The Economy the Internet Birthed: How High Tech Made it Tougher to Land a Job

On August 29, 2012March 16, 2022 By The Social CriticIn Economics & Globalization, Technology & ScienceLeave a comment

It is a presidential election year and by all counts the race is close. There is no question the post-recession recovery has been anemic at best. To call it a recovery is a stretch and the threat of a double-dip recession lingers. Whether anyone can really turn this lackluster economy around is anyone’s guess. Talk of the unsustainable $16T deficits looms large but specifics on job creation remain few.

It’s not just abstract conversation for the nation’s unemployed and underemployed.

Culprits are a dime a dozen, among them offshoring and outsourcing — imbalanced “free trade” that in better economic times Americans were largely content to ignore in exchange for a bounty of Chinese-made bargains at Walmart.

Taxes are another favored target. What if we eliminated corporate taxes? Not much, it turns out. Many major corporations already avoid paying federal income taxes, studies show. Beyond that, there remains an insurmountable wage gap between an American worker and a similarly-qualified counterpart in the likes of Bangladesh. The argument can be made in favor of tax cuts but it won’t necessarily translate into hiring more American workers because consumer demand remains low. Ditto for unions, which represent less than 7 percent of the U.S. workforce. Until Americans have the ability to subsist on less than minimum wage, driving down pay will have little impact on leveling the globalized playing field.

The usual suspects have been the subject of much discussion but what about the not-so-usual suspects? The unemployed and underemployed may be asking “Is it just me or was it really easier to land a job before the Internet came into play?” Quantifying the answer to that question with any degree of certainty is difficult — it will take more research to answer the question definitively. And like any time past or present, some things don’t change: Success depends on where one lives, who one knows, what type of industry is hiring and one’s education or skill level. One thing, however, has changed: In the pre-Internet days, looking for a job entailed pounding the pavement nearly as much as it required pounding a keyboard. Now it’s possible to shoot off a résumé from an easy chair! Still, there are some indications that job hunting in the digital era isn’t as easy as the ease of the technology implies. Here we take a look at nine of the least-often acknowledged reasons job-seekers’ efforts — and the economy at large — continue to flounder in uncharted Information Age territory.

The World Wide Void

Social Networking: So you’ve got 300 friends and family connected on Facebook and five recommendations on LinkedIn. How many of those individuals yielded a job lead? Now how many of those leads actually panned out? Of those that panned out, how many of them were built upon a relationship or introduction that occurred principally online vs. off?

Due diligence takes on a whole new meaning in a sea of fly-by-night online universities, identity thieves posing as employers or recruiters and social networking contacts that may do as much to harm one’s reputation as to advance it.

Cultural Shift: Hiring conventions have changed — and they’re generally less tolerant of those who deviate from the norm. HR staff who witness an applicant walk into an establishment to apply to or follow up on a job may characterize the effort as “annoying” and attention-getting gimmicks on the part of applicants as “creepy“. With few exceptions, today’s one-size-fits-all employment market eschews the personalized or creative, which speaks to the jaded wariness of our over-saturated, over-stimulated, life-on-an-electronic-leash culture.

Going above and beyond to stand out above your fellow job seeker may be an asset in an old school employer’s eyes — it could also earn you the reputation of being an overly-desperate “job stalker”.

Who’s Asking?: Thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, fewer employers feel it necessary to provide a name, address or phone number. On Craig’s List and job boards alike, “company confidential” is an all-too-common practice. We’ve all heard the phrase “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” — but this takes opaqueness to a whole new level.

The irony of the Information Age is this: It has never been so easy to hide in plain sight!

The Internet: Never has a job search been more impersonal. Few jobs require job seekers to pick up an in-person application, scan the classified section of a local newspaper or interview on the spot at a job fair. In the past, looking for a job took footwork — physical effort to seek out job postings and to pick up and return applications. Now it’s so easy a caveman can do it. And that’s not good news for those who wish to stand out. Now that everything is online, everyone can apply — causing employers to be inundated, for instance, by out-of-area applicants that in the past would have had a hard time competing for a job advertised primarily in local newspapers. To compound the problem, Internet job postings more than a day or two old are rarely removed yet quite possibly defunct — over-saturated by applicants and marginally-qualified “junk” applicants at that. It’s a major reason why few Internet applicants learn whether their application is under consideration or not.

Even on the part of those who score an interview, follow-up is increasingly rare. Who would’ve thought: The dreaded rejection letter of days gone by seems exceedingly quaint and polite in the vast Internet of today.

Impress the Machine: A look at a job-seekers’ handbook written in the pre-Internet age is revealing. Much of the advice surrounds the proper way to go about standing out to gain that coveted interview — passe, even comical advice by digital-era standards. Today’s job search has been largely reduced to that of an electronic form and an MS Word doc — subjecting applicants to the great equalizer that is the Internet itself. Because of the sheer volume of applicants that the online process avails itself to, the eyes of an HR manager are unlikely to review the vast majority of applications. The initial screening process for employers is increasingly automated. A key-word locator scans an applicant’s submission. Applicant tracking software decides who makes the cut. This makes life particularly difficult on career-changers and fresh-graduates — and anyone else for whom one’s résumé contains experience or knowledge a computer application fails to interpret or appreciate.

Thanks, too, to the multiplicity of online IQ and personality profile tests designed to weed out electronic applicants before human eyes make first contact, only those who fit the company “monoculture” make the cut. Even the presence of a college degree isn’t the ticket it once was, if only because so many people possess them. Moreover, the relevance of one’s degree is itself problematic. And it’s not just a U.S. problem. Chinese graduates are coming up over-educated and empty-handed, too. This, however, is a particularly dangerous trend here in the states, where the skyrocketing cost of higher education necessitates steady work and a decent income by which to pay down student loans and move on to other goals in life, such as starting a family or buying a home.

It’s not personal. Employers are coming up with rigid requirements to fit fewer applicants because there are too many applicants and too few jobs.

Typecasting: You’ve just graduated from college and can’t find work in your field so you take a minimum wage job. Alternately, you’ve worked in your profession for a number of years but were laid off. You’ll take any job you can to get by — understandable, right? While it’s long been true that employers don’t like unexplained employment gaps what is less appreciated is the price for taking a step backward. Most employers are looking for a progressive level of responsibility — a linear career trajectory. It may not be fair that doing what you had to do in a recession to get by counts as a strike or that a weak job market made it necessary to accept work less challenging or lesser paying. And yet, for reasons described above — the sheer volume of applicants an Internet connection permits — employers are working more aggressively to thin the herd. Applicants who work too long in an unrelated field or for lesser pay and responsibility have their work cut out for them, not unlike a character actor that has accepted one too many sci-fi or daytime soap roles.

Getting out of a career rut has never been easy. Technology only makes it easier to pigeonhole job seekers who fall outside a narrowly-targeted candidate profile.

The Jobs Paradox

Technology: Technology has opened the job market to more competition than ever before. Thanks to broadband, back office and administrative work can be done virtually anywhere in the world. As automation enables greater efficiency employers are apt to invest more money in such products and services — diminishing demand for human resources.

It doesn’t take as many people to answer phones — automated systems allow callers to await the next available representative. It doesn’t take as many people to take reservations, provide directory assistance or maintain a digital archive. Records, gaming and software delivery, too, are migrating to the “cloud“. It takes fewer employees to process photos — consumers process their own photos on home computers. It takes fewer secretaries — managers can answer their own calls and track their own schedules on a PDA. There are fewer copy editors working for publishing houses and media outlets, in part because spell- and grammar-checkers in word processing applications have usurped them. There are fewer printing presses, print news journalists, news and postal delivery people employed because demand is down. And, as President Obama said on the campaign trail last year, there are fewer bank tellers and cashiers because ATMs and self-checkout kiosks are turning banking and shopping into a help-yourself job.

The Internet is a self-serve medium, enabling online retailers to edge out local competitors. Just as the expansion of the Borders and Barnes & Noble chains threatened independent booksellers, competition from the likes of Amazon is encroaching upon brick-and-mortar bookstores, of which Borders has already succumbed. And it’s not just B&M booksellers who are feeling the heat. Best Buy, which less than a decade ago edged out Circuit City among other local and national gadget retailers, has taken a whopping loss in profitability, too. What’s more, as local businesses vacate property and lay off workers, state and local tax revenues and commercial real estate values take a hit — a magnifier effect that only weakens the financial system further. And perhaps more unanticipated than anything, Dot-com bubble not withstanding, the popularity of the virtual world has yet to translate reliably to real-world profits — even with respect to popular social networking platforms. Perhaps no one knows the fallacy of Internet-as-goldmine better than the print media industry where circulation and ad revenues are down, bankruptcies are on the upswing and freelancer writers, photographers and cartoonists are increasingly working at home — part time.

It has been an article of economic faith that the displacement of one job is equaled or exceeded by growth in another area. Such assumptions do not account for jobs that are bound for cheaper overseas labor markets, nor does it account for the reality that better-paying jobs frequently demand specific skill sets for which educational programs typically lag. Moreover, not every “Joe the Plumber” can expect to have or to handle the demands of increasingly high-tech, high-skill or creatively-demanding jobs. And yet technology continues to hollow the job market out, shoving low-skill, service-level jobs on one end of the bell curve and highly educated Ph.Ds and creative/entrepreneurial-geniuses on the other. The middle class isn’t just eroding thanks to global trade. It’s eroding because technology, if not eliminating jobs outright, require a higher-than-average subset of workers to support it.

We can’t have a well-fed, well-educated and well-adjusted society, on the whole, if technology bifurcates the workforce along the lines of intellect and class.

Here Now, Gone Tomorrow: Staffing agencies have been with us for decades. What hasn’t been with us for decades is the idea that it is acceptable to farm out mission-critical business functions to outside firms and temporary contractors on a long-term or permanent basis. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than the information technology field. Increasingly field engineering is carried out by contractors and increasingly entry-level developer work has shifted overseas and undercut through H1B visa, foreign-worker insourcing. At the same time, data storage is moving off-site to cloud facilities comprised of a virtual, Internet-based distribution hub serving a multitude of corporate clients. Software licenses and their associated administration costs are shifting, too, to cloud-based subscription services.

In-house information technology support staff are proportionately at risk of replacement by a contingent, just-in-time workforce to further scale down costs. Therein lies the irony: those who work to facilitate technological efficiency — consolidation through automation — are transforming their own livelihoods into one characterized by employment gaps and benefit loss for which students and career-changers with an interest in the IT field are growing wary. When one contract expires the continuity of one’s personal income goes with it. As the tech talent pool shrinks, productivity may take on a whole new meaning as fewer and fewer technologists are employed or equipped to provide businesses with the continuity of service and security they demand.

Talented personnel cognizant of the eroding future in the IT and administrative fields are apt to apply their skills elsewhere, competing for jobs alongside the rest of us for an increasingly limited slice of the economic security pie.

Information Asymmetry: Today’s applicant selection process is more image based than ever. Applicant tracking software allows companies and recruiting firms to form impressions not merely through a criminal or credit check but who you know and, for better or worse, the prevailing stereotypes those associations invoke. Digging into an applicant’s connections on LinkedIn and Facebook are common and some employers have gone so far as to request passwords to social media sites as part of the screening process, while others collect social security numbers for all would-be contractors — not merely new-hires who make the final cut. Whether or not a candidate has engaged in inappropriate or questionable behavior is the obvious question but it is far from the only consideration. One’s age, income and the overall character of one’s social network may work for or against applicants. Today’s employer has the upper hand like never before.

It’s verboten to include a photo of yourself with your resume or thank-you card — but employers may view one anyway. Worse, there’s no reliable means to determine if you’ve been subject to discrimination on the basis of age, race or gender because of it. The Internet has made EEOC regulation virtually unenforceable.

Tough Questions

The social and economic questions this digital era provokes remain new and largely unanswered despite the ever-present push to move forward at all costs. And yet how accurately we define the challenges determines our success in adapting to change with the smallest amount of persistent, collateral damage. Do we want to continue headlong into a technology-made future wherein employers cast an unrealistically wide net for “local” applicants? Do policymakers wish to facilitate a future where there are fewer and fewer taxable Americans because technology has hollowed out the employment market, squeezing out the middle class? Do we feel it is justified to to force applicants to “tell all” online, availing themselves to identity theft and résumé rip-offs even as employers refuse to identify themselves? Is it time to revisit the issue of antitrust enforcement to break up monopolies across a variety of industries — to prioritize more jobs, spur competition and combat market concentration?

These are the soul-searching questions our increasingly convenience-driven and complex society must ask itself. How we answer will determine whether high numbers of underemployed and unemployed workers continue to take their toll on American prosperity. So too do our answers foreshadow whether the American Dream remains within reach of those willing and able to pursue it.

###

RESOURCES

Former Fed Vice Chairman: The Internet Could Threaten Millions of U.S. Jobs | CNBC, March 2007

The Rise of the Permanent Temporary Workforce | Bloomberg, January 2010

Does Technology Destroy Jobs? Five Points of Clarification for the Unemployment Debate | The Decline of Scarcity, January 2012

What Has the Internet Done for the Economy? | Kellogg Insight, March 2011

What if this is No Accident? What if this is the Future? | TechCrunch, November 2011

Local News Coverage Outsourced to India and Elsewhere | Columbia Journalism Review

Political Clout in the Age of Outsourcing | NYT, April 2006

Worries Grow as Wellpoint, Other Healthcare Companies, Send Jobs Overseas | Bangor Daily News, July 2012

Death of an IT Guy | Forbes, July 2012

Privacy Abuses Could Kill Cloud Storage | Infoworld, April 2012

Books

Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy | Amazon, October 2011

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences | Amazon, 1997

The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future | Amazon, 2009

Video

American Competitiveness: The New Untouchables or The New Half Truth?

On October 25, 2009March 16, 2022 By The Social CriticIn Economics & Globalization, Politics & Public Policy, Technology & Science4 Comments

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau

In “The New Untouchables “, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argues that in this downwardly mobile economy there is no room for average. Extraordinary is what it takes to survive and thrive in the modern workplace.

I get that.

Yet for all my appreciation for education — I hold two degrees so I do, in fact, lean in favor of Friedman’s premise that education is key to American competitiveness — his education-as-a-panacea argument oversteps its reach.

Most strikingly, Friedman’s description of a successful “untouchable” American worker isn’t a portrait of educational endowment at all. Friedman’s favorite descriptors, instead, refer to personality attributes: entrepreneur (risk taker), creative (visionary), analytical (critical thinker), and persuasive (charismatic). The obvious problem with Friedman’s pin-the-tail-on-the-wrong-donkey premise is that temperament is inborn — teachers, let alone parents, cannot instill personality characteristics that are not there to begin with.

Friedman’s eagerness to finger the usual suspects — schools — also ignores six reasons why Americans are at a competitive disadvantage in the global era. Here we examine those realities, and the future these changing times have in store.

First, there are more of us occupying this country — and this planet at large — than ever before. At some point, the mathematics of population growth have to matter. The sheer number of people in today’s workforce suggests more and more people are competing for the same jobs even as we adopt more and more technology to displace human hands. That’s not a sign of a lack of education; it’s a sign that business owners comprehend that productivity gadgets and gizmos don’t require breaks, a salary or workers’ compensation.

It comes down to the numbers.

Second, I would argue the inverse in response to Friedman’s suggestion that there just isn’t enough talent to be had here in the States. Over the past 50-some years there are more colleges turning out more graduates on an annual basis than employers of the past had access to. Many foreign nationals, in fact, come to the US for higher education opportunities. On the flip side, there are only so many engineers, M.B.A.s, lawyers, scientists and the like universities can churn out before higher-end fields become saturated in much the same way low-end jobs are chalk full of contenders.

It’s no longer merely a question of whether there are clear winners and losers on the academic front.

Job scarcity is a threat, in part, because of the decades-long trend of mergers, acquisitions and a globalized labor pool. Consider: There are generally fewer than a dozen heavyweights in a given industry — everything from mainstream media to appliance manufacturing. This trend does not bode well for domestic job expansion. And if jobs aren’t available to begin with, it is tough to gain a competitive advantage even with above-average potential. So what we are seeing, in this author’s opinion, is an over-supply of talent.

But that doesn’t mean the proponents of Friedman’s dire self-fulfilling prophecy won’t get their wish.

With less competition in a given industry there is less demand for the eager young grads institutions of higher learning infuse into the job market each year. With shrinking demand and a greater supply of contenders, salaries may also take a nosedive. America at large may become competitively disadvantaged in the years ahead precisely because the “good jobs” of today are no longer perceived as a source of steady employment or adequate pay thereby diminishing American college students’ willingness to pursue them.

Already, the very cure that causes the “employment insecurity” disease is well underway: Calls for immigration reform permitting more foreign grads to take up permanent residence in the U.S. as a form of “insourced talent” are originating from Google, Microsoft and Susan Hockfield, MIT president and author of an October 19, 2009 Wall Street Journal opinion piece ironically titled “Immigrants Create Jobs and Win Nobels“.

Sure there are a lot of average people who aren’t cut out for the highest levels of business, government and academia. Just the same, there is also an ample supply of bright, talented American citizens who, for all their desirable qualifications and qualities, will nevertheless find themselves competing toe-to-toe against peers who are just as capable and “deserving” of a career break as they are.

Somebody has to lose.

Third, failure to thrive in this Brave New Economy isn’t always linked to failing schools, as Friedman argues. Good health is arguably the number one prerequisite to productivity. Healthcare is such a hot topic precisely because we cannot remain competitive if, as a country, businesses and individuals are increasingly diverting money out of the real economy just to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of healthcare.

Beyond that, few esoteric explanations matter when perfectly down-to-earth explanations suffice. When an individual charged with hiring decisions has too many promising applicants to choose from among, what assets wins out on the last round of interviews? That extra year or two of experience? Those additional GPA points? Or would it be more honest to conclude that it comes down to how well an applicant clicks with his or her interviewers? Hands-on experience, even a social or physical attribute — whatever it may be that fits a manager’s self-styled view of the proper candidate — is just as likely to make the deciding difference.

On the flip side of the coin, there is a perverse disincentive to hire the best qualified candidates. For one, they tend to be more experienced and/or highly educated, thereby commanding greater salaries. For another, few people in the position to do so hire individuals with the obvious capacity to perform so impressively that it will ultimately threaten their own job security. Friedman is right in the sense that education and talent ought to insulate Americans from the pitfalls of a failing global experiment.

Unfortunately, it does not.

Fourth, where one lives also figures largely into one’s ability to compete. Like the tough-luck stories that abound on the streets of Hollywood, those who flock to saturated markets — Los Angeles, New York, etc. — may, ironically, find fewer opportunities to leave a lasting, positive impression due to the sheer number of people in the area who are equally worthy of consideration. An over-supply of applicants for a given position, in turn, may make it more challenging for employers to select optimal talent vs. expedient talent. Translation? Being a big fish in a vast ocean still makes you a little fish. To argue, therefore, that education can somehow imbue success and that lack of it underlies a failure is a misnomer.

It’s impossible to underestimate the economics of supply and demand.

Fifth, it’s a mistake to assume that a Third World factory worker is more “competitive” as Todd Martin, former PepsiCo and Kraft Europe executive, suggests to Friedman. Third World workers come inexpensively, and that’s one competitive disadvantage that will only heighten the more educated the American workforce becomes. Why? Because talent doesn’t come cheaply — nor do the salaries of increasingly educated job seekers struggling to repay oppressive student loan debts as a direct result of their herculean efforts to rise head-and-shoulders above the crowd.

Getting noticed in an increasingly competitive job market only ups the ante — and the price tag of success.

Sixth, the assumption that Third World products are better made by virtue of their “efficiency” is also flawed. When frequent replacements and upgrades are factored into the cost of ownership, inexpensively manufactured Third World goods are, ironically, quite pricey. Case-in-point: In 2005 I replaced a 30-some-year-old GE refrigerator made in the US as well as an old but functioning washer and dryer. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t trade anything old and working for something new, sleek and modern. Why? Because the major appliances I purchased new in 2005 — all have had repeated major breakdowns requiring multiple service calls, dozens of hours on the phone, weeks waiting for parts.

Even when consumers spend top dollar, the manufacturing source and quality of today’s big-ticket items are often quite similar — with merely a change of window dressing to imply otherwise. That’s what happens when there are so many market consolidations that an appearance of choice is just that: little more than a dozen or so name badges owned, in truth, by the same handful of Big Players. It is almost laughable the degree to which consumers on complaint websites proclaim that they will never buy brand “X” again, only to unwittingly state that they intend to replace such-and-such item with brand “Y” — yet another brand or subsidiary of the very same company who manufactures brand X!

Market concentration doesn’t grow jobs any more reliably than it promotes healthy competition.

Sparing one another the hassle and headaches of poor quality goods isn’t the only reason to care, however. The build-it-to-last ethic of decades past was, perhaps, the ultimate expression of “Green“. Why? Because durable goods were seemingly less likely to break down, destined for a landfill in an absurdly short time frame. By contrast, “planned obsolescence” is the new norm, with a trend of shrinking manufacturer warranties to attest to the low vote of confidence manufacturers assign to their own products. Longevity isn’t a valued trait in a disposable society, but if we really want to go Green perhaps we should rethink the “dept-trap consumerism” cheaply designed and manufactured products facilitate. Sadly, modern rhetoric would have us believe that pride in one’s workmanship — a refusal to sell junk to unsuspecting consumers — is “noncompetitive”.

All talk of going Green aside, standardized manufacturing processes have made it difficult to make the case that company “A” is making a better product than “B” or “C”. Consequently, the maxim “You get what you pay for” has never been more suspect. True, you may get more for your money, but that does not necessarily translate into significantly better quality. What differs most dramatically is the amount of money corporations throw into slick ad campaigns, and the perception consumers have of branding and value.

It would be one thing if high-end boutiques were selling products made by First World craftspeople with higher price tags thanks to First World production costs. But when both low-end retailers and high-end retailers are selling inexpensively made foreign goods, who, exactly, are they fooling? Fairly or not, Third World origination suggests that income and human rights disparities favor corporate bottom lines. In the Third World, after all, it is not uncommon for workers to be denied bathroom breaks, sick days, maternity leave and most of the other benefits and protections Americans consider “civilized”. It is not surprising, then, that workers are more productive when they spend most of their lives in the confines of a factory, fearful that their only other option is a life of abject poverty and/or prostitution.

In short, the Third World is the modern-day economic equivalent of the pre-Civil War Old South: a place for slave-like child and adult labor, often conducted under sweatshop conditions. As if that weren’t questionable enough, outsourcing trends pose an unacceptable risk to national security as well.

So how does all of this tie in?

Unless Americans are willing to stoop to similar lows to compete with workers abroad, it’s not possible to rationally conclude that education, talent or entrepreneurship on the part of American workers will level the economic playing field anytime soon. America’s competitive disadvantage, rather, speaks to corporate opportunism — and to the politicians in recent decades who have crafted immigration, economic, trade and taxation policies that have enabled such heavily skewed commerce to become the norm.

Moreover, if being properly educated, creative or analytical adequately described, as Friedman suggests, the entirety of American competitiveness, I suspect we would see fewer reckless gambles on Wall Street and more evidence of long-range thinkers putting the brakes on short-term gain (scams) in the lead up to the Great Recession. In the real world, however, the “right reasons” are not always the cause for getting ahead — or, conversely, for falling behind.

THE WAKE UP CALL

So why care whether or not a newspaper columnists gets it so wrong? Because generalizations and simplifications aren’t a starting point for progress. Economists are projecting a ~10 percent national unemployment rate that’s here to stay for the foreseeable future. That can only mean more bankruptcies, more foreclosures and a greater amount of “dead weight” on America’s ability to compete. Only by taking a long, hard look at the unvarnished truth do we have any hope of fingering the right culprits, crafting the right solutions and ultimately reviving Main Street before the American Dream becomes a distant memory of a bygone era.

Doing nothing is not an option.

If Middle Class wages continue to decline as we move further into the 21st Century, who will consume the products and services entrepreneurs on both sides of the oceanic divide offer? Will young Americans, contemplating the grimness of their economic future and/or the need for ever-more costly and impressive academic résumés opt for traditional marriage and family life — the nation’s greatest driver of new purchases, everything from strollers and diapers to single family homes and minivans? Should Main Street’s economic House of Cards continue to crumble, will Third World workers have their own Friedmans urging them to blame themselves when factory orders dwindle and the newly affluent in Asia and India begin to see their own hopes and dreams falter? Or will they see it — we see it — for what it is: globalized economic forces beyond any single individual’s immediate control?

As kind-hearted as sweatshop proponents paint it — that throwing out more life preservers will rescue Third World residents from a life of “primitive agriculture” — building more life preservers than boats is a plausible scenario. Economic growth, after all, relies on expansion. For much of the world’s history markets were local, national, then regional. Globalization isn’t a sure-fire path to success: It’s an experiment that presupposes that natural resources will support endless growth. And it begs a simple but profound question: What happens when all markets are tapped out?

Working and Middle Class people — the majority of us — may not be the most educated, creative or adequately prepared lot, to hear Friedman and his corporate pal, Todd Martin, hash it out. But that doesn’t change the reality that the American Middle Class must earn a living wage in order for the economy — ours and theirs — to thrive. Yet it is telling that in Louisiana, a state with fewer college grads to begin with, Curt Eysink, director of the Louisiana Workforce Commission, indicates that there is an oversupply of degreed residents “we cannot employ” because job growth projections favor vocational trades and the service sector — primarily low-wage occupations such as ticket-takers, cashiers and customer service representatives that are not so prone to the insourcing/outsourcing phenomena.

Is this a sign of things to come?

Without the discretionary income Middle Class Joes and Janes inject into the marketplace, globalized economies may become relegated to a small percentage of elite income earners pitching their products and services to other elite individuals. This may be a recipe for modern-day feudalism, but it’s no way to protect and preserve the merits of free-market capitalism, let alone a profitable market share.

As dire as it all sounds, this isn’t about being pessimistic. Opening our collective eyes is the first step in defending what matters most: family, community, culture — the United States itself. If that means rethinking our definition of progress in the 21st Century sans the usual set of partisan blinders, so be it.

This is no time for subterfuge.

If Friedman wishes to talk about education, he ought to contemplate the wisdom no book learning apparently can impart in America’s best and brightest CEOs and newspaper columnists: The foresight to realize one’s employees/coworkers are also one’s customers/consumers. That means that success at the top of the economic pyramid is only as long-lived as the Middle Class foundation upon which it rests. Excuse it, deny it, defend it, ignore it: the race to the bottom is a very real risk when good intentions go too far.

It’s foolhardy — and a threat to democracy itself — for a transnational conglomerate, an economy, a nation, to conduct business using the lowest common denominator as a competitive yardstick. And yet, globalization promises to outsource gain even as it insources pain. At best, this implies that if and when international economic and trade equilibrium is achieved Third World laborers will nevertheless be unable to sustain the lifestyle Americans have taken for granted — if only by virtue of how thin finite natural resources are stretched — whereas Americans should anticipate “economic insecurity” as a way of life. That’s why Friedman and friends argue so passionately that being wildly successful — untouchable thanks to one’s creativity, innovativeness and education — is the only position of safety (familiarity). The rest of us, apparently, are destined for a mediocre economic melting pot in a neocapitalist New World Order.

Cliché though it may sound, the proactive response to an uncertain future is civic engagement: voting wisely with one’s ballot and one’s pocketbook in support the kind of economy one wishes to see. For if there’s any silver lining to this Great Recession, it’s in bringing an abstract global issue close enough to home that we can reach out, touch it — and change it.

It’s not too late.

###