.
I have thought a lot about the last sentence of this column, which received renewed interest earlier this year. While I don’t buy much of what I’ve read by Peter Turchin, even in the linked article, this one sentence (“An excess of young people with advanced degrees has been one of the chief causes of instability in the past.”) seems worth considering.
We certainly feel as though we are at a moment where there is an overproduction of elites. There is no shortage of those who, on paper, have a ticket written to the top echelon of society but instead find themselves struggling and feeling aggrieved by an economy that does not support them and a political climate that is unable to address the fundamental issues that arise from a changing world.
Nobody needs convincing that we are in a period of incredible wealth inequality and a troubled middle class. This only will grow as we barrel deeper into an asset-light, intellectual-property-heavy economy which necessarily rewards superstars — as Greg Mankiw puts it, nobody wants the 12th-best tax preparation software.
With higher inequality and dim prospects in the middle class there is fiercer competition for reaching that top echelon — even if you don’t dream of being fabulously wealthy.
This competition is not just constrained to the present generation. As Richard Reeves lays out in Dream Hoarders, intergenerational economic mobility is a zero-sum game — to reserve their kid a spot in the top 20% of the income distribution a parent must necessarily block someone else’s kid out. This sort of reserving probably only happens in rare cases if parents think most folks in the middle class are doing just fine. But if you think that the fall is far, you’ll be lining your kid up for selective preschools, high-octane extracurriculars, and prestigious internships, and will certainly seek out the best public school districts and attempt to block any policy changes that might threaten your student’s seat.
In such a world of fierce competition, even among parents of small children, why would any student risk losing their spot at a top firm to be an entrepreneur or to work at a nonprofit? It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and that Bain contract is a golden ticket into the lower upper class, kid! Go forth and multiply (…in an Excel template that was built for a previous case).
This is not to say defaulting into this well-trodden path is a good choice, only an understandable one for an anxious college senior, and perhaps one that would be different in a world of widespread after-tax real wage growth. If we saw a prosperous middle class — or at least a contented one — students might be more willing to hang their hat at a lesser known firm or strike out as an entrepreneur. One can hope that in that world we’d have fewer burnt-out and unhappy recent graduates with enormous opportunity, little direction, and heaping dread about make a wrong choice.
I highly recommend subscribing to Wes’s newsletter. You can do so here.
The Quick Links
Shoehorning in UAP* An exquisite deep-dive into Libre Institute and the Libre Initiative, which functionally are the Latino-focused parallels to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and Americans for Prosperity. There is too much in the article to completely unpack here, but an important thread I’ve seen with the Koch network is that they know the rules so well that they can exploit them. For me, perhaps the most important sentence in the whole piece was: “Several staff members told me that, as contractors, they worked for the Libre Initiative during election years and for the Libre Institute during off years.”
While 501(c)3s cannot formally coordinate with 501(c)4s given their differentiated status (non-profit organizations vs political advocacy organizations), Libre and AFP have proven that you can build community ties and trust through classes, outreach, and services inside a tax-advantaged, non-partisan 501(c)3, and then transplant all the community goodwill and human capital (in the form of organizers’ knowledge of communities) into a partisan 501(c)4 by transplanting the staffers themselves.
To see more of this sort of activity at work you should pick up — you guessed it — Upending American Politics, which touches on similar activities in Wisconsin and North Carolina, where the staffer transplantation takes place between AFP and state Republican parties. Here, too, are groups that legally cannot coordinate but can sing from the same hymnbook by trading staff.
I continue to be a sucker for scrollytelling* An overview by Timur Abbiasov of their economics job market paper. The paper itself has very clever methods and a fascinating question (Do parks promote racial diversity?), but the brilliance of the scrollytelling stands out. Although the site is rather bare, Abbiasov uses it to break down a central accessibility problem with academic papers: print figures are necessarily static. Hopefully we’ll see more authors move in this bold direction and improve the information pipeline between academia and the public. (s/o Connor Murphy)
Defense is the Best Offense* A US nuclear deterrent may render counterstrikes ineffective — there’s an open question whether such a successful deterrent actually increases the probability of nuclear weapon use.
In a Galaxy Far, Far Away* The universe is constantly expanding and everything in it pretty much moves around in some way, so how can you keep track of a tiny spaceship far away from home? Bonus — I’ve been to that pictured lighthouse (Bodie Island, NC). It is one of several lovely lighthouses in Eastern NC.
Water Machine goes Brrr* To better withstand the winter take cold showers.
2020: A Utah Odyssey* Mysterious monolith found in remote desert.
Lagniappe
Take a tech shabbat.
Graph(s) of the week
[@kate_ptrv] COVID-19 causing widespread loss of smell appears to have caused scented candles to receive lower reviews due to customers thinking the candles lacked scent. More on smell this week feat. Terry Gross here. (s/o Benedict Brady)
[the Fed] One problem with owning a home is not wanting to move once you lose your job.
Starting next week, The Long Read section will feature a limited series through the end of the year: Vaccinating Against Bad Economics. We’ll take a look at four bad economics takes that you will definitely hear in 2021, break down why they are not accurate, and proffer a better view of the issues. If you know someone who might enjoy this (or need to read it!) please forward them this email so they know to subscribe.
Your friend,
Harrison