Ellen Dannin 5/24 replies to my remarks on her paraphrase of Chrysler's
chairman on how downsizing is good even for those let go [did you follow
that? sometimes it's just easier to copy great blocks of stuff]
In discussion elsewhere I've been told how much I belittle the market
when I suggest it's not all that easy to find one has become un-employed.
"I've never had any difficulty," posters say. Not all of them are
highly-paid (for the moment) programmers who have not yet been replaced
by imports from the Indian subcontinent, but few of them seem ever to
have experienced being busted, broke, and SOL. I've tried it, and even
knowing that I was bright, reasonably presentable, and educated, so that
I could almost certainly find something, somewhere, it was no fun.
From that, however, it doesn't follow that the best policy would have
been one locking in my job, or my wage level. To start with, to the
extent that my employer would have been able to "pass on" my excess wages
(that is, the amount above what he would have paid me had he had a
choice), it would have been the customer who made up the difference, and
I prefer that taxes be explicit, not hidden. Second, it would have done
me no great favor if my employer had paid my "excess" wages right up
until the day he closed his door.
Third, chief among the reasons that being unemployed hurt me was that I
had constructed a web of expectations, debts, and tastes which a
significantly-reduced income couldn't support. Truth be told, maybe I
was living higher than I needed to (and, of course, contributing my mite
to a higher "cost of living" -- which, unlike the current model, did not
in my mind include Yale tuition). I had taken it for granted not only
that I was entitled to the job I had, at the wage I got -- entitled
because, ultimately, of what a swell fellow I was -- but that it would
(therefore?) continue until it got even better or I felt like changing
it.
Little or nothing having been set aside for a rainy month (or, here in
Central Texas this year, a droughty year), and having grown accustomed to
high-income patterns, I was ill-prepared for sustained destitution (or so
it seemed to me).
How generalizable is this? Depends on how bothered you are by the
proportion of "the poor" with VCRs.
But I certainly agree that average higher wages do not in any
immediately-obvious way help someone receiving none, and that at least
through eyes of envy, higher payroll and benefits for "execs" will, at
least until one either a) becomes one (and realizes it was only his due),
b) achieves the equivalent as, say, a tenured academic, or c) rearranges
his material priorities, rankle.
What to do about it? Probably not get words of wisdom from the
chairman.
Michael Etchison
[opinions mine, not the PUCT's]
