Flutterby™! : opting out

Back in 2003 I linked to a story about a guy who went from 100k/year to minimum wage with the .com bust. Today John Robb had a link to a New York Times article about unemployed men:

Indeed, a larger share of working-age men are not working today than at almost any point in the last half-century, which raises the question of how they will get by as they age. They may be forced back to work after years of absence, they may fall into poverty, or they may be rescued by the government. This same trend is evident in other industrialized countries.

The article is disconnected, it conflates those who've opted out (albeit often at the expense of home equity...) because they can't get the more rewarding jobs they used to have with those who aren't looking because they can't get back on their feet after, say, a prison stint, but I think that as a culture one of the things we're going to have to deal with as the middle class shrinks are people who want skilled professional work, but are disappointed that pushing paper (or, hell, brooms) for the government is a better way to retirement.

This popped up on my radar right now because I've been pondering what I do if my current startup doesn't work out, and then I read Larry's comments about leaving his most recent job:

While I love what I do for a living and I enjoy the travel I don’t enjoy the type of travel for the length of time this past project put me through. My family life suffered, my social life suffered and my work suffered from it. What contributed even more to this depression was my realization that I was not being fully compensated for the incredible number of hours I was putting in and billing for.

Recesssions, and depressions, result when people don't think that they're getting anything meaningful out of their work. They stop buying things, businesses stop paying salaries, cycle deteriorates. As that NYT story points out, this is a global trend right now, fueled on by the real estate bubble which has made homeowners feel like they're rich on the backs of younger workers who'll be struggling to buy those homes against inflated values supporting the second mortgages that the current owners have out on them. And, as has already happened in Japan and is likely to happen given the current trends and attitudes of the administration of the U.S., the attempts to pull the country out of the malaise will involve lots of government spending on infrastructure projects that will cost more in maintenance than they'll bring in economic growth.

Making a few politically savvy contractors rich, bringing on a whole bunch of meanlingless unskilled jobs, but doing nothing for the enthusiasm for skilled work that leads to real growth.

Everybody's stuck on "passive income" and real estate rentals and similar schemes, and that's fine, but we can't all be hiring teenagers to do each other's laundry, at some point people actually have to be working hard and innovating, and have to feel like they're going to be rewarded for innovating.

Don't know what to do about it, historically these things end up getting solved when a big war sucks the nation into a state of national emergency and gives everyone a common sense of purpose, and I guess that's what'll happen this time. But it'd be kinda cool if it didn't go that way.