Megan McArdle = Pauline Kael

[I would like to get two things out of the way before we begin. One: I don’t give a fig if Pauline Kael actually said the quote attributed to her, and I double plus don’t care to listen to any “evidence” to the contrary, or in support of the provenance of the quote for that matter. Two: Megan McArdle is a perfectly cromulent writer for the blog with which she’s been entrusted.]

I don’t read all that much stuff on these here Intertubes. I’m busy, and since I’m a content generator now, I busy myself with writing barely readable, worthless text. I’m not that big a consumer.

I did read quite a bit for a while, just to see what everyone’s about. It doesn’t take long to figger out who’s who and what’s what. But I have little interest in going to Memeorandum every day and seeing what everyone’s interested in. I already know what I’m interested in.

So ipso facto I’m a content generator, not so much a consumer, and I’ll confine my remarks to the production side of things. Someone pointed me to the remarks by Megan McArdle at the Atlantic, and they struck me funny. But because I’m a little different, It seems that I’m the only one that had the reaction I did.

Pauline Kael is famous for supposedly uttering the opinion that Nixon couldn’t have won because she didn’t know anybody that voted for him. And now Megan McArdle says everybody that she knows that could possibly write an economics blog already has one, or isn’t interested:

I was at lunch with some blog people today, one of whom wants to recruit an economics blogger and asked for names. I basically drew a blank. All of the high-traffic economics bloggers I read are either professors, in some similarly rewarding profession, or already tied up by a media organization.
I think this is becoming broadly true of the wider blog world: the biggest bloggers are either professionals, or they have an even more lucrative job.

The comments were interesting, and a few bright people I know from blog correspondence like Tim Worstall appeared with cogent comments, but I couldn’t shake off one little aspect of the whole idea as stated.

Megan says her Rolodex is fresh out of names of people who are willing, capable, and have the credentials to blog about economics. Who’s left out of her equation? Why, anyone who would know the first thing about economics.

You see, I couldn’t care less what people like Paul Krugman have to say about economics, because if they worked for me, they’d be qualified to sweep the floor and get us all lunch. You can indulge any sort of bizarre idea about economics if you have a sinecure. Hell, you have to be careful about the pronouncements of people who are already successful in the business world, as they have the money to indulge in all sorts of strange ideas now, too. I don’t really care what Warren Buffett thinks about what people that ride the bus should be doing. How the hell would he know? How the hell would an academic?

Megan McArdle, who is very bright and lively to read, says that all the people with sinecures are taken, so the game’s up. She’s not dumb. She’s blind.

Perhaps I’ve been too harsh to compare her to Pauline Kael, although Kael certainly was a very fine writer, so it’s not really less than a left-handed compliment. But my impression of economists, or more precisely people scribbling about economic matters, is that with a few exceptions, you’d all be much better off to be just like Mike Rowe, out in the landscape looking in wonder at things that average people do to make the world, and everything economic, go around. At least Mike Rowe doesn’t think he knows enough about anything to be placed in charge of the affairs of others, like most economists, academics, and writers do. He’s just inquisitive and deferential and lively.

A thermometer is not a weather god. Mind your own business, the whole lot of you, and pay attention to the people who know how an economy actually functions. Here’s a hint: You will never find even one of them in Washington DC. Not one.

Busy

Today’s throughput. There are two more piles just like this one, partially finished. I’m a road warrior today. Gasoline costs $3.45? The filling station shuts you off like a drunk at a bar at $75. Who knew? I haven’t been outdoors in a year, it seems to me.

I guess I shouldn’t have worn long underwear. It’s eighty.

(Still) No Admittance

What shall we talk about today?

By the time you are reading this, I’ll be pushing wood through a saw. I have help occasionally, but for the most part it is a solitary thing.

Many people used to work in solitary endeavors, or in small groups. Those types of situations are becoming much more common again, and many more people are joining the ranks of the fractured work force, as I have. I think it’s better in many ways.

There is an image I have in my head of the average denizen of the office building. It is not an imaginary image, as I have worked there myself. It occurs to me that it it is the office building filled with information workers that is old-fashioned, not me and my version of the work picture.

The office building is the text version of belching smokestack-noon whistle-timecard punching-id badge-break room-factory of my youth. The cubicles and the old CRTs and the in and outboxes are the assembly line of text now. That’s the modern version of the old sepia colored photo of a humming factory. You nice folks with the boxy shoes and skinny glasses and the Blackberrys and ACT folders open are the buggy whip people now. You are the people who used to wear coveralls and carry a sandwich in a pail and grind it out until you get a watch and bed with a lid. Not me.

The idea that you’d all congregate in one place made sense when there was a smelter in the back. The smelter is a server now, and you probably don’t even know where it is. There is little reason to congregate in one place between low-pile carpeting and drop ceilings just to think. It is unlikely people will continue to do so much longer.

I have a network of persons to help me when I need it. That pool is too small, but not inconsiderable. We congregate when it is necessary. We generally each have the tools we need available to us wherever we are, or go. We buy components and materials and machinery from people we will never meet, and sell the fruits of these constantly shifting associations to other persons we may never meet. In the past, I’ve even occasionally worked in occupied homes and never met the occupants. It’s not always necessary.

The little shelf outside the HR office with the brightly colored forms. The vending machine. The bagels laid out before all but the most hardy clerk arrives by a contractor no one has ever met. It’s all going the way of the dodo. You cutting edge old-fashioned people are going to have to learn to live in the world outside the office tower. The world is booming, and it’s kinda scary if your sun is of the fluorescent variety. Be brave, and do not allow yourself to be taken advantage of by those that say they can put the workplace genie back in the bottle.

I bet you’ll like it out here.