In Which I Pretend I Know What I'm Talking About

Every blogger eventually becomes a crank to some degree or other -- you all know that, right? I've been at this for seven-plus years, so it's probably time for me to turn that handle another few turns and find something really nutty to obsess about.

Which is to say that I've had a thought lately that seems plausible inside my own head, though I'm sure it would be laughed at heartily by people who really know about economics. But, since I'm already typing, let me lay it out for you, and then you can explain why I'm wrong.

It's obvious that previous technological and organizational advances -- railroads, stirrups, the wheel, automobiles, the detailed division of labor, antibiotics, air conditioning, etc. -- allowed more business activity, and thus more jobs, more profits, and an expanding economy. That's the general mantra of progress, and it's a clear and obvious progression -- it may not have always seemed like a bigger economic pie to the Luddities who were thrown out of work at their looms, but there was definitely more products being produced, and a greater total value of products entering the marketplace (and there being exchanged for real money). Again, I'm no economist -- so I may be completely wrong about this -- but it looks to me like the transformation sparked by the Internet is very different: that its defining factor is that behavior that was previously part of a business process is being supplanted by similar behavior that does not generate revenue for anyone -- or, in some cases, generates substantially less revenue than the prior model did. Or, perhaps, some transformations are not as complete, so there's still some revenue attached, but not nearly as much as the pre-Internet version.

Some examples:

• Classified ads, which generated tens of millions of dollars of ad revenue yearly for newspapers, are replaced with free-to-the-user websites like Craigslist.
• Physical advertising -- primarily print, in newspapers and magazines, but some outdoor and other formats -- is replaced by a much smaller spend for online advertising.
• CDs are replaced by downloads, and ad-supported radio is replaced by promotional streaming websites and, occasionally, by ad models that bring in, again, much less revenue.
• Hardcover books are replaced with cheaper ebooks.
• Local newspapers are replaced by mostly unpaid bloggers.
• Software development companies are replaced by open source.
• Journal publishing is under pressure by the concept of "open access" -- essentially that the public should get for free the research that their tax dollars helped fund.

(I'm not even touching piracy of digital materials, since that's completely separate -- what concerns me is the devaluing of the work and the goods, even when there's some chance of payment.)

In many of those areas, there's still some money -- actually, enough money that a few superstars can grab a lot of it. That, I think, has camouflaged the larger picture, or made it look like every other transition -- there are winners and losers now, just like the buggy-whip era! But there are only a few winners, and a whole lot of losers. And there are large areas where entire job categories have disappeared, and have only been replaced by unpaid hobbyists. Sure, there are a million food bloggers out there now -- but how many restaurant critic jobs have been lost to get there?

I don't see how this is a sustainable trend for any economy: that more and more activities are done for free by people who hope they're good, lucky, and popular enough to be among the few to actually get paid for it. And I don't have any answer to the problem -- we clearly can't go backward, and those old models are pretty well smashed now, and are being smashed in more and more areas each year. But I don't like the way things are going, and I don't see how we can get from here back to any kind of economy where well-paying jobs are increasing and I can hope that my sons will do something neat and interesting twenty years from now.

Ethics: Not Always Profitable

A new Harvard Business Review study reports that male professionals with high ethical character earn 3.4% less than those with lower character.

Actually, both of those metrics are self-reported, so it may be that the people reporting high ethical character are stuck-up prigs whose careers have stagnated, or those who report low ethical character are just more likely to lie about their salary. All we can really know for sure is that men who say they have high ethical character also say they make less money.

In Which A Lying Liar Lies

Some bozo named Cameron Herold -- a consultant who clearly gets paid for making other people's working lives miserable, curse his name -- touts that "the private office is dead" and that "employees love" open plan, no-privacy workspaces.

And from this we can easily deduce that he has the kind of aggressive, hard-driving management style that shuts down all actual discussion in his immediate vicinity, because actual real people loathe those kind of offices. Really. And they say so when someone other than their boss asks them.

I also call bullshit on his claim that "a conversation that could take seconds in an open-concept environment gets needlessly stretched into minutes by walls and doors." In my actual working experience, having a meeting with people in real offices means walking in, saying "Got a minute?" and closing the door if necessary. Having a even-mildly-private meeting in an open-plan office means finding a quiet space to do so, which takes extensive checking-of-calendars, searching-of-rooms, and so forth. And those conversations in the next cube? Everyone within ten feet is desperately trying not to listen and to focus on their own work, to no avail. Every supposedly quiet five-minute conversation kills about an hour's worth of work in the surrounding area.

Also, I take great offense to his privileging of "collaboration" over actually being able to concentrate and do your own work -- most jobs are not done better by four kibitzers than by one person who actually does it. (But management consultants, as always, love kibitzing, since it's all they know how to do.)

This Herold chap is evil and needs to be stopped before he kills any more workplaces.

Creepy WSJ Article About the Ever-Shrinking Workspace

Speaking as someone who once got to work in a real office with a door, and now operates out of a noisy fabric-covered box, this has already gone too far --- but the WSJ gleefully serves up a vision of an even worse hell waiting for us.

And you know that all of the CEOs, Senior VPs and Directors who love this idea so much have big corner offices with credenzas and couches, too. How about we reallocate some of their space?