The End of the Routine

I think that Henry Allen is guilty of over-analysis in his op-ed in the Washington Post this morning. I don’t think that “knowledge workers” (a term I despise) condescend to people who work with their hands. I think they’re just ignorant and inclined to puff themselves up. Isn’t that the charm of the TV program Undercover Boss? What a poor job the “boss” who goes to work in the trenches does at the dirty, repetitive, unglamorous jobs that need to be done but are paid so much less than he is?

Why are today’s television programs about stockbrokers, lawyers, and doctors rather than about bus drivers and sewer workers? I don’t think you need to look for some social trend in which everybody despises people who work in factories or as janitors to explain it. Carl Reiner didn’t write a comedy program about a television comedy writer who lived in New Rochelle, New York because he despised blue collar workers but because he was a comedy writer who lived in New Rochelle, New York. He wrote about what he knew.

Product placement is probably a component, too. It’s easier to work expensive luxuries that people don’t need into a program about people with high incomes than it is to put them into Ralph Kramden’s apartment.

Add specialization and nepotism and you’ve got it. There are programs written by aimless 20-somethings with a target audience of aimless 20-somethings.

I’m at a loss to explain Dancing With the Stars (other than the skimpy costumes worn by the female competitors).

However, there’s an important remark in the op-ed that I think that Mr. Allen completely fails to understand:

Here’s Walter Russell Mead, a noted policy scholar, saying in a recent blog posting that revolutions in information technology create “the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work.”

I’d thought these revolutions had liberated stand-ups from this work by throwing them out of it, but what caught my eye was the “meaningless and repetitive.” What an odd thing to say — Mead might just as well be describing what it’s like to be a stockbroker or a big-firm lawyer. He isn’t, though, because these are knowledge-class jobs, and this rap about “meaningless” is usually reserved for the stand-up class.

This is what I think he doesn’t understand: the “meaningless and repetitive” isn’t just disappearing from “stand-up factory” jobs; it’s disappearing from the work of stockbrokers and lawyers as well. Those tasks are being automated. Or, in the case of the big-firm work formerly done by associates, it’s being shipped off to India and performed at a fraction of the cost.

The meaningless and repetitive has been a large part of most jobs including those of stockbrokers, lawyers, engineers, physicians, and college professors. My dad, a sole practitioner attorney (who’d been an associate at the largest firm in St. Louis until it collapsed in a scandal) used to refer to that meaningless and repetitive work as his “bread and butter business”. I think that’s true, generally.

However hard they try to protect it, I think it’s inevitable that the meaningless and repetitive will disappear from most jobs including those of highly compensated professionals. Maybe especially those of highly compensated professionals.

I don’t honestly know what the future will bring. I know any number of people who have no interest (or at least don’t think they have an interest) in “meaningful” (whatever that means—I think that meaning is something you put into a job, not something you take out) and creative work. They really just want to put in their 9 to 5, do as little as possible, get paid as much as the market will bear, go home, have a beer, and watch the ballgame on the television. Or Dances With the Stars.