Archive for March 10th, 2009

In addition to 4 new pieces up on Scientific American’s website, two other pieces — long in the hopper — finally went online yesterday.

At City Journal, you can read my article on The Promise and Peril of the Freelance Economy.

At Doublethink, you can read my article called The Household is Flat: The Rise of the Core Competency Mom.

Both are favorite topics of mine, so I was happy to be able to explore them at length — 4,000 words and 5,000 words respectively. So, if you’re looking for some massive Laura Vanderkam reading, enjoy!

Every month when the Department of Labor announces the unemployment rate, it makes front page news in papers nationwide. That means it must be illustrated, preferably with an eye-catching photo that will sell papers. One of the iconic images from the Great Depression was that of the breadlines, with men in overcoats (or at least non-casual-looking clothes) queued up solemnly. Newspaper editors and photographers would like to give a nod to these images.

The problem is that there aren’t a whole lot of lines generated by economic woes these days. Your unemployment checks are either mailed to you or direct deposited in your bank account. Food stamps often come in the form of electronic benefits transfer (EBT) cards. These are all fairly massive advances in customer friendly government service, but that’s a different matter. The point is, if you want to illustrate rising unemployment with a photo of a line of reasonably well-dressed people (preferably in overcoats, preferably a reasonable number of men), you have to find such a situation. Where do you look?

Career fairs! I swear, every article on unemployment has been illustrated with a photo of people lining up to enter a career fair. The obvious question, of course, is whether there were lines to enter career fairs when the economy was good as well. I suspect so — there are always new grads and people looking for new jobs in our high-churn economy — but no one ever started snapping their photos until unemployment rose about 6%.

I was fascinated to see an article in USA Today this morning in which White House press secretary Robert Gibbs attempted to define what the White House sees as the American Dream: “That you could get a job that pays a living wage, that if you got sick you wouldn’t go bankrupt, that you don’t have to be rich to send your kids to college, that you could have a secure retirement.”

I kind of thought it was more about having the freedom to pursue your goals in life through hard work — with an emphasis on the idea that anyone could become rich. You could start a business and make millions (which is emphatically still true — certainly many self-made millionaires grew up solidly middle class). Now it’s more about protecting yourself from disaster? No wonder people have accused the Obama administration of talking the Dow into the tank with its gloom and doom.