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So what do we think? Can Will Lewis survive at the Post? Or will the problems there put the brakes on a British takeover of American newsrooms? Have we reached the tipping point for Substack? Where is the BBC headed under a Labour government? Wasn’t season two of Succession How do the Murdochs manage? And what about the FT columnist? It was a reckless hire, wasn’t it?
When journalists get together, some or all of these issues are aired, which is an excellent reason to be somewhere else. The challenge is to build and maintain that alternative circle.
Even the largest cities on Earth fail to live up to their primary promise: that of wide-ranging human contact. City dwellers live near A hodgepodge of different people who, for lack of strenuous effort, end up in the social tangle of their own and adjacent professions. This ghettoization sets in during those years of hard work after college. At 30, it is difficult to undo. So – and here I am addressing young people, especially those starting work this fall – avoid this trap from the start. Because it is a double curse. First, it creates a single point of failure. If your job goes, a large part of your social life goes with it.
The second, and even more serious, problem is mental narrowness. It was Nassim Nicholas Taleb who warned that the great “moderns”—Darwin, Marx, Freud, and the Einstein of the mirabilis ring — were “scholars but not academics.” That is, each had enough exposure to life outside his specialty to produce unlikely bursts of thought. (Taleb might have added Keynes, who was in and out of Cambridge.) For the rest of us, who work at a monotonous level, the point remains valid. No writer, management consultant or engineer should mingle too much with his own kind. Employers only half-understand this. It has become a basic leadership lesson to bring in high performers from outside fields to reveal their “ideas” to staff. But it doesn’t work. You have to socialize with them for a long time. You like their thought patterns, not their thoughts so much.
Last week, I came across a statistic that made me put down the paper, rub my eyes with my knuckles, and stare into the middle distance for a while. Tim Walz is the first person in the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school. That’s 20 people in 10 elections over 40 years who went on to law school or graduate school. None of the four Republican presidents during that period had legal training.
Law is an excellent discipline and career. I’ve gotten to know it a bit as a side project, but all professions have their distorting effects, and the law’s are present throughout modern American liberalism.
For example? A belief that voters care about or even understand constitutional norms (note that the current successful attack on Donald Trump and JD Vance focuses on their weirdness, not their Caesarean ambitions). A grueling squeamishness about words and their usage (a good thing in a contract dispute, but not so much in a conversation with the electorate about gender and other sensitivities). And a massive overvaluation of the ideological fads that emerge from universities. A PhD in law takes three years, after a college degree: a party so immersed in the campus experience cannot help but overestimate the strength of young militants.
I’m not suggesting that veteran Republicans are a grassroots alliance of lumberjacks and night-shift nurses. JD himself has a PhD in law, but their recent presidents have come from the worlds of acting, oil and real estate. The only one with a postgraduate degree did an MBA. Even that modicum of cognitive variety must confer an electoral advantage. The right was quicker than the left to detect that something had changed in the public mood in those years after the 2008 crisis. Because it was smarter? No. But perhaps because it was less bovine and insular.
If this is what professional ghettoization can do at the organizational level, imagine the risks it carries for the individual. Your boss’s job is to occasionally bring in a star athlete or a supermarket magnate to take his important stuff. Yours is to find and retain friends of various kinds in your own life. There’s no need to emulate John Updike, a twentysomething who left New York for Ipswich, Massachusetts, in part to meet people who “aren’t in the same boat.” [his] game”. But no effort is made and even that game is lost.
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