A few days ago, Tyler Cowen gave a “quite unfavourable review”:http://www.slate.com/id/2125041/entry/2125047/ to Barbara Ehrenreich’s _Bait and Switch_. Tyler observed, not unreasonably, that a job candidate like Ehrenreich’s _alter ego_, who didn’t appear to have much in the way of social networks, was unlikely to secure many offers. But as Paul Campos “observes today”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050919&s=campos091905 this logic cuts both ways – manifestly unqualified candidates can land plum positions which are far, far above their “level of incompetence”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle, as long as they have the right college room-mates.
bq. It’s clear that hiring Brown to run FEMA was an act of gross recklessness, given his utter lack of qualifications for the job. What’s less clear is the answer to the question of exactly what, given Brown’s real biography, he is qualified to do. … Brown’s biography on FEMA’s website reports that he’s a graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. … Of more relevance is the fact that, until 2003, the school was not even a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) … it’s fair to say that Brown embarked on his prospective legal career from the bottom of the profession’s hierarchy. … When Brown left the IAHA four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer–a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn’t attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the IAHA, he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of FEMA. It’s bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don’t qualify them. But Brown wasn’t a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the IAHA, he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resumé and no job. Yet he was also what’s known in the Mafia as a “connected guy.” That such a person could end up in one of the federal government’s most important positions tells you all you need to know about how the Bush administration works–or, rather, doesn’t.
Ehrenreich’s experiences as a middle-aged woman with a thin resume and no networks worth speaking of stacks up, shall we say, in an interesting fashion against Michael Brown’s experiences as a (slightly less) middle-aged man with an equally thin resume (if not a worse one) and high-level connections to the Republican kleptocratic classes. Tyler is right that personal networks count for a lot. But Ehrenreich’s riposte, I imagine, would be that the networks you have access to are a product of both your social position and your “‘ability to be a suck-up'”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/09/08/mclemee. A point which Brown’s skyrocketing career in the current administration drives home trenchantly (even now they’re hesitating to fire him).
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JR 09.09.05 at 1:22 pm
We know how he got the job at FEMA. What I don’t get is how the hell did he get the job at IAHA?
Cornhuskerblogger (CHB) 09.09.05 at 1:29 pm
image trumps reality. ask karen hughes. http://cardcarryingmember.blogspot.com/2005/09/perception-is-all.html
Richard 09.09.05 at 1:31 pm
Terrific post, Henry. Barbara E probably couldn’t have defended herself any better… RB
Matt 09.09.05 at 1:44 pm
We all know, or believe we know, that contacts and personal connections are very important for getting a good job. But does anyone think this is a very good thing? It seems unlikely that this fact makes our lives better in any of the ways we care about. (I’m not certain of that, so if people can come up with answers that’s great. But, don’t say it lets us feel connected to each other, since if we got jobs in a more rational way we could experss our connection in other ways, surely.) I don’t know exactly what the point of Ehrenreich’s book is supposed to be. But, it’s a myth of our society that connections are not what get one ahead in life (despite the fact we all know it’s not true, at least completely). So, why isn’t it an interesting thing to make this stark? I’ve not read the book, and likely won’t, but Cowen’s objections seem odd. Why isn’t showing that if you don’t have these connections you’re screwed an interesting thing?
Russell Arben Fox 09.09.05 at 1:45 pm
I’m not sure it’s really a defense of Ehrenreich (whose Nickel and Dimed is a great book that suffers from the same, massive flaw which Tomas Frank’s book does: a total inability to actually take seriously the culture out of which the subjects of the book come from) to point out that there is a thin, thin line which separates being a suck-up from being part of a communal network. The former debases and abuses the latter, surely, but that doesn’t make the meaning and importance of the latter any less real.
djw 09.09.05 at 1:55 pm
What Matt said. Many, many people confront various job markets without a meaningful network of contacts, or a plausible way to get them. It’s hell for these people as (I presume…) Ehrenrich demonstrates. Furthermore, as Michael Brown so vividly illustrates, the various good old boys networks that afflict the world of employment are deeply problematic for a host of reasons. Cowen’s critique seems to amount to announcing “that’s just the way the world is, so don’t bother complaining about it or even pointing it out.” Not a particularly interesting line of criticism.
John Emerson 09.09.05 at 1:58 pm
Since about 1980, ambitious young people I run into have seemed to put an inordinate amount of stress on networking, dress-for-success, and personal relationships, and much less stress on skills, competences, and so on. Being a team player absolutely loyal to the organization seems to be everything.
I understand that it’s always been more or less this way, but it seems to have gotten steadily worse.
y81 09.09.05 at 2:00 pm
Well, yeah, being a suck up is helpful in life. This doesn’t seem like a very useful insight. It would be worse, I would presume, in a socialist society.
No doubt, many of the posters here would do better in a society in which all advancement depended on one’s SAT scores. (780M/770V, if you’re wondering.) But would anyone here want to be a practice group manager, or a department head, or whatever, with subordinates assigned solely on the basis of their standardized test scores?
bryan 09.09.05 at 2:35 pm
probably not Y81, I also wouldn’t want to hire anybody based only on their sucking up, as I might end up with a bunch of incompetent republican fuckups (sorry about the overuse of synonyms there).
Dan Nexon 09.09.05 at 2:41 pm
“No doubt, many of the posters here would do better in a society in which all advancement depended on one’s SAT scores. (780M/770V, if you’re wondering.) But would anyone here want to be a practice group manager, or a department head, or whatever, with subordinates assigned solely on the basis of their standardized test scores?”
This is a false choice; we can have more meritocratic systems of employment that do not depend on a single college admission’s test.
There are actually two different ways of looking at the mountains of data suggesting that personal networks are critical to employment and, to some degree, career advancement.
One is that the “market” is not a market at all, and that employment practices are grossly unfair. Even worse, they reinforce inequality by making social position more important than actual capability.
Another is that network ties are one way that people minimize information costs; getting references from someone you trust, or hiring someone you know, requires a lot less work than excavating more detailed information about job applicants. In that sense, social networks land people jobs for the same reason that holding a degree from a top law school is a necessary condition for certain firms to look closely at a first-time job candidate or why holding a degree from a top graduate school gives prospective assistant professors an enormous advantage over their peers (at least in most specializations).
These aren’t exclusive interpretations of course, but I think we ought to be able to agree that while there’s a thin line between what goes on in the second interpretation and out-and-out patronage, there is a distinction between the two.
theorajones 09.09.05 at 2:55 pm
This was an interesting twist on the Michael Brown issue I saw posted–the blogger (a Black Republican) basically asked, “What if Michael Brown were black? How would the criticism of him be different?”
Worth reading.
http://raggedthots.blogspot.com/2005/09/notes-on-gop-affirmative-action-baby.html
John Emerson 09.09.05 at 3:33 pm
Well, yeah, being a suck up is helpful in life. This doesn’t seem like a very useful insight.
You’ve obviously already learned it, but it’s a useful insight for others who still have idealistic delusions. I actually once counseled someone to go to the school which provided the best education, rather than the one which provided the best connections. I was very wrong.
Cornhuskerblogger (CHB) 09.09.05 at 3:37 pm
it’s official: michael brown is the first evacuee the administration worked to evacuate from the Gulf Coast… http://cardcarryingmember.blogspot.com/2005/09/real-first-evacuee.html
Ken C. 09.09.05 at 3:41 pm
“whose Nickel and Dimed is a great book that suffers from the same, massive flaw which Tomas Frank’s book does: a total inability to actually take seriously the culture out of which the subjects of the book come from”
According to Frank, he grew up as one of those subjects, and his views changed only in and after college. So I’m not sure such a flaw is present.
I’ll concede, however, that Frank seemed to have a little trouble being completely straight about Pope Michael, the guy who thought the Pope wasn’t Catholic enough, and whose breakaway three-member church elevated Michael to the papacy.
“Being a team player absolutely loyal to the organization seems to be everything.”
Since it’s become clear that any such loyalty runs only one way, I wonder if this has changed.
Andrew 09.09.05 at 4:06 pm
The whole FEMA Brownie reminds me more of the movie “Tommy Boy” than of anything normal people would likely face in reality.
y81 09.09.05 at 4:12 pm
hey bryan (comment #9), if you’re running a law firm, and Rudy Giuliani and John Roberts are recommended to you, hire them, incompetent f***ups though they be.
roger 09.09.05 at 4:13 pm
Mr. Nexon,
I’m not sure how social networks negate the market nature of labor markets, even if they inflect it. I don’t think merit can really exist apart from social networks. The idea, carried over from the obsolete reliance of education on individual testing, that we trail behind us a self created budget of credits, seems sort of ridiculous to me. Much of what we do has to do with how well we can access information from other people — an ability that goes against the whole image of merit being an act of accumulation of knowledge by autonomous agents working in isolation. One of the great faults of the Homeland Security response was not about following official planning guides, but about not being willing to listen — that is, to adapt to a highly changing situation by assessing what different people in the situation are saying. And that gets to the imaginative side of knowledge — the ability to empathize with what it is like to be a person in that situation, rather than the ability to look up the rules appertaining to response to the situation.
clew 09.09.05 at 4:28 pm
But that cuts both ways, too, roger; people deeply embedded in their social networks, especially closed-loop ones, begin to lose some of their ability to listen to and empathize with anyone who isn’t ‘someone they know’. They only trust information from their in-group.
I expect there’s a difference between closed and open networks.
Slocum 09.09.05 at 5:10 pm
I’ve not read Bait and Switch but it struck me that Cowen’s complaint was that Ehrenreich’s alter ego did not seem like a real person with real life experiences and also that Ehrenreich seemed to go out of her way to do ineffectual things and torpedo her own interviews — which, of course, would be perfectly understandable if her goal was to demonstrate how impossible it is for a middle-aged woman to find a professional job). If she’d been offered jobs, it would have screwed up the whole deal. If you don’t want to be offered a job, making a bad impression at an interview ain’t exactly difficult.
None of that, of course, excuses the appointment of political hacks for important positions, but I think the analogy is pretty strained.
LeisureGuy 09.09.05 at 6:39 pm
I wonder whether Michael Brown can even find another job, given how publicly (and broadly) his lies in his résumé have been aired. Now everyone knows that (a) he’s incompetent and (b) he lied about everything he claimed to have done. I think he’s going to be toxic waste, even to Republicans. “We’re the company that hired Michael Brown.” No company wants to say that–or have it said of them.
Jim Milles 09.09.05 at 6:52 pm
Just to nitpick, but the Association of American Law Schools is a scholarly association and is not involved with accreditation–that’s the American Bar Association. Oklahoma City University has been ABA-accredited since 1960, not 2003.
Uncle Kvetch 09.09.05 at 7:51 pm
Now everyone knows that (a) he’s incompetent and (b) he lied about everything he claimed to have done. I think he’s going to be toxic waste, even to Republicans.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Bernard Kerik is already back on TV as a talking head.
roger 09.09.05 at 8:00 pm
Clew, you are certainly right. I am not going to make an exhaustive list of the elements of tacit knowledge, because I can’t; nor would I want to deny that the xenophobic impulse is very strong in any social network, whether it is about who is cool and who isn’t, or who is the right race and who isn’t. I simply think that one can’t project what it means to be competent in an emergency situation without certain empathetic characteristics. I wonder, on Brown’s resume, is there any volunteer work at all? Did he, for instance, ever volunteer during the floods in Missouri in 1995, or do volunteer work for his neighborhood fire department? There are fields where that impulse is very important. To be indifferent in a care-giving field is like being uninterested in money if you are an accountant. It isn’t a good sign.
trotsky 09.09.05 at 8:11 pm
Networking can be simply a useful filter, just like the college credentials discussed in a recent post.
For instance: My first full-time job out of college came when, entirely without my knowledge, the editor at a newspaper happened to be an old colleague of one of my references. They chatted, and the reference probably informed my soon-to-be boss that I was a talented young prospect worth giving a chance. Or something nice, because I got the job. As it happens, nobody else in the strange state I had just moved to would even return my phone calls.
The flip side, of course, is that the candid knowledge one should acquire from social networks (as opposed to resume-padding BS) should also serve to weed out incompetents. When the grapevine gives you a red-flag warning that the paper credentials conceal, bumbling fools like Brownie can be avoided.
So what’s the Bush admin’s problem?
'As you know' Bob 09.09.05 at 8:39 pm
I wonder whether Michael Brown can even find another job, given how publicly (and broadly) his lies in his résumé have been aired. Now everyone knows that (a) he’s incompetent and (b) he lied about everything he claimed to have done.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Bernard Kerik is already back on TV as a talking head.
One of the important points about these sorts of ‘old boy’ networks is that they take care of their own. Heck, that incompetent liar George Bush is now President.
Dan Nexon 09.09.05 at 8:45 pm
“I’m not sure how social networks negate the market nature of labor markets, even if they inflect it.”
I don’t think we disagree here. My wording may have been too strong. Nonetheless, if hiring decisions are based on patronage, personal connections, and so forth it is difficult to see much of an “employment market.” Inflection can range from “minor” to “closer to a different ideal-type of exchange relations.” :-)
Brian 09.10.05 at 12:08 am
I’m sure Brown will land on his feet in some lobby/consulting firm, probably doing work with FEMA. They’re going to be tossing billions out the door for reconstruction and you better believe tons of it are going to wind up in the pockets of every two bit grifter with ties to the Republican party. Consulting, contracting, faith-based slush funds, etc.
Now, let’s imagine Bush without his network. He’d be lucky to be managing a McDonalds right now. Maybe assistant night manager at WalMart or something.
Slocum 09.10.05 at 6:20 am
Now, let’s imagine Bush without his network. He’d be lucky to be managing a McDonalds right now. Maybe assistant night manager at WalMart or something.
Well, now maybe you want to claim that it’s possible to graduate from Andover, Yale, and Harvard on connections and back-slapping alone. But an uneducatable moron just can’t learn to fly jet fighters. Daddy’s friends can’t keep an F-102 in the air.
John Emerson 09.10.05 at 7:08 am
I think Slocum is right. Without his inherited networks Bush would do well as middle-to-upper management in business. Many businessmen are as anti-intellectual as Dubya, and Bush is shrewd about things he cares about. Unfortunately he cares mostly about campaigning rather than governing. (I’ve seen it proposed that he and Rove are equal partners on electoral strategy, though Rove is the nuts-and-bolts guy).
For Bush governing consists of lowering taxes, reducing regulation, starting wars, and rewarding friends. The administration part is supposed to take care of itself, and to conservative ideologues most government activity is useless or harmful anyway.
Matt 09.10.05 at 8:00 am
“Daddy’s friends can’t keep an F-102 in the air”.
-Neither could Bush, though, or very well. He did crash his plane, got low ratings, and was grounded after all, so I’m not so sure this is much of an endorsment!
Uncle Kvetch 09.10.05 at 9:09 am
Now, let’s imagine Bush without his network. He’d be lucky to be managing a McDonalds right now. Maybe assistant night manager at WalMart or something.
For some reason, every time I’ve indulged in this little mental exercise, it’s used-car salesman that springs to mind first.
anciano 09.10.05 at 9:45 am
While we are talking about managerial disasters, what about Paul Bremer? He made the situation in Iraq far worse than it needed to be. What about Donald Rumsfeld who has a good resume and his certainty that people like Gen. Shinseki must be wrong? Why are Americans so tolerant of incompetence in people responsible for national security? Is there something about our schools and our culture that tells us – I can’t judge those things, I have to depend on somebody higher up?
mythago 09.10.05 at 10:11 am
dan pretty much put his finger on it–nobody wants to get rid of social networks, partly because most of us benefit from them sooner or later, and partly because they are useful. When a trusted employee vouches for a job applicant, that information is probably more useful than a random reference: your employee is putting his or her own credibility on the line. That kind of networking doesn’t and shouldn’t substitute for the ability to do the job–my employer might well believe me completely that Bob is a good worker and a reliable guy, but if Bob doesn’t have the right job skills, he nevertheless won’t be hired.
As dan says, that’s very different from patronage, where the social networking goes beyond giving initial credibility and turns into an obligation to hire despite a manifest lack of ability to do the job.
bob mcmanus 09.10.05 at 11:21 am
Michael Brown was a “bagman”, passing out checks to politically useful recipients based on someone else’s decisions (Rove?). Loyalty, a certain lack of imagination and ambition, a complete lack of moral judgement and qualms, a placidity that made it obviously useless to argue or complain to this underling, and equally pointless to charm or cajole this messenger for a larger payoff. A decent understanding of what was required for the apparent legality of bribes.
He was totally qualified for the job as designed by his superiors.
abb1 09.10.05 at 1:32 pm
Exactly, Bob. They are perfectly competent, or else they wouldn’t be there. The gods are just, and the American public get precisely what they deserve.
Troutsky 09.10.05 at 2:44 pm
It would be a great undercover journalistic project to begin giving large sums of money to one party or the other then to see how far you could leverage that into some powerful position once that party comes to power. Plenty of research has already been done on the importance of the family tree,university connections etc.
'As you know' Bob 09.10.05 at 5:01 pm
Now, let’s imagine Bush without his network. He’d be lucky to be managing a McDonalds right now. Maybe assistant night manager at WalMart or something.
For some reason, every time I’ve indulged in this little mental exercise, it’s used-car salesman that springs to mind first.
With his passions for bike-riding and clearing brush, I always thought he’d be well suited to be a groundsman for the Texas Rangers baseball team.
As long as he stayed sober, that it.
Uncle Kvetch 09.10.05 at 6:47 pm
I like that, AYKB. And he’d have really cute nicknames for each of the players, too.
cm 09.11.05 at 1:14 am
zizka: It even goes so far as friendship-making having the sole purpose of building a network with some people. But I’m probably not telling you anything new.
cbisquit 09.11.05 at 1:24 pm
I don’t think Cowen’s argument was that only connected people get jobs, but that qualified persons will in almost every situation have at least some connections by the time they are Ehrenreich’s age. Exceptions are and should be made for younger people entering an industry but it can’t speak well for you if you’ve managed to amass multipe decades of professional experience without making any impression on anyone.
Tracy 09.12.05 at 12:03 am
I read an article in the The Economist once defending the awarding of knighthoods and titles to political supporters on the basis that it was far better than the alternative ways Governments might reward their political supporters. Perhaps the US should bring in an honours system with special letters the honouree can put after their name and maybe some other reward, like their name being recorded on a plaque somewhere in the White House? The honourees could have the right to be addressed by the letters after their name in all government correspondence and on their passport or something.
Of course the Government would have to give out enough honours to people who did something useful that the honour system would not be hopelessly degraded. But I think Americans could cope with that.
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