My Wife, Equality, and That Which Is Not Seen

NOTE: My wife in no way put me up to this post. Rumors that my busy travel schedule and an accidental trip down the Midtown Direct line to Mount Tabor have me in the doghouse are completely false. More seriously, these are my opinions, not hers, which should go without saying but often doesn't.

Economists, especially of the rightward-leaning variety, like to cite Frederic Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window when they talk about the consequences of government spending, or how economic decision-making has invisible secondary effects, and lots of other things besides. (One of the nice things about parables, whether they come from Jesus or an economist, is that they can be applied pretty broadly.) This parable comes from an essay called, "That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen", and they show that a broken window, which some people might call an economic benefit because it forces the owner to spend for repairs, is actually a misallocation of resources because it diverts that spending away from a more productive channel. 

I'm now going to abuse that parable a little bit, and say that we most often observe the effect Bastiat is describing when it comes to well-meaning rules. So, here's where my wife comes in. She is "That Which Is Not Seen", the unnoticed victim of rules that are meant to protect women and in particular working mothers. In short, I believe that the rules and regulations meant to protect women in the workplace are in fact keeping her out of the workplace.

A bit of background. My wife, Kim Reed, is a very talented person who could be doing any number of things (check out her vastly more interesting blog if you want a sample) but has focused, career-wise, on product development. This is in essence the science of taking an idea from a designer or artist (or company bigshot, as the case may be) and figuring out how to get it made at commercial scale and at a cost the market will bear. She's done this for companies making curtain rods, dinnerware, watch bands and, most recently, high end jewelry. Kim felt like her job at Tiffany & Co. was a sign she had made it in New York, and that it would open up lots of options in her career. She felt that way when she got pregnant, even though she intended to return to work there after our son was born.

But she decided she wanted to take six months instead of three months, and Tiffany wasn't cool with that. They said they'd consider her for other roles when she was ready to come back, but somehow that hasn't worked out. My belief is that, in a company that is predominantly staffed by women of child-bearing age, they didn't want to set the "bad precedent" of allowing too much employee flexibility around maternity leave. And since the law says you are protected for 12 weeks, and then pretty much on your own, that makes 12 weeks the default, and woe be it if you feel like you need more time. 

Now, I don't begrudge Tiffany the right to make the best business decision for their company, and I suppose (although her reviews both there and everywhere else she's ever worked would make it seem unlikely) that they didn't consider her a particularly productive employee. But I do think that the laws that "protect" women treat them as a uniform group and define (and thus limit) what they can expect from a company. Twelve weeks is an arbitrary number, not some well-thought out limit on the needs of new mothers.

I wouldn't have thought much of what happened with Tiffany if it hadn't been for her subsequent experience in the job market. My wife has had a large number of interviews, and with a handful of companies has gone back multiple times, and left with the expectation of an offer. And a pattern has emerged. All of a sudden she stops hearing from the company, and either they completely ignore her (again, after multiple rounds of interviews taking significant chunks of her time) or give a non-answer as to why she is no longer being considered.

Here, I think, other rules that are meant to help women are actually hurting Kim. You are, as an employer, not allowed to discriminate against women with children. You aren't even allowed to ask about someone's family status or how it might effect their work. But you can't expect people not to think about it. What's more, once you hire someone, you risk an expensive and frustrating lawsuit if you let them go and there is a perception you might have done so because of their family issues. You might not be allowed to say any of this (and you're in it deep if you ever write it in an email or otherwise document it), but if you're hiring you can't help but think about it. And so I believe that a woman with a young child, who hasn't been working for a while, is now seen as a potential legal liability as much as a potential asset. And, if you decide not to take the chance, but can't articulate an approved reason to reject the person? Well, easier just to never call back and let the issue, as the said in Office Space, "work itself out naturally."

I normally try not to get into personal issues on this blog, but I think this is a great example of understanding how the mind works and how we react to incentives. The government, for understandable reasons, sets up rules that are meant to protect women in the workplace. But people don't necessarily respond to the intent of the law (which is to ensure women aren't treated worse because they have children) but rather to the effects of the law (which is to make it legally easier to deal with men or women without children). Women like Kim who have children have to behave within the strictures of the laws that have been created or else they are suspect, seen as a problem waiting to happen. 

I think that one of the greatest benefits to society in the last century has been the unlocking of women's potential to impact society for the better. We have, in essence, doubled our human capital. But a lot of what passes for "women's rights" is condescension that assumes all women want the same things or need the same protections. And I think, based on the evidence of Kim and many other women I've known, that if the genders competed on an entirely even playing field, us men are likely to get trounced.

On Meaningful Work

Next week, I'm leaving the best company in the country to work for. I didn't quite make it a year. Frankly, though there were plenty of reasons, the simplest reason why is that I wasn't happy at Google. Sure, the food is great, the people are nice and smart, and there are plenty of cool perks. But none of that is sufficient if you don't find the work you're doing engaging, and you think another job can offer that.


In the course of researching this post, I came upon the following anecdote:

Three men are found smashing boulders with iron hammers.  When asked what they are doing, the first man says, "Breaking big rocks into little rocks." The second man says, "Feeding my family." The third man says, "Building a cathedral."

Most of the time, I couldn't shake the feeling I was just smashing rocks at Google, and I tried to feel better by telling myself I was doing it to provide for my loved ones. But I never felt I was building a cathedral here, or even a house. In some ways, Google's cathedral has already been built: their search engine is one of the greatest gifts to the modern world imaginable. And I know the leadership envisions building other ones just as impressive. It is likely that the failing to see past the rocks is mine.


In the same article where I found that story, the author, a psychologist who studies what makes work meaningful, outlines three principles:

First, the work we do must make sense; we must know what's being asked of us and be able to identify the personal or organizational resources we need to do our job.  Second, the work we do must have a point; we must be able to see how the little tasks we engage in build, brick-by-brick if you will, into an important part of the purpose of our company. Finally, the work that we do must benefit some greater good; we must be able to see how our toil helps others, whether that's saving the planet, saving a life, or making our co-workers' jobs easier so that they can go home and really be available for their families and friends.

 A lot of the meaning in work, then, has to come from within. If I can see myself contributing to the welfare of my coworkers, it might matter less that I am bored by the tasks I need to complete during the day. But it would be wise if more companies thought through how they can make a job sensible, purposeful and beneficial. Other researchers have looked at the link between a sense of meaning at work and job performance, and found that productivity rises significantly when employees are engaged in work they find meaningful. And yet most companies look to "sugar high" motivators like perks and bonuses to provide lasting motivation: 

When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.

If I worked in HR, I would make it my business to figure out what meaning my best employees found in their work, and try to instill that sense of purpose in as many other people as possible.


So, the last question: why do I think I'll find more meaning in my new role (returning to the advertising agency I left for Google) than I did in this one? Well, I'm going to take my direction from this amazing Clayton Christensen article and use the uncertainty and change in advertising as a chance both to share what I've learned and to learn from others. Here's Christensen's advice:

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

I think my life will be judged, by myself and those I care about most, by how I grew as a person, what I built, and who I was able to help. I'm going to a place where I think I can accomplish a lot in all three areas. I can't wait to dive back in.


So my question for you: what do you think makes work (and life) meaningful?

The Future of...Me

I have it damned good. I try to remind myself of that as often as possible, because I find it remarkably easy to slip into pessimism, or even outright cynicism. And since so many good, exciting, transformative things are happening right to me right now, I thought I could risk your indulgence in writing a more personal post than is normal. (I will strive to ensure it is less than completely irrelevant to people who aren't me.)

First, my wife and I are expecting our first child this summer. This has triggered an instant change in every parent we know from trumpeting the glory of child-rearing to cackling about the lack of sleep we'll be getting for the foreseeable future (estimates range from 6 months to 18 years of sleeplessness, depending on the parent, or perhaps on the child). I am hesitant to say anything back to people who have already run the gauntlet, but can I say in general that our society's attitude towards parenthood is completely screwed up, and is based on the notion that every moment of life should be the best it possibly can be? I don't look at my child as a moment-to-moment affirmation of my life choices and how great I am, but as an investment. I'm not particularly thrilled at the notion of a baby (it's exciting, but I know it'll have plenty of pain), but I'm increasingly ecstatic as I think about that child being 3, or 10, or 18, or 25. The point is that you're investing yourself in the future of humanity and, in particular, in expanding your family to include another member who will be loved, and love back. Sure, a baby loves in its basic way (and that way is damned hard to resist), but that love matures and grows and becomes more worthwhile with time, and THAT'S why I wanted to get married and have children, dammit! (Ok, rant over.)

The next (potential) big change is buying a house. Is it any surprise that the first change triggered the second? As many flaws as there are in the system of home purchasing as there are, I have to say that it's extraordinary that our society fosters the purchasing of property by new families, even as the country (or many parts of it) get more crowded. We still have this cultural commitment to family and individuality that I think is, for the most part, a very healthy and even critical thing. We still allow and encourage people to chart their own course, and making a decision to buy a bit of land and a house to call home is a big part of that, both practically and symbolically. I wonder if, between a rising population and increased governmental and social pressure to live a green lifestyle, if this institution can be preserved in the future.

With all this change, the most stable aspect of my life is work. But is that stability only an inch deep? I don't mean that I won't be working at Cline Davis & Mann in a year, but that the whole industry might be on the cusp of transforming in ways that will make my actual work very different than it is today. Right now healthcare marketing is all centered around personal one-on-one relationships between the physician and the sales rep. No one entirely likes this state of affairs, but it has persisted because reps do provide a needed service (quickly disseminating information about new drugs) and because the physician is a relatively small market not efficiently reached by mass mediums like television. (There are exceptions, but I'll leave that aside.) But both of the above assumptions no longer entirely true. Reps increasingly don't have time or access enough to share meaningful information, and there are other ways to effectively target small markets. Everyone in the pharma advertising industry, just like the consumer advertising industry, acknowledges that digital relationships are somehow going to supplant or and the very least supplement traditional communications. But no one knows how. My contention is that the 'creative' aspect of advertising will primarily provide inducement for an audience member to enter into, or deepen, a digital relationship. The business end of advertising will be making use of this relationship in a way that doesn't turn the audience off. It's going to be a delicate dance, and we're so far from figuring it out the way that rep brochures and journal ads are figured out that everyone who thinks about it gets intimidated.

So my future doesn't look to hold a lot of stability. But it does hold adventure, and excitement, and possibility. And I have a great wife and family as the base to build on. And so, onward!

A Healthy Dose of Fear

My good friend Ben blogs over at A Healthy Dose, with some interesting, and often very personal, observations on the interaction between healthcare and culture. He flashes up some interesting stats here, with a link to more here, that imply one of two possible futures:

1) Baby Boomers retire in droves, swamp the government and corporate systems designed to ensure their retirements, and suck up an increasing share of the nation's resources.

2) Baby Boomers 'work until they drop', stay in the labor market a decade or more longer than expected, and lock up positions that otherwise would have been freed up for younger workers. (James K. Gilbraith at Foreign Policy argues that we should lower the retirement age for this reason.)

Our best hope is for a Goldilocks outcome, where enough Boomers keep working to avoid overwhelming the safety net, but enough retire to open positions for the younger unemployed. But it is just as likely that, given the number of Boomers, there will be too many retirees and too many senior workers at the same time.

Unfortunately, while our society has finally woken up to the problem, we don't seem to have the first clue what the solution to our senior citizen boom might be.

How Many People Do We Need?

Just to be clear, this is not a post on population control, exactly. Rather, I am forced to wonder what is going to happen to the vast majority of mankind when civilization only depends upon the productive work of a few of us.

Why am I worrying about this? In this post, Walter Russell Mead boldly challenges the complacent thinking that the 'developed world' has reached some sort of pinnacle, and reminds us that from the perspective of the future, many of our fundamental institutions are likely to look downright awful. He cites a few examples in the quote that follows:

Much of today’s production that doesn’t take the form of mind-numbing, repetitive work in factories comes in the shape of mind-numbing, repetitive work in offices. Government, corporate, legal and non-profit bureaucracies suck up inordinate amounts of human time and talent. It is not at all clear that the output is worth it — or to put it another way, we should be able to get equal or better results with less work. Information technology offers increasing opportunities to transfer more and more of the routine scutwork of administration over to machines, setting the office drones free to do more rewarding, more socially useful things.

Moreover, our bureaucracies are not just cumbersome time and creativity sucks; they are expensive as well. Federal, state and local government can become significantly cheaper as we strip out the layers of bureaucracy, dispense with work rules developed in some cases back when carbon paper ruled the world, and restructure patterns of organization and management that date back even farther. People who like low taxes and people who like on big government can agree at least that by systematically making government cheaper we can have all the government we need at rates we can afford.

All very true, but do you notice one common thread? All of these reforms imagine fewer people doing the work done by many today. I'm sure Mead would contend that freeing up these people from drudgery will allow them to create, innovate, and add new value to the economy, and that's true. But increasingly, those innovations will require far fewer people to grow them than the great businesses of the past. In manufacturing, men are replaced by robots. In services, the personal touch is replaced by the convenience of online ordering. In entertainment, fewer and fewer people chase the same experiences provided by the same few musicians, writers, and artists. I can even point to the relative traffic of Mead's blog versus my own as another example: the better thinkers get the traffic and the links.

We have 10% unemployment now, and maybe close to 20% underemployment. However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the wealthy have recovered quite nicely from the recession, and seem increasingly to be detached from the concerns of their middle-class countrymen.

Historically, innovation has always had positive effects throughout society, from top to bottom. There have always been disruptions (Mead even cites the destruction of the family farm a century ago), but overall change has been for the good. And in all likelihood, it will be in the future, as well. However, we might be moving towards a future where a few people live lives of meaning, creativity and success, while the majority draft along in their wake, doing the jobs that can't be automated or living off of the charity their success allows. I'm not sure if this is likely, but I'd ask this: where are the middle-class jobs of tomorrow going to come from?

Declining Opportunities for "Earned Success"?

I am quite intrigued by Arthur Brooks' arguments about "earned success", which I have seen in several places but which are summarized nicely here. To briefly summarize, Brooks suggests that it is not ultimately income that correlates with happiness, but the feeling that our success (which yes, is often reflected in earnings) is the result of our drive, and that we have contributed in some way to improving humanity's condition. Whether that is by solving a scientific problem, making something useful for someone else, or creating beauty doesn't matter.

I agree with the notion, but I find it mildly depressing, because I believe that the future will offer fewer professional opportunities for earned success. Most of the people I know (and admittedly, New Yorkers and other northeast urbanites/suburbanites are an unrepresentative sample) do not feel their jobs are contributing towards anything bigger, at least not in any way they can observe.

And the future seems likely to create more of the same. Most of the jobs created in the western world are based on various types of information manipulation: packaging facts and ideas for consumption. It may be lucrative, it may even be challenging, but it quite often feels detached and utterly meaningless to the people in these positions. Our corporations, our systems of production and distribution, are so large that few people really have a view of how their contribution fits in. In other words, they feel they are part of a machine and not in control of their own success. This is even happening in healthcare, where doctors and nurses frequently complain that they spend much more time doing administrative tasks and less tending to patients.

This is not cause for despair, exactly. There will always be jobs in research, in the arts, and in engineering that offer what corporate positions increasingly do not: a sense that your effort makes an impact. And for the rest of us, we may have to find earned success in our families or our avocations as we are denied it in the working world.