Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Three-Piece Suits, Breakfast Meetings, and Overwork
Krugman wonders aloud whether one can ever eradicate this kind of thing. I'm guessing no, since social signaling is basically baked into our primate DNA.
No, this isn’t more about “American Hustle”; it’s a commentary on James Surowiecki’s interesting piece on the cult of long hours. I don’t exactly disagree with his argument, but I’d place the emphasis a bit differently.
First of all, he’s right that for what he calls knowledge workers — I’d just say elite workers in general — the whole time ethos has changed. When I was growing up on Long Island, there was a clear class hierarchy on commute times. Early trains were filled with menial workers; the later the train the more and fancier suits, with executives starting their day at 9:30 or 10. These days it is if anything reversed: lots of hard-driving suits on the early trains, much more mixed later on.
So what is this about? Surowiecki emphasizes the incentives of employers, and their difficulty in taking the negative effects on productivity into account. My sense, however, is that the most important factor — which he alludes to but doesn’t put at the center — is signaling. Working insane hours is a sign of commitment, of willingness to sacrifice for the job; the personal destructiveness of the practice isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
To be fair, my view is partly shaped by personal experience. I’ve never worked at an investment bank, thank God; in fact, the only time I’ve had a job with a regular commute that required me to wear a suit every day was my stint at the Council of Economic Advisers in 1982-3. But during that time the centrality of discomfort as a proof of seriousness was overwhelmingly obvious. If you were at all ambitious, you wore three-piece suits every day; in a Washington July, that’s completely crazy, but that was the point.
And then there were the breakfast meetings. I can understand why busy, productive people might sometimes want to meet at 7 AM. But what soon became completely clear was that the people who insisted on those early meetings were precisely the least competent and productive guys — the economics team at the NSC, which was totally hopeless in the Reagan years, the team at Agriculture (ditto), and so on. (No offense to current personnel, who I hope are in a completely different class; there were a lot of really strange people allegedly doing economics in the early Reagan period.) It was hard not to conclude that they were making a show of being incredibly busy and hard-working; they probably went back to their offices after breakfast and read Ayn Rand novels or something.
Meanwhile, people at USTR and the Fed, who really did know what they were doing, showed no similar fetish.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/three-piece-suits-breakfast-meetings-and-overwork/
First of all, he’s right that for what he calls knowledge workers — I’d just say elite workers in general — the whole time ethos has changed. When I was growing up on Long Island, there was a clear class hierarchy on commute times. Early trains were filled with menial workers; the later the train the more and fancier suits, with executives starting their day at 9:30 or 10. These days it is if anything reversed: lots of hard-driving suits on the early trains, much more mixed later on.
So what is this about? Surowiecki emphasizes the incentives of employers, and their difficulty in taking the negative effects on productivity into account. My sense, however, is that the most important factor — which he alludes to but doesn’t put at the center — is signaling. Working insane hours is a sign of commitment, of willingness to sacrifice for the job; the personal destructiveness of the practice isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
To be fair, my view is partly shaped by personal experience. I’ve never worked at an investment bank, thank God; in fact, the only time I’ve had a job with a regular commute that required me to wear a suit every day was my stint at the Council of Economic Advisers in 1982-3. But during that time the centrality of discomfort as a proof of seriousness was overwhelmingly obvious. If you were at all ambitious, you wore three-piece suits every day; in a Washington July, that’s completely crazy, but that was the point.
And then there were the breakfast meetings. I can understand why busy, productive people might sometimes want to meet at 7 AM. But what soon became completely clear was that the people who insisted on those early meetings were precisely the least competent and productive guys — the economics team at the NSC, which was totally hopeless in the Reagan years, the team at Agriculture (ditto), and so on. (No offense to current personnel, who I hope are in a completely different class; there were a lot of really strange people allegedly doing economics in the early Reagan period.) It was hard not to conclude that they were making a show of being incredibly busy and hard-working; they probably went back to their offices after breakfast and read Ayn Rand novels or something.
Meanwhile, people at USTR and the Fed, who really did know what they were doing, showed no similar fetish.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/three-piece-suits-breakfast-meetings-and-overwork/
