Avenue G

Assorted Dutch beers, courtesy Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Barbara Ehrenreich is an author who contributes essays to TIME magazine. Her writing has a feminist bent, and sometimes comes across as shrill, but her essay in last week's TIME was pretty good. In it, she described a new collegiate reality where only 45% of students under 25 are male; males are also less likely to graduate. Much of this jibes with statistics I mentioned in my Macho Imperative blog earlier this year. Rather than slave over Physics or Classical Mechanics, today's young males are more likely to select easy majors that allow for keg parties and poker games. Academicians have fretted that we may end up with a matriarchy where over-achieving girls rule the roost. "Not so fast," says Ehrenreich. "It may be that college boys are onto something".

Ehrenreich describes a new business world that has also recently evolved -- evolved in such a way as to separate bean-counting nerds from high octane, risk-taking players. The new business world celebrates such things as personality, likeability and positive attitude. It elevates traits such as a Myers-Briggs "extroverted" profile far above any engineering proficiency. The personality cult is especially kind to jocular jock types who excel at hitting golf balls.

Time was, when hard work and earnest effort toward objectively judged goals was praiseworthy. If any division existed, it was between blue collar and white collar workers. One must imagine that w/ grade inflation, proliferation of college degrees and globalization, that college degrees don’t have the patina they once did. A Bachelors Degree of 2006 is maybe on par w/ a high school diploma of 1966. Then, celebrity-jock hip-hop culture has made anyone troubling over books and graphs some kind of ultimate chump. “Fish or cut bait” goes the phrase, and apparently guys all want to fish.

My personal impression is that there aren’t enough “personality” jobs to give every member of the cult a high paying position. Maybe we are heading toward a “Slacker Nation” where under-employed men shop their ideas for web sites, businesses and screenplays at Starbucks while the wife toils over actuarial science in a cubicle maze. In a pride of lions, the females hunt while the males luxuriate, look beautiful and shake their manes. Maybe we are headed toward lion world. It’s not a world I’m overly familiar with – perhaps I should go back to college. This time, I’ll hedge my bets by majoring in Heineken and hoops.

© 2006 blogSpotter.

Labels: Society