American work ethic
Does the recent economic collapse show that we as Americans have lost our appreciation for a strong work ethic and other virtues necessary for capitalism to work? Steven Malanga makes a good case for it in an outstanding article in City Journal:
I don't think there's much doubt he's right. My question for us is what can we do about it? Are there churches or schools in Monroe County with the time or energy to dust off of those books on "moral education" and start using them again?
After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, from business, from popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue. Not even Adam Smith—who was a moral philosopher, after all—imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes, and monetary policy moves won’t be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic—not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.
Read the whole thing here.I don't think there's much doubt he's right. My question for us is what can we do about it? Are there churches or schools in Monroe County with the time or energy to dust off of those books on "moral education" and start using them again?
posted by Will Davis at
10:42 AM
I find it highly disingenuous that people think the problem with modern society is that the *workers* in our system lack a proper work ethic. I'd argue that the opposite is true - there are plenty of hard working people out there who struggle every day to provide for themselves and their families. The real problem lies with upper management who willingly sacrifice the safety and livelihood of the average employee to maximize their own end-of-year bonuses. That's not pursuit of profit, that's greed, plain and simple. The CEOs and the chairmen and the hedge fund managers are every bit as guilty of lacking a strong work ethic, if not moreso, than the the guy who works two shifts for minimum wage to get by.
The rule of the game in a capitalist system has always been "maximize profit by any means necessary." Any claim towards business ethics or the like is the exception, not the rule. The industrial era that Malanga seems so forlorn for was the same one where small children worked 8-10 hour shifts in brutal factories, where employees who were mangled by heavy equipment were thrown on the street to beg, where managers literally locked employees in to die in fires and where blacks and other minorities were expected to remain deferent and out of sight. Gosh, those were the good old days, when men of business were more ethical!
Despite the rose-colored glasses that Malanga (and you, I would presume) seem to look back on the pre-Information era with, industry has always made profit at the expense of the employee - at least in the hazy halcion days of yore, it was possible for someone working an industrial job to save their pennies and buy into the system, because there were factory jobs (mostly unionized) that allowed workers that luxury.
You'll note that the "massive culture shift" discussed in the article happened in the late 60s and early 70s - i.e., the beginnings of deindustrialization. The high paying working class jobs that allowed a guy with a high school diploma to save up and make a middle class living are long gone, shipped to the other side of the world, leaving little but low-paying service sector jobs under which it is virtually impossible to do anything but survive paycheck to paycheck. But hey, it's just not profitable to keep manufacturing here in the U.S.!
But I've gone on a tirade. Long story short, I disagree. The "American work ethic" has never applied to the upper echelons of society. Why should we expect it of anyone else at this point?