“The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.”
Willy Loman – the salesman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman – offers that advice to his son. Sure, the neighbor’s son is a hot-shit lawyer who just argued a case in front of the Supreme Court. That’s fine, and he may be liked, but is he well-liked? That’s the point Loman is making. You see, being well-liked is what really matters – that’s where the big money is, and the power, and, most of all, the respect. Everyone knows that. And Miller’s rather heavy-handed 1949 play explores what an empty delusion that is – and how it destroys a man, and a family, and by implication a nation. The play is a unpleasant critique of the American Dream – bourgeois consumer capitalism is a complex system that prospers and grows by leaps and bounds if you have what is in essence a nation of salesmen, where everyone is selling everyone else stuff no one really needs. That is the consumer economy. But then how do you sell all that useless crap? You use your winning personality. People like you, they come to trust you, and then they hand over their cash – and you hand them the keys to that cherry used Studebaker, or that third life insurance policy. The ones who succeed in such a system are those who are well-liked, extremely well-liked, and Miller hammered us over the head with the emptiness of such a socioeconomic system, and its sadness. The play was a tragedy, after all. It was also a critique of capitalism in its way. If you don’t have the patience for Karl Marx or Thomas Piketty, read the Miller play – or if you’re just not that into reading, go see it. There’s always a revival playing somewhere. Actors love it. They love chewing the scenery – boasting, then in despair, and then overwhelmed by the cruel world, in an oddly noble way – and Loman is easier to play that Lear. The language is flat, plain American.
The cruel world that finally overwhelms Willy Loman is, however, not exactly the world that Miller imagined. The tragedy here was caused by a structural change in the economy at the time. It wasn’t that glad-handing salesmen were becoming obsolete, replaced nerdy technical experts who actually had to know their stuff – the triumph of expertise over personality. Salesmen were becoming obsolete. Grocery stores were becoming self-service supermarkets, where no one was selling you anything. You rolled your shopping cart down the aisles and dropped things in. The “selling” was done in newspaper display ads, and on radio and then television, and eventually with coupons in the mail, and now on the internet. Now the supermarkets let you check out and bag your own groceries at automated kiosks, and if you prefer no human interaction at all, order on line. In most cities, Amazon or others will drop your order at your front door in an hour or two. Department stores followed suit, replaced by places like Target and GAP and whatnot. Walk around, grab what seems cool, try it on if you can find a dressing room, and then stand in line at the check-out area. There are no salespeople, as such – you’re on your own – and there are no bookstores anymore, where you can chat with the staff about what’s good, or controversial, or interesting. Amazon killed those too. Read the reviews on their site and order the book, or don’t. No one is pressuring you. Car salesmen may be the next to go – find what you want on line, compare prices in the area, use the service that finds the dealer who will provide the one car at the price you found, print the coupon and take it to the dealer. Hand them a check and they’ll hand you the keys. You can do that in Los Angeles now. Who needs Willy Loman? Miller’s tragic hero was one of the first to be done in by a structural change in the economy. A wave of change was coming. He was the first to go under.
Miller couldn’t have known any of this at the time, but there was a new disconnectedness coming, far beyond anything he imagined, and in the Los Angeles Times, Marc Dunkelman – the fellow whose new book is The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community – explains things this way:
In many cases, we’ve been fooled into presuming that modernity serves only to broaden our horizons because people with different perspectives are now only a few mouse clicks away. But that assumption conflates the ability to connect with the same predilection. Even beyond the careful algorithms Google and Facebook use to circumscribe what we see online, technology lets us make contact with one another without registering our full identities.
Two generations ago, a member of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society looking to hock a vintage baseball card would likely have had to come face to face with a buyer – even if she’d pinned a picture of President Kennedy on her lapel. Today, by contrast, a tea partier can sell memorabilia to a Latino immigrant on eBay, and neither is any the wiser for it. The spirit of American commerce once compelled us to know one another in depth. Today, by contrast, we frequently engage entirely on the surface.
We can’t discount the blessings of the new norm. Most of us find comfort living inside pockets of like-minded acquaintances. And keeping antagonistic communities separated can tamp down the tension between them.
But if the magic of the American experience was born in the cultural mélange of our broader diversity, something has been lost along the way.
That may be so. The spirit of American commerce did once compel us to know one another in depth, but that was Willy Loman’s world. He woke up one day at the dawn of the next new world. He couldn’t deal with it. He couldn’t accept it. It was there, nevertheless, and Arthur Miller could have never imagined how disconnected everything and everyone in would become, and now we have our own specific problems.
One of those problems is that one third of us don’t work for anyone now. In Reason Magazine, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, reports that at least a third of Americans are currently doing freelance work, and most of those are doing that freelance work as their main source of income, and they have an association that has just confirmed that:
A new report shows some 53 million Americans – or 34 percent of the U.S. workforce – are now working as freelancers in some capacity. “This is more than an economic change,” asserts the report, a joint effort from the Freelancer’s Union and freelance marketplaces eDesk and eLance. It’s also “a cultural and social shift” that will “have major impacts on how Americans conceive of and organize their lives, their communities, and their economic power.”
This is the next new world, and it may be just fine:
When it comes to millennials, we see an even more freelance-heavy generation. About 38 percent of those under age 35 are freelancing, compared to 32 percent of those 35 and older. Millennial freelancers are also more likely to look for job with a “positive impact on the world” – 62 percent of the younger group said this was important, versus 54 percent of older freelancers. Finding freelance work that’s “exciting” is also more important (62 percent versus 47 percent). …
To its credit, the new report remains relatively agnostic about whether these updated employment realities are better or worse than the previous paradigm(s), an agnosticism I share. There’s just no use crying over a culture and economy we won’t get back. What matters is what is happening now, why it’s happening, and how to adjust our political and cultural expectations to accommodate it.
At the Washington Monthly, David Atkins has a few things to say about that:
Libertarians, of course, tend to get excited about this trend, seeing it as a pure form of free interactive capitalism in line with the much-ballyhooed “sharing economy.”
However, as a proud freelancer myself for over a decade (I fall into the “freelance business owner” category), I can attest that it’s not really a workable model for society. As with all things in unregulated libertarian capitalism, opportunity potential is high but the downside risk is enormous. It’s often difficult to make long-term plans since you aren’t sure if the freelance work is going to keep coming – and the nature of freelance work itself means that it’s hard to even plan a weekend getaway, much less a vacation, because if there’s a project required to happen at a certain time you can’t pass up the opportunity to take it on.
Project-to-project work is a bitch, and the irony is that you do become salesman, marketing your skills twenty-four hours a day, every single day. People need to know you can swoop in, fix everything, and be gone the next day (or month) – and they’ll never have to add you to their payroll, or provide any benefits, or even think of you again. It’s a great deal. People need to know that. You’re main job will actually be drumming up new business. People need to know there’s one really amazing hired gun out there, and that happens to be you. You will lead a life of never-ending self-promotion, just like Willly Loman. And you’ll never have a steady job.
Some might find that exciting – a life of telling others how wonderful you are, then having to prove it over and over again, to new people each time, and the freedom that comes with having no boss, really, but Atkins doubts that everyone feels that way:
Not everyone has the personality to deal with the level of uncertainty involved in freelancing. Most people like to know what they can count on, and don’t want to be forced to constantly be doing business development and singing for their supper every night. Also, a freelance economy reduces the necessary commitment of employers to their employees, whom they can increasingly treat as contractors to be discarded at the earliest convenience.
Elizabeth Brown at Reason is probably right that the new employment models are here to stay and we can’t go back. But what follows from that premise is that where corporate America can or will no longer provide the required amount of certainty in people’s lives, it falls to government and society to make up the difference through increased safety nets, guarantees and even basic income programs.
There are those who would say that certainty is for wimps, or girly-men or something, not for Real Americans who are all about rugged individualism and personal responsibility and self-reliance. They would say there is no required amount of certainty in people’s lives at all. Those who require certainty are like whiney little children. They should grow up, but Atkins doesn’t think so:
Simply letting the economy slide into the enforced uncertainty of the freelance economy without helping workers achieve dignity and stability is not an acceptable outcome.
Is that the government’s business? Libertarians, and most Republicans, might think not. Everyone should be on their own, like adults, damn it. The massive disconnectedness that Arthur Miller only hinted at in 1949 has become politically institutionalized.
Ben Casselman and Andrew Flowers cover how this massive disconnectedness works economically:
In the three years following the end of the Great Recession, the typical American family’s income declined 5 percent, its wealth fell 2 percent, it saved no more for retirement, and it was saddled with even more student debt. The only households to see income gains were the highest earners, and the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest widened.
These are the dispiriting results from the Federal Reserve’s latest triennial report, the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which was released on Thursday. The SCF is a massive enterprise, conducted by the Fed in conjunction with the U.S. Treasury Department. More than 6,000 families were interviewed in 2013, and their responses were weighted by demographic characteristics to get a realistic national picture.
And it wasn’t a pretty picture:
Young people were hit especially hard. Thursday’s report provided yet more evidence that today’s young people risk becoming a “lost generation” economically. The median family headed by someone under 35 earned $35,300 in 2013, down 6 percent from 2010 and down nearly 20 percent from 2001. Those figures may understate the magnitude of the problem: Many young people are living with their parents because they can’t afford to strike out on their own; they aren’t included in the Fed’s figures because they don’t count as their own households. Young people have also become less likely to own their own homes (35.6 percent listed their primary residence as an asset in 2013, down from 40.6 percent in 2007) and much more likely to have student debt (41.7 percent in 2013, up from 33.8 percent in 2007). Whether by choice or by necessity, young people are also taking fewer financial risks, holding more of their assets in cash and less in stocks.
We seem to have managed to disconnect an entire generation from the economy, perhaps permanently, and this may be the first of many generations to follow. David Leonhardt argues here that this will turn all of these young folks into severe conservatives, or even Tea Party folks – the government let this happen, so government is bad and we should less of it, or none of it, because they were betrayed by government. They’ll vote Republican for the rest of their lives, unless this or that Republican is a useless squish.
That’s an interesting theory, which glosses over the fact that both Republicans and Democrats got us into this – no one’s hands are clean – and Atkins comments on this too:
Mention the problems of young households to a politician or pundit and they’re likely to talk about student loans and the minimum wage. It’s true that student loans are a huge burden and that the minimum wage needs increasing. But those two policy items are just the bare beginning of the problems facing Millennials in the new economy.
The bigger challenge is low wages and high cost of living – particularly in terms of housing. Older generations are fond of making fun of Millennials for claiming to be broke while buying the latest iPhone – but particularly in urban areas where most of the attractive jobs are, no amount of scrimping and saving will allow the average young adult to break into the real estate market or even afford a decent rental. So why not splurge on a gadget or some vinyl records now and again? It’s not as if most young people can make real financial progress toward the biggest goals without acquiring a job that puts them into at least the top two (if not the very top) quintile of American incomes.
The disconnection between the very top and everyone else is complete now. We just woke up in the next new world. Like Willly Loman, we can’t seem to accept it, and we certainly can’t deal with it:
Right now neither party is addressing that problem. There are a lot of young people who make above minimum wage and never went to college. There are a lot of hardworking young people without student debt burdens who are nonetheless struggling to just get by. And no policy solutions seem to be forthcoming for them. Republicans offer even more brutal economic libertarianism, while Democrats tend to continue to focus on inflating asset values while minimizing the damage to the elderly and those who are “left behind.”
Yeah, keep inflation and interest rates low, so all assets cost no more than they ever have, or cost even less, even if it stalls the economy and causes massive unemployment. It’s a delicate balance, but here Atkins gets into the nuts and bolts of that decision:
Talk about jobs and wages to most sectors of the American left, and you’re likely to hear that the problems in the modern economy are mostly political rather than structural: essentially, that changes to tax, labor and trade law created an easier environment for companies to reduce wages and outsource labor.
That is certainly true to a large extent. But it’s also undeniable that the march of technology has done much to alter the labor market terrain, often in subtle ways. When people think of mechanization they usually think of a big robot taking a manufacturing job from someone in a hard hat. But most of the biggest effects are much more subtle: instead of machines making cars, think primarily of Amazon.com slashing retail jobs, or Instagram killing Kodak, or big data analysis putting armies of researchers out of work. Better communications and travel technology has also made the global supply chain more efficient, eliminating some of the roadblocks to outsourcing labor.
In the next new world, here already whether we like it or not, there are fewer and fewer jobs, period, although we pretend that’s no so:
One of the most common responses to this argument is that technological change has always been with us, and that new jobs always arise to replace the old ones. But that hasn’t been the case. Internet-related jobs still haven’t come close to replacing the quantity and quality of work that the digital revolution eliminated.
Another argument is that the manufacturing work usually to be done by human hands and that if we just institute trade protections, those jobs will come back onshore.
Isn’t it pretty to think so? Sure, so Atkins cites an item on how robots are taking Chinese jobs too:
Industrial robots, whose market in China is showing promising signs as workers get replaced due to higher labor costs. A lot of domestic robot manufacturers want to join the party and slice a piece of cake with foreign competitors. But they seem to be facing a tough road ahead… According to International Federation of Robotics, nearly 180,000 industrial robots were sold worldwide in 2013, with a fifth of those sales being in China.
In 2013, China surpassed Japan for the first time to become the world’s biggest and fastest-growing robot market with sales of about 37,000 industrial robots .Experts predict that China’s robot market will grow to be more than one trillion yuan in a year or two. The Lucrative industry has attracted many investors who’re diving in. In Shanghai, a robot industrial park is currently under construction and that’s expected to generate and send out around 60 billion yuan worth of products. Parks of the same scale are also being built in the cities of Shenyang, Qingdao and the municipality of Chongqing.
Atkins:
The reality is that there just isn’t enough high-paying work available in the private sector for the number of people that want to work, and that problem is only going to worsen over time. The answer isn’t just to rejigger trade and tax policy. The answer has to be a greater expansion of government-sponsored jobs, and disconnecting basic human dignity from the necessity of “having a job.”
Good luck with that, in a society where one’s moral worth is measured by one’s financial success – a sign that God has favored them with the right genes and the right connections, and the right cutthroat attitude, and His good luck in all things – where the free market is the final arbiter that judges men’s souls. What else was Romney’s forty-seven percent comment about? The job you have is everything. Ask Willy Loman, and now add the latest factor. Everyone is now quite thoroughly disconnected from each other, and becoming disconnected from traditional employment. We’ll all be freelancers soon, hustling up whatever consulting work we can find, on our own. Willy Loman had it easy. He wouldn’t know what to make of all this. Maybe no one knows.