The Kids These Days - Value of a Dollar (of profit)

Their skepticism and confusion should be a wake-up call.

The vibes I get are that profit is not just out but more out than usual among the yutes of today. If I am right, this is disappointing.

However, let’s look at it charitably and constructively. Rather than disdain them for their shallow, naive judgment, we should admire the young for the reasons why they are eschewing the profit-seeking firm and correct the bad image that those firms often rightly deserve. We should consider this to be a feature rather than a bug.

Young people are more and more drawn to not-for-profit businesses¹ because of idealism. Rightly or wrongly, they are somewhere between indifferent and disgusted by what they perceive from for-profit businesses.

Let’s ask some introspective questions: Why would they feel this way? What have we done to contribute to the problem? Is the sentiment based on something real?

My short answers are: because young adults are naturally questioning and sensitive to how the world is versus how it could be; we’ve insulated them from hardship while telling them everything should be great; for-profit businesses both have transgressed (who hasn’t?) while not proudly marketing all their laudability.

Look, it’s hard to be charitable here. The kids have it better than ever, and yet they are overwhelmed. As Mike Munger writes,

This seems paradoxical. The commercial system has delivered, consistently and broadly shared across the population. Yet having to participate in a system where one plans, saves, invests, and designs an individual “pursuit of happiness” is overwhelming the very people who should be grabbing all the new opportunities that the system has revealed to them.

I think the explanation for the paradox is simple: Everything difficult has been banished. Just as our physiological immune system needs threats to mature and avoid attacking itself, our sense of commercial efficacy has to be confronted with challenges, and surmount those challenges, to mature into effective citizenship.

Still, we live in a world that continues to be plagued with cronyism. This isn’t necessarily worse today than in the past. In fact I’m a bit optimistic that on the whole it is relatively better—relative to the size of government. Except today we have more chances to see it because of the decentralization of journalism and the overall improvements (more, faster) in transparency.

Today there are more elaborate schemes that exist because with every additional ratcheting up of government power, we open new opportunities for abuse and capture. The magnitude of the regulatory bureaucracy has grown steadily over the decades. Concurrent with it rent seeking has grown.

To their credit the youth are not blind to this. They may be and often are mistaken about why to be mad or who to be mad at. Still, they notice that somethin’ ain’t right. And don’t get me started on their embrace of bad solutions. From price controls (ceilings and floors) to disinformation witch-hunts, from protests where virtually nobody knows what their are fighting for to sloganeering that self contradicts, there is much to deride.

In the future they very well will look back on their youthful perspective with cringe and regret. Most of us do since in the wisdom that comes with age we gain double vision as Scott Sumner explains:

Just as the past is another country, our past selves are another person.

In this post, I’ll try to explain one of the few areas where old people do have an advantage. It’s something I never really realized until I got to be older. Old people have a sort of double vision about the past—an ability to see the past from the perspective of today, and also from the perspective of the people who lived through those times. When then was now.

Of course this only applies to periods that we ourselves have lived through. I have no feel at all for the 1890s. I know that it was a disgrace for respectable women to show their legs in public, or to go out on the town without an escort, but I don’t actually have much of a feel for why. I understand that men in the early 1800s felt they had to respond to insults with a duel, but don’t understand why. I understand that thoughtful people like Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but don’t understand why.

…

Unlike the 1890s, I do understand why people of the 1960s (and 1970s) behaved in the way that they did. I was there. But I also understand why some of that behavior now seems quaint or bizarre or offensive. To quote a 60s pop star, I see “both sides now”.

It wasn’t until I got old that I realized that history doesn’t seem weird to the people that live through it. It seems normal. You often hear people say, “You can’t even believe the horrible conditions that people had to live through in such and such a country or time period.” But in most cases, the conditions didn’t seem horrible at all, just normal life.

We need to do a better job showing the virtues of for-profit business and we need to clean up our act. The business of America should be business not rent seeking.

P.S. I would be amiss if I neglected to reference Arnold Kling who stands bravely and rightly against this tide of young thought. I myself have railed against this trend.

1. Make no mistake, these are businesses. But instead of being responsive to customers and owners, they are responsive to donors (primarily) and beneficiaries (secondarily).