An Economy of Grinds

I generally like David Brooks -- "the liberal's favorite conservative" -- and am mostly impressed by the fact that he incorporates modern neuroscience into his account of economic and moral reasoning. However, sometimes I think he gets overly enamored with a concept and, as in this case, tries to shoehorn too much into a clever dichotomy. I suppose I'd consider myself a grind, yet I work at a large corporation.

Still, at a high level, his point about the economic recovery not really benefiting average folks or small businesses seems relevant.

Careful people treat reporters differently in conversation. I'm surprised Brooks failed to mention that.

The "princes" are interesting to a reporter (Brooks) because their career is enhanced and their income largely secure when they are quoted.

The "grinds" don't want the reporter broadcasting their ideas before they have achieved product-market fit and begun scaling.

Some good points mixed with a fair amount of foolishness and surface thinking here, as usual for Brooks.

You can make some good points about schmoozers vs. makers and how our economy values social climbing more than actual productivity. The golf-shirt wearing MBA's take a paint-by-numbers approach to business. They tend to do well when things are going well and somehow avoid consequences when things turn.

The rest of the article doesn't make much sense.

> Princes can thrive in a period of slow, steady growth, but grinds need a certain sort of psychological atmosphere. They need a wide-open economy with plenty of creative destruction.

This should be rewritten as, "Grinds need a wide-open economy so that princes will give enough money to grinds that they'll be worthy of my attention." There are plenty of Grinds doing amazing things, but Brooks can't be expected to seek them out when he's so busy eating lunches with the wealthy princes.

> The princes can thrive while the government intervenes in the private sector. They’ve got the lobbyists and the connections. The grinds, needless to say, don’t.

I known tons of grinds (professors, researchers, contractors) that make their living through government grants and contracts. In government contracting and grant writing, schmoozing is much less important than in the private sector. (There's still a "councilman's nephew" problem, but I'd contend it's much milder than the "COO's golfing buddy" problem in private business.)

I wonder how true this is in England. The last government was all about funneling public money to private companies, but the present one is tearing up those agreements like it's going out of fashion (this is the real story behind the cancelled school building programme - after 13 years and hundreds of millions of pounds, the last government had very little to show, so the programme had to be scrapped).

From a grind's perspective:

This article reminds me of my stint in high-end B2B tech sales. The fortune 500 I worked for spent more than $80k just to send one person (me) to one tradeshow. I was the nerd that was supposed to make all the demos work and answer the tough questions. I was supporting the sales team (princes) from another F500 company we had partnered with.

Watching the process was odd. Lot of marketing speak. Lots of expensive "sales lunches". Not one hard technical question was asked by any of the attendees.

The whole time I couldn't help but think of what $80k in equipment and a week of my time would have meant to the very project we were demonstrating. It was also interesting how trivial it was for the sales team to ask for (and receive) all this, when it would have been a month long fight for me to get half as many resources to improve the actual product.

This is pretty disingenuous. Brooks tries to jump on the new fascination with small businesses but only does it in order to carry the same water for the same old people (who are, to use his own terminology, the princes). Most of the new regulation he argues against will not affect start-ups and small businesses but will mostly affect the large banks.

In reality what hurts the grinds most presently is that the middle class is beaten down and ordinary people do not have much income. Small businesses usually do not have access to the enterprise markets and usually have to rely on ordinary people to be their consumers. And ordinary people are poor and are cutting all discretionary spending. This is what hurts most of all.

If linking to a columnist, vs a news article, please include their name in the link.

David Brooks enthusiastically supported Bush's Folly in Iraq. No mea culpa. For that alone, I won't support his efforts with my (reading) attention.

I used to watch his tete a tete with Mark Shields on PBS. I can't imagine anyone being more consistently wrong (and wrong headed) about more things than David Brooks.

And that's saying something. The list of always wrong about everything is pretty big: George Will, Charles Krauthammer, both Kristols, Thomas Friedman, Ted Nugent (haha), etc.

Neocon concern trolls who aided and abetted the looting and destruction of our country deserve our mocking, not our links.

So it's smart people at hedge funds who are going to get us out of this economic crisis?

That must have been some dinner!

I really dislike articles that use the amorphous notional "we."

In this case, maybe "we" refers to newspaper writers "mired in debates over macroeconomic models" but I doubt newspaper writers are going to "to light a fire under the country’s loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders."

What a bizarre article.

Firstly, most hedge fund managers are very socially capable and convincing, which is how they manage to get other people to invest with them. The Bernie Madoff's of the world aren't hidden in a basement. I really, really don't get the "geekish" angle around hedge funds.

Secondly, many hedge funds have been doing great during this economic turmoil. Hedge funds make money during turmoil. That's their bread and butter.

Clearly the author missed the recent carried-interest battle where Congress (absurdly) allowed Hedge funds and VCs to continue to be taxed on their guaranteed yearly management fees as if they have made a capital gain. I wonder if he reads his own newspaper?

I really don't understand the author's position.

And it's also a very loaded link, should have the libertarians out of the woodwork.

I'm not sure if it belongs in Hacker News though (I'd love to discuss it, but it doesn't seem the right forum for it).

Edit: I'd like to know why you disagree with me.

My take on the article:

It differenciates between

"Grinds" (I take them as the "enterpreneurs", the Randian Hank Reardens if you will)

and

"Princes" (which I take as the "cronies", "old-boys networks", etc)

He states that "princes" are more interesting to be around and other subjective stuff, but then goes on to the meat of the article IMO:

he realizes it's the enterpreneurs and small businesses that drive the economy - "For jobs to recover, the grinds have to recover"

and that it's largely the government's fault (and banks, etc): "it’s hard to see how that will happen so long as households are still so leveraged, government debt is still so unnerving and the business climate is still so terrible for entrepreneurs."

so he wants the "grinds" to redouble their efforts: "how we are going to light a fire under the country’s loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders"

yet he doesn't seem to realize it's the gov't and the "princes" which hinder the "grinds"