Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Country to town, agriculture to services

A couple of thoughts.

There are two momentous trends occurring globally which match what is happening (or has happened in the US) – 1) Movement from country to town and 2) redeployment of people from agriculture and manufacturing into the services/knowledge sector. These trends have a couple of common elements which change the dynamics of success from that which existed in the past.

Relocating from thinly populated countryside to the much denser environment of the city requires a dramatic increase in communication skills and behavior management capabilities. The new arrival has many more people to deal with who operate from many and much more varied cultural assumptions. The communication skills and behavior management competencies necessary for dealing with an environment where you might interact with 100 people in a day are dramatically higher than those where you might interact with 100 people in a year.

Similarly, the migration from labor intensive agriculture and manufacturing environments where there is some level of standardization and predictability (which is not to say that bad things don’t happen but bad weather for a farmer is a predictable event) to the services or knowledge economy, characterized by rapid change, constant churn, high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty, also call for certain skills to be practiced at much higher levels. Skills and attributes such as communication, behavior management, empathy, networking and creativity are much more highly required and rewarded in the services/knowledge economy than in agriculture and manufacturing.

As a single example of some of the implications: An employer might have relatively little concern about hiring a young person with a spotty arrest record to work in a field, pick apples, or function on an assembly line. They are going to have very significant concerns about doing so in a comparable role (where it exists) in a services environment where that individual will have to function and communicate with many colleagues.

With both these two trends of urbanization and knowledge economy concentration, there is an increasing premium on empathy, communication, self-control/behavior management, etc. (in addition to the traditional idea of education). It is not so much that most of the traditional values (patience, temperance, diligence, humility, perseverance, tolerance, etc.) that have been selected for in the past five hundred years in those countries earliest in the urbanization cycle are no longer relevant, but rather that the cost on non-adherence has risen dramatically. The 20 year-old with a demonstrated work ethic (summer and part time jobs), confident and clear communication capabilities (reading and conversation), self-control, empathy (volunteer activities), etc. has ever more opportunities open to them with increasing probabilities of success. For those that have not acquired these traits or who have blotted their copy-book in some fashion, the chances for recovery and success are dramatically lessened. A twenty year-old unable to communicate in the language of the land (both linguistically as well from a cultural literacy perspective), or with a youthful criminal record for a relatively minor offense, no track record of accomplishment or application, no activity of giving back to the community, etc. has incredibly bleak prospects in the urban, knowledge-based, economy.

It doesn’t help that many of our national policies have been disproportionately focused on interpreting everything through the lens of race (here in the US) or class (in Europe). Instead of seeking to identify what values and attributes are more likely to make a person successful, we have instead been eagerly seeking to identify those barriers which prevent them from being successful. It is not the same thing and the probability of success is much less with the latter approach than the former. We broadly know what those attributes of success are (see above, work ethic, diligence, patience, careful risk-taking, generosity, kindness, trust, temperance, etc.) but are strangely reluctant to grasp the nettle and proclaim them. By focusing on race and class and the removal of barriers we have had only very selective successes (either here in the US or in Europe) and have been distracted from the main arena. Race and class matter but not nearly as much as values and character attributes.

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