Friday, September 10, 2010
Nations and career choices
David Brooks touches on a subject I’ve been thinking about lately: How the nation’s destiny is tied to the career choices and prejudices of its citizens. It seems too many people don’t want to get their fingernails dirty – or have anything to do with industries in which fingernails get dirty. David explains it better:
David Brooks touches on a subject I’ve been thinking about lately: How the nation’s destiny is tied to the career choices and prejudices of its citizens. It seems too many people don’t want to get their fingernails dirty – or have anything to do with industries in which fingernails get dirty. David explains it better:
America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.Did Michelle Obama really say that? If so, it’s one of the more damning quotes about the ‘as we did’ mindset of those occupying the White House. … Wonder why the administration has a hard time connecting with small-business owners? They get along fine with their fellow Ivy League grads and service-sector types on Wall Street. But they'll never quite connect with the struggling owner of a small sheet-metal factory in Illinois as long as they look down on the profession.
It would be embarrassing or at least countercultural for an Ivy League grad to go to Akron and work for a small manufacturing company. By contrast, in 2007, 58 percent of male Harvard graduates and 43 percent of female graduates went into finance and consulting.
The shift away from commercial values has been expressed well by Michelle Obama in a series of speeches. “Don’t go into corporate America,” she told a group of women in Ohio. “You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. ... Make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry.”
