What Ted Lasso Can Teach Us About Panda Express

And more from this week...

Sorry for the late delivery of tonight’s edition. I’m on the road, my laptop charger died, and my computer then ran down its battery. But still I persisted. An Uber ride to the nearest Best Buy and back got the electrons flowing again so I could bring you your one thing to read this week: Aaron Renn’s commentary on “Andrew Tate or Panda Express: Which Way Young Man?”

No sooner had the Vivek Ramaswamy sleepover discourse died down, you see, than Chris Rufo leapt into the fray, tweeting:

The Panda Express near my house is offering $70k/yr plus benefits for the assistant manager. You can make $100k/yr working at Chipotle for a few years and working up to store manager. … Yes, cost inflation is a huge problem, especially in housing, but my point is that even non-college, non-trade jobs that require minimal experience or credentials can yield a six-figure salary in a few years. More ambitious young people can, and will, go for knowledge work, entrepreneurial ventures, and high-prestige employment. But that will always be limited to a small group. It's fine and good that young guys without a degree can live the St. Louis suburbs and make $145,000 a year as a UPS driver.

This, says Renn, is a great example of “Spiritual Boomerism,” which he defines as “A person, typically a man, who has achieved high status/success/home ownership/secure retirement/marriage speaking down from his lofty heights towards those who don’t have them.”

The piece makes a number of good points about what’s wrong with this attitude on its own terms, even when its underlying impulse may have some kernel of truth. (“If you want to succeed, you actually do have to work and work hard. Everybody has to pay their dues. You’re not entitled to success.”) Read the whole thing.

I’d like to add a point, though, which is that in this instance there is no kernel of truth. Rufo’s reality is painfully and obviously incoherent. And he is wrong in a way distressingly common on the Old Right, and indicative of a deeper failure of not only empathy, but also basic critical thinking.

We went through all this a little over a year ago, when Oliver Anthony opened “Rich Men North of Richmond” with the shrill lament, “sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay.” Not so, retorted National Review executive editor Mark Antonio Wright. “My brother in Christ, you live in the United States of America in 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working ‘overtime hours for bullshit pay,’ you need to find a new job.”

American Compass happened to have a survey in the field that same week, attempting to assess the quality of jobs in the American labor market. What share of workers had jobs that met our definition of “secure”, with annual earnings of $40,000 or more, at least somewhat predictable future income, health benefits and paid time off, and satisfactory control over scheduling? Less than half. For works that had not earned a four-year college degree, the figure was less than one-third.

As I wrote at the time:

It is easy to tell one man [quoting Wright], “If you’re the type of guy who’s willing to show up on time, every time, work hard while you’re on the clock, and learn hard skills — there’s a good-paying job out there for you. Go find it.” But can you say that to 70 percent of the American workers without a college degree, more than 50 million people?

Maybe all 50 million just lack initiative, personal responsibility, that old American pluck separating National Review writers and American Enterprise Institute scholars from the unwashed masses. But were that the case, the problem would remain that the American labor market’s structure could not offer them good jobs even if they had made investments to pursue them. Confirming this are the tens of millions of Americans whom the Federal Reserve Bank of New York classifies as “underemployed,” because they have earned college degrees but are still in jobs where one is not typically held. Fully 40 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed, and that figure remains at one-third for all college graduates.

Frankly, I struggle to understand the mindset of someone who sees a pamphlet advertising a $70,000 job at Panda Express and concludes that $70,000 jobs are widely available to anyone who wants one. If the nation consisted entirely of people choosing not to work and people working as Panda Express assistant managers and up, that would be one thing. One could at least hypothesize that the unemployed were not willing to put in the time and effort to work the job. But as American Compass’s secure-job research indicates, and basic Bureau of Labor Statistics figures confirm, we do not live in that nation.

Nationwide, the median wage is $23.11 per hour. For “food preparation and serving related occupations,” which employ more than 13 million people, the median wage is $15.50. Those people are not too lazy to get a job. They do not have some hang up about working in food service. So what could be going on? Why haven’t they all pursued jobs at Panda Express? At the American Enterprise Institute, Scott Winship has shown that young men’s median annual earnings in the 2010s were between $35,000 and $40,000, lower than what they had been in the 1970s. Do none of them know what UPS is paying?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, they’re questions that someone would presumably consider and have answers for, if planning to make the case that a help wanted sign at the local Panda Express is a better measure of labor market conditions than the experience of tens of millions of hard-working Americans struggling to make ends meet. Rufo is a filmmaker, maybe he could do a short film where he approaches random people in $30,000-per-year jobs and brings them to Panda Express and helps them apply for and get $70,000-per-year jobs. I’m sure it would work really well and be really inspiring.

Or, just spitballing here, perhaps we should take a cue from Ted Lasso in the famous dartboard scene. Says Ted:

One day, I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman painted on the wall there, it said “be curious, not judgmental.” I like that.

So I get back in my car, and I’m driving to work, and all of a sudden it hits me. All them fellas used to belittle me, not a single one of them was curious. You know, they thought they had everything all figured out and so they judged everything and they judged everyone, and I realized that their underestimating me, who I was had nothing to do with it. ‘Cause if they were curious, they would have asked questions, you know?

The judgmental model of conservatism has not only been (unsurprisingly) a political failure, but also prevented recognition of the very serious problems that emerged in recent decades. Sure, it’s easy to spot “opportunity” if that’s all you’re looking for, then place blame anyone who doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity you’re sure you found, and then declare mission accomplished. Be curious, not judgmental. You will be able to understand America a lot better and do a lot more good.

BONUS LINK: The Wall Street Journal reports that “Even Harvard M.B.A.s Are Struggling to Land Jobs.” Kristen Fitzpatrick, who oversees career development and alumni relations for HBS, says, “going to Harvard is not going to be a differentiator. You have to have the skills.” Which I guess is not something Harvard thinks it does a differentially good job providing?

THIS WEEK AT COMMONPLACE

Commonplace is here! Follow us @commonplc. We’re off and running with a phenomenal set of pieces from the first couple of days. My welcome note explains the magazine’s purpose and aspiration.

Then, check out our first two feature essays:

In Defense of Travel Teams | Michael Brendan Dougherty

Travel baseball and the dance mom circuit drain the wallets and time of suburban families. But I’m not going to stop taking part.

Remote Work Created a Baby Boom. Can We Keep It Up? | Patrick Brown

Work-from-home isn’t for everyone, but there are ways to make it function better for parents and employers.

And, we’ve got commentary from a great set of contributors on a wide range of topics:

Ditch the Grindset | Fred Bauer

American workers aren’t just widgets.

A Good Word for National Libertarianism | Robert Bellafiore

Working through one of the New Right’s internal divisions.

A Realignment Must Mean Something | Henry Olsen

The Trump-Vance admin should beware the lessons of European conservative-populist coalitions.

TikTok’s First Amendment Ruse | Joel Thayer

How the Court can restore sanity back to the First Amendment.

Good Riddance, Facebook ‘Fact Checkers’ | Drew Holden

Previous content moderation policies at social media giants buried, not defended, the truth.

And, this week on the American Compass Podcast, Michael Brendan Dougherty joins me to discuss his essay on high-commitment kids as a cornerstone of community.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?

How Trump Can Rebuild America | Oren Cass, Foreign Affairs

Hey, that’s me! And this is my essay on the eve of Trump’s inauguration considering how his own brand and priorities, overlaid on the areas of greatest agreement within the disparate factions of his coalition, point toward the promise of an agenda focused on reindustrialization.

Kids Turn to a Mental-Health Chatbot to Share Their Anxieties | Julie Jargon, Wall Street Journal

These stories just keep getting worse. Here we meet a 14-year-old who says of her mental-health chatbot, “Sometimes I forget she’s not a real person.” The chatbot says things like, “It sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate at the moment, Taylee. It’s understandable that these changes and responsibilities could cause stress.” To another user, the advice is, “It’s understandable to feel this way when you want something that someone else has. Sometimes, talking about it can help. Would you like to explore ways to cope with these feelings or discuss them further?”

Wow! So easy to forget that’s not a real person! Even better, the parents get a list of topics discussed and even a word cloud of the user’s emotions, plus helpful “Insights” like “Happiness from recent purchase. They expressed happiness about buying Taylor Swift book, indicating a positive mood trend.”

In a healthy culture, we would trust our visceral disgust at all this. But in the culture we have, that’s “irrational.” If the app “helps,” defined as efficiently alleviating a narrowly defined problem, that represents prima facie evidence that it is “good.” The burden of proof shifts to the luddite to explain in technocratic cost-benefit terms what could be wrong.

Sometimes I’m inclined to take the time to frame the objection accordingly. But sometimes it seems to me that even the concession to that way of understanding the issue is itself part of the problem. At what point are we allowed to notice that constant efforts at supporting teen mental health with “evidence-based” “interventions” keep coinciding with a worsening of teen mental health that demands yet more unnatural interventions? Are we allowed to consider changing course?

Maybe It Was Never About the Factory Jobs | Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic

When you hear people say the Democratic Party is not yet grappling seriously with its political challenges, essays like this are what they’re talking about. The logical error here is so painfully simple that I feel almost foolish having to describe it. But Chait spent 2,500 words making it, so I guess I should. Somehow, he seems never to have encountered the concept of “necessary but not sufficient.” On issues like trade and industrial policy the Biden agenda moved away from neoliberalism, he argues, yet Biden did not win working class voters, ergo moving away from neoliberalism does not help win working class voters.

Could other issues have driven working class voters away, even as these economic policies helped at the margin? Chait does not engage the possibility. What different approach to economic policy would have fared better? (More free trade agreements? Accelerated offshoring? Union busting?) Chait suggests none. The only coherent causal chain here is that Chait likes neoliberal policy, therefore he thinks that’s what Democrats should do. Which is fine—you do you, Jonathan. But it’s not political analysis.

How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms | Ross Douthat with Marc Andreessen, New York Times (podcast/transcript )

The whole conversation is interesting, but I particularly appreciated Andreessen’s point that “The view of American CEOs operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong. … I would say Goal No. 1 is, ‘I’m a good person.’ ‘I’m a good person,’ is wildly more important than profit margins.” This is surely true, and a point that Adam Smith made in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, when he observed that nature had endowed mankind:

not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men. The first desire could only have made him wish to appear to be fit for society. The second was necessary in order to render him anxious to be really fit.

Ironically, Andreessen notes, “the only true groups of people who think that corporate CEOs are just profit-optimizing machines are people on the far left, who are full-on Marxists, who really believe that, and then people on the far right, who I think fear that the CEOs are like that but also maybe hope that they are and then later realize that they’re not.”

Bonus Link: I wrote about this in one of my favorite essays from American Compass’s early days, “Constraining the Corporation,” which is worth revisiting here:

While Smith’s vision of the well-functioning market entailed butchers, brewers, and bakers acting out of self-interest rather than benevolence, implicit was an assumption that self-interest included both the profit motive and the desire not only to appear, but also to be virtuous. Anything less, and they would not be really fit for society. Milton Friedman’s version of the free market turns this thinking on its head, defining responsibility solely in terms of shareholder returns and thus denouncing virtue as selfish. Smith never endorsed, nor would he even recognize, such an economic model. Perhaps Smith misjudged the human character. Or perhaps the legal, economic, and social pressures that once supported business leaders in their virtue have given way to ones that discourage or outright prohibit it. Either way, faced with an unvirtuous marketplace, Smith would surely be among those demanding constraints.

Enjoy the weekend!