James Scott shows in “State Simplification” how the need for low, transparent costs and standardized measures required by mass-manufactured commodities (with their long supply chains and global markets) ultimately prevails against the local standards of measure and flexible pricing required by artesanal products.
In the age of mass maufacturing, commodities are for the masses, and luxury items are for the 1%: Lamborghini’s, yachts and items auctioned at Sotheby’s.
In the coming digital age, a broader luxury market is developing: fine German automotive engineering, portable computers and, at the everyday level, artesanal food products of all kinds (locally-grown, fair-trade, free-range, etc.), small splurges that the the emerging 10% of university-educated professionals can routinely afford. Welcome to the post-industrial age!
Job history, that is. I’m not the Hidden Imam of the Irish Mob.
So why does a student of philosophy go to B-School, become a stockbroker, become a computer programmer, get a PhD, and then teach high school?
Good question. It’s not like it was a plan or anything.
To put it in perspective, I was ABD (All But Dissertation), something of a professional student, without a clear focus as to how I was going to wrap up my PhD, coupled with the growing realization that positions in my field, traditional political theory, only opened up when the previous occupant left feet first (aka in a body bag), as more and more of my comrades paddled off in the Law School lifeboat for philosophers without job prospects. (And a steady stream of my former students with a flair for what I do are taking the Law School lifeboat still.)
My next move was to get accepted into UChicago’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) during the night, while in daylight hours I worked as a journeyman stockbroker trainee. (My GSB course in Microeconomics gave me the credentials for later teaching AP Macro at CGHS.) I got through three Quarters of that before the combined effort proved too much, and I dropped B-School for the stock market.
My timing couldn’t have been worse; I became a full-time stockbroker, on commission, just in time for the 1983-84 bear market. There were 4 of us entry-level stockbrokers with desks side by side, in what we came to call, in the hallowed tradition of gallows humor, Death Row, as the bear market lumbered on in its ursine way.
I could have stuck it out, but when I realized that retail stockbroking is not so much explaining risks and rewards to investors as goosing macho guys into acting in the broker’s best interests, I wanted out.
“Let’s get back,” I thought, “to something with a rational basis. Let’s learn computer programming.” You must be getting the picture, by now, that I have quite the chequered past, as far as job history goes, pretty much the opposite of a lifelong Japanese sarariman.
Hence, the MS in CompSci from DePaul. I specialized in AI, partly because it was the sexy, coming field (although it hit a 20-year doldrums about when I arrived), and partly because I was still more the intellectual than the jobseeker.
In 1986, when I graduated with my degree in CompSci, there were only two job markets for AI, San Francisco (Silicon Valley) and Boston (Route 128). Chicago was halfway between: nowhere.
I did get one bite from a Silicon Valley firm, Intellicorp, a maker of expert systems. I was flown out for an 8-hour all-day interview, 30-60 minute interviews with people across different departments.
My guide for the day, charming Donna, seemed like a friend, until she ambushed me at lunch. We went to a local Chinese place, and I ordered, my all-tme favorite Chinese dish: Moo Shu Pork. It’s kind of like a Chinese taco, and therein lay the unseen danger. Lay out a flat round rice pancake (much like a tortilla), heap onto it the savory combo of stir-fried pork strips, water chestnuts, golden needles (dried lily flower buds), wood ear (a disk-like fungus that grows on dead trees), etc., liberally dabbing the pancake on one side with hoi sin sauce (Chinese BBQ sauce) and hot mustard on the other. Now, roll it up, and don’t let go til you’re done, because (just like an over-full soft taco), all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. As I bit into this nostalgic treat, friendly, charming Donna asked me to draft a randomizing algorithm on my napkin. Lunch ruined, and a body blow to my job prospects. Dunn’s Rule #1 for seeming-friendly job-interview lunches: order a no-brainer meal from which you can quickly detach yourself.
I was almost, but not quite, what they were looking for. They wanted a Technical Joe, a think-fast-on-your-feet fixer and debugger for showing off their wares at technical trade shows. I was a plan-it-out program designer (but not out of Stanford or MIT). They kept me hanging for 3 months, long enough for me to turn down a standard COBOL programming position at several $1,000’s more than I utlimately settled for.
I did finally get a job, after 31 job interviews. I was overqualified, which meant that they all knew I would not be long content with a slow-moving entry-level position — and companies hate to train people so they can leave for greener pastures.
I was the first hire of Arthur Andersen (a now-defunct consulting firm of the Big 8, now reduced to the Big 4) at Chicago Title Insurance. One of the roles consulting firms play is to “restructure” an unproductive IT department, blowing out half the staff, which puts the remaining, more productive half on notice, and hiring in fresh recruits, like me.
I worked there for 3 years. Good income. OK life. But doing something I was OK at, while watching the driven people who loved it, or whose lifetime goal was climbing the ladder (the Arthur Andersen way) was all I needed of a mid-life crisis.
Back to my first love.
And that’s why my Gables students know me.
(Half the story, anyway. Future post: why I’m not a college professor, or, at least, not one on tenure track earning a living wage.)
When All Is Said and Dunn 