Editor's note: Oren Cass joined Adam Carolla’s Take A Knee podcast to talk about his new book The Once and Future Worker. The following is an excerpt from their conversation.
On Hollywood's representation of work, family, and community
Adam Carolla: Taking any of those guys on those job sites and shoving them in a cubicle would have driven them insane. And, of course, there are many others who, if they had to get up on the roof, wouldn't have been too happy about leaving the air conditioning of the cubicle. So let's not think that one cubicle fits all.
Oren Cass: Right. Now, this is a big cultural problem, and it's always easy to talk about what should public policy do? What should Congress do? Some of this just has nothing to do with public policy. It's about our cultural messages and you know, Hollywood is a great example. Where if you look at what are the stories we choose to tell, what do we depict in the popular media? I find it fascinating to look at sitcoms and the Emmy for Best Sitcom pretty much every year through the 70s and 80s went to a story about a blue-collar family—whether you're talking about “All in the Family,” “Taxi,” “Cheers,” “Wonder Years.” These were stories about people's lives and their families and they had a job that they did as part of that.
Adam Carolla: Right.
Oren Cass: And suddenly in the early nineties, it just flipped on a dime. And since then, every single year the Emmy went to a show about professionals living in Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Boston, New York, or Washington, DC. Most of them didn't even have kids at all, let alone have family be the focus, and the only exception—which I think is especially telling—is “The Office,” where the whole premise was, look at how sort of sad and pathetic these people are with their not-cool white-collar job. And I don't know why we made that shift. I mean, you could do all sorts of cultural analysis, but we've come to think that the only stories worth telling and celebrating are of a certain kind of job of a certain kind of life that your job is at the center of. And we've lost the ability to recognize and celebrate that whatever job you're doing, if it's a needed job, if it contributes something to the community, if it allows you to provide for your family, then that's success. That's great. Whatever it happens to look like.
Adam Carolla: Yeah. It's funny. I've always studied commercials the same way, but you're right. You know, “Friends,” they had a monkey. There may have been one illegitimate kid floating around, he made about every 28th episode. But it's like a bunch of good-looking people living in New York, sort of hanging out. And “Big Bang Theory” and all this kind of stuff. It was all literally “All in the Family,” and then “The Jeffersons,” and “Good Times.” And some families were doing well, some families were struggling, but it was all about the unit.
Oren Cass: Yeah.
Adam Carolla: And how that's a bygone era.
Oren Cass: It is. Well, now the funny thing is I think we have so many culture war issues where we disagree passionately, right? And when we can fight about them and it seems to get worse and worse. I think Americans actually agree on what we're saying. I don't know if you remember, there was a big issue a couple months ago. Geoffrey Owens, the former “Cosby Show” actor, some tabloid photographed him bagging groceries at Trader Joe's and kind of tried to embarrass him. There was this massive immediate backlash and all the celebrities got on Twitter to say, “How terrible, how could you suggest there's anything wrong with this guy who's doing honest work to support his family?” And it was on Good Morning America. Whenever we actually had to look at it and think about it for a moment, there was no one taking the side of, “Look at that guy with his lame job at Trader Joe's,” right? Everybody actually, if you sit them down and forced them to think about it, I believe, agrees that we should have this attitude toward work. It's just a question of whether or not it's something anyone's going to focus on and be cognizant of. And so that at least makes me optimistic that this is an area we could make progress if people realized it mattered.
Adam Carolla: Well, with guys like you and Mike Rowe, I think we can realize this dream.
On national productivity and trade with China
Oren Cass: Everything about economics comes down to specialization. And the more that you find the one thing that you do well and just do that and let other people go do the things they do well and just do that, the healthier the economy looks. But that's not necessarily what's going to translate into people being healthy or happy or creating the right environment to raise your kids in. And so you get this at the individual level as you've just been describing, with the person who just—why do anything when you can just call and order it? And then it even happens for an entire country. I mean our model as a country has been, well, if someone else can make it cheaper than we can, that's great. They'll make it and send it over to us. And that’s bad at the national level, too. And it's a habit that we have to break of just saying, well, whatever is the most efficient solution must be the best one. Because bigger picture, it's not always.
Adam Carolla: So how do we remedy that with places like China? I know you're talking about sanctions or embargoes or whatever trade deals. Is this a fair statement: China's—we got to get that bell un-rung or that horse back in the barn, and I feel like we've been kind of napping on them for 40 years and now that Chinese chickens are coming home to roost.
Oren Cass: That was a few too many farm metaphors, I think, but everything is right in that. It's a huge problem, and it starts at the level of ideas. It starts with actually what we care about. I mean, the way that I got involved in this topic in particular and really focusing on work is that I started to do some work on this trade question with China and saying, wow, this is a real problem, if everything we used to make here, they're just making in China and sending to us. And essentially, we're putting it on our credit card. We don't even send anything back. We go into debt. And I started writing about how this is clearly bad, and I was flummoxed that the response was, “No, you don't know what you're talking about. According to economics, this is great. Because we're consumers and if China wants to make all our stuff for us and make it cheaper and we don't even have to make anything in return, that's a big win. Why would you ever complain about that?” And I couldn't believe that not only was anyone arguing this, but that this was like the standard, obvious, commonsense way to think about it. And so, step one is realizing, no, that's not the commonsense way to think about it. It's not just about who gets the most, biggest, cheapest TVs. It's actually about making sure that people can still be productive workers and be engaged in their society that way. And then once you agree on that and believe it matters, then you have all sorts of policy things you can do. But you have to actually start by getting people to agree, even if it means some things are more expensive, you know, even if it means the economy's not going to show the same growth rate every quarter that we like to measure. There are other values there that we have to care about, too.
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Oren Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the new book “The Once and Future Worker.” Follow him on Twitter here.