Creative Class

Jon Rauch draws a connection between introverts and bloggers (via Andrew Sullivan):

I suspect a lot of bloggers may be introverts, because blogging is great if you like to sit in front of the internet all day. If not for my aversion to specializing in one subject, I probably would have been an academic historian, because I think it would have suited me to work in libraries back before there was an internet.

So I asked Cambridge personality psychologist Jason Rentfrow about it:

I would be inclined to think that Openness would be a big predictor of blogging because it’s related to curiosity and reflection… But just as my work on music and entertainment preferences indicates that personality is related to preferences for particular content, I would imagine personality is related to the content of people’s blogs.

Rentfrow sent along a link to this study on bloggers and personality:

We examined whether the Big Five personality traits predicted blogging. The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. Additionally, neuroticism was moderated by gender indicating that women who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers… The results indicate that personality factors impact the likelihood of being a blogger and have implications for understanding those who blog.

As for Rauch, his being wary of over-specialization leads the armchair psychologist in me to believe he is likely to be high in openness-to-experience as well as being an introvert. Highly creative people frequently share these sorts of personality traits. Like The Economist, I’d place him way up on the spectrum of creative people, which the leading psychologist of creativity describes this way.

Yesterday, The New York Times had one of the most frightening articles I have ever read.

In what I think is one of the most perverse misuses of our creative talent that I have ever heard, President Obama is launching a massive Reagan-like Cybersecurity Cold War that has the military-industrial complex salivating. This is expected to soak up the trained computer scientists from Silicon Valley and put them into super-secret R&D.

Instead of creating value for the global economy, they will now be sequestered in high-security laboratories where the knowledge they create will only slowly, if ever, leak out to the commercial world. Mind you, this initiative is being pushed while Harvard and many other universities are considering firing tenured faculty. If a massive military cybersecurity program is the change that the current administration believes is going to assist the U.S. economy in overcoming the worst crisis of the last 75 years, then the future for us and our creative class is likely to be grim indeed.

It is my belief that openness, information exchange, and creating value for the consumer has been the hallmark of U.S. success and what made us a beacon for brilliant people from around the world. By taking some of best and brightest and sequestering them in laboratories shrouded in secrecy, we are taking a deliberate step in the wrong direction.

Can a creative economy be built on directing resources in such directions?

A blogger says the issue is more class than gender:

Men have worked as essentially shop keepers and store clerks for a lot longer than they have worked on assembly lines. There have been waiters forever. Lawyers are the world’s second oldest profession. Teaching was a male-only profession for centuries.  The idea that men are and ought to be unreflective, grunting, two-fisted louts is a class thing not a gender thing and it is imposed upon working class men by a system that needs them to be beasts of burden.

Men who reject certain values and behaviors as “sissy” or “girlie” are rejecting success, and don’t think their bosses aren’t grateful.

His point hit home with me.

When I was a young boy, my father would often take me with him to Newark on Saturdays to buy “Italian Bread.” We would inevitably pass by a neighborhood “beauty parlor” where my father would stop for just a minute. “Richard,” he would say, “I was so dumb. When your aunt (his older sister) moved to California, she wanted to give me this place. I could have made it work. I enjoy cutting your hair and coloring your mother’s. But when I was young, beauticians were considered ’sissies.’ So I let my pride take over. Instead of having my own place, being my own boss, and doing something enjoy, I stayed in the damned factory.”

The economic crisis is hitting hardest at working class jobs, and rates of male unemployment have skyrocketed. A commonly asked question is, how do we retrain them for emerging job opportunities in other sectors? The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente suggests the problem runs a whole lot deeper than we think.

The new economy (over the long term) is creating tons of service jobs in retail, customer support, and personal care. The trouble is that these jobs require temperamental attributes that are stereotypically feminine – things like patience, a pleasant demeanour, deference to the customer and the ability to empathize and connect. Another way to put it is that these jobs require emotional labour, not manual labour. And women, even unskilled women, are much better at emotional labour than men are …

This identification of masculinity with hard physical work (no empathy required) is deeply embedded in the history of the human race … But no matter how much education and retraining we offer, we are not going to transform factory workers and high-school dropouts into customer-care representatives or nurses’ aides any time soon. It’s their wives and daughters who will get those jobs …

In the new world of work, the old values of working-class men are an anachronism. And what we are really asking of them is not to retrain or upgrade. We are asking them to abandon their very idea of masculinity itself.

She’s right. I grew up in that culture. My father worked his entire life in a factory. I spent my high-school summers doing factory work. Sexism and racism ran rampant. Fights were almost everyday occurrences; working class disagreements almost always end in them. When a Garden State scholarship enabled me to attend Rutgers, I was floored by the relative safety, meritocratic orientation, and personal freedom afforded by middle-class culture. Sure, modern middle-class culture has plenty of faults. And certainly not all working-class men share these retrograde attitudes. Many workers in more modern, high-performance factories (a good deal of whom are women) would fit nicely into service or professional work. Still, that old blue-collar male culture remains too much a fixture in too many places.

The demise of high-paying blue-collar jobs and the economic devestation it means for families and and communities is tragic. But the demise of that old-school working-class male mind-set is not something to be sad about.

Google has developed a nifty new algorithm to identify employees who are most likely to leave the company. Discoblog explains:

Performance reviews, pay raises, promotion histories, and other data on its 20,000 employees were crunched into yet another mathematical formula, which reportedly spat out the names of who was most likely to quit.

No surprise, Google insiders are keeping quiet about the details of the algorithm, though they will say that it has already “identified employees who felt underused,” a key precursor to telling your boss to shove it. Meanwhile Laszlo Bock, the company’s head of HR, told the Wall Street Journal that the algorithm helps the company “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave.”

Perhaps it’s fashionable to bash uber-successful companies. I visited Google twice for book talks  – once at their Silicon Valley headquarters, and also at their NYC office. I’ve been to a lot of high-tech companies, leading-edge manufacturing plants, and the trendiest of creative enclaves, but Google still blew me away. The digs were great, and employees (at least the ones I met) appeared smart, challenged by their work, and genuinely engaged in what they were doing. Not to mention, the algorithm seems pretty useful and reasonable to me.

The New York Times asks artists how the recession is affecting their lives and work (h/t: Alison Kemper). Money quote:

“I love it. The only thing that makes me sad is that I can’t make a living right now.”

While the responses comprise a small, ad hoc sample, my read is that the artists in major centers like NYC and San Francisco seem more upbeat than those in harder-hit Rustbelt communities.

Young girls are creaming the boys in science, up north in Canada.

Five years ago, boys made up 55 percent of the competitors at the annual Canada-Wide Science Fair, a national competition where youth in grades 7 to 12 compete against other regional representatives. After a steady decline, this year boys are in the minority at 44 percent. Girls are also claiming the lion’s share of prize money available each year: Eight of the last nine overall winners have been female.

Felix Salmon points to Michael Lewis’ review of the new Warren Buffett biography by Alice Schroeder.

“Lewis is no fan of Buffett’s, and dwells in his review on many of the investor’s weaknesses: his juvenile shoplifting, his dysfunctional family life, his “diet of an eight-year-old.” He even explains why he thinks that “there has never been a better time to bet against Warren Buffett” – not that Lewis himself is about to do so. Lewis says that Buffett is unhappy with Schroeder’s book; he’ll be much less happy with this article …”

Source: News York Times

Renzo Piano’s new Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. Architecture still has the power to move.

There’s a terrific slide show here.