Susan of Texas on McMegan:
The Hunting of the Snark: Sacrifices: Megan McArdle saw the word "entitlement" and, like a certain dog with a bell and a doggie treat, sprang to attention....
a lot of email defending the right of government employees who gave up Big Law or McKinsey to feel like they made a sacrifice, and like they're a little hard used by the current US income structure.... Speaking as someone who attended one of these lustrous graduate institutions that allegedly produce our "best and brightest", I'd like to say.... knock it off. Stop patting yourself on the back. You can seriously damage the ligaments in your shoulder that way, as I discovered when pursuing an ill-placed mosquito bite too vigorously. You know how much credit I deserve for giving up highly paid professional work in order to spend my days boring the hell out of you all with my breezy explanations of present value calculations?
Heh. McArdle just said gave up a lucrative career that should have been invested in her by the power of the holy Birth Lottery so she could dedicate her life to public service at low pay....
Am I performing a public service? I hope so. I take my profession seriously, and like to think that I am adding something to the public understanding. But that was my choice. I knew what I was giving up when I made it, and I also knew what I was getting. Which is to say, a job that I absolutely love more than anything I've ever done, a chance to speak to interesting people and see amazing things all the time.
I think someone would beg to differ with McArdle's recitation of events. Namely, Megan McArdle.
But that doesn't mean I don't understand how awful and terrifying it is to have expected a certain life, and have it stolen away from you by a fate you do not very well control. In June 2001 when I graduated from business school, I had a management consulting gig that was scheduled to pay over $100,000 a year and had just moved back to New York. Two months later, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, killing a number of people I knew and leaving the rest of us traumatized. Four days after that, I was working at the World Trade Center disaster recovery site, trying to come to grips with what had happened. Four months after that, the consulting firm, having pushed back my start date twice, called my associate class and told all of us that our services would not be required. For the next eighteen months, I struggled to find a job.... I was 29 years old, and living at home... as I could tell, I had no future. When I finally did get a job, with The Economist, it paid about a third of what I'd been expecting as a consultant. I had about a thousand dollars in loan payments, and of course, I had to live in New York.... I understood what Victorian novelists meant when they described someone as "shabby". Over the years since I'd had a steady income, my clothes had stretched out of shape, ripped, become stained, gone out of style. I couldn't afford new ones. And I wasn't one of those whizzy heroines who can make over her own clothes. Instead, I frumped around in clothes that never looked quite right, and felt the way my clothes looked. It took me a long, long time to crawl out of that hole. I'll never make what I expected to make as a consultant. I'll never have the job security that I had learned to expect in the pre-9/11 world. The universe will always seem a potentially malevolent place to me, ready to unleash some unknown disaster at any moment.
Horrible, Just horrible. The humanity! But it seems that journalism was a happy accident, a relief and last resort, not a choice.(And let's just draw a polite veil over the fact that McArdle doesn't believe in job security:
Nor am I a fan of seniority rules and job protection. Most of us function perfectly well without these, and I don't think that advancement solely by time-in-grade, or protecting everyone who does not actually set the plant on fire from being sacked, is either reasonable, or economically desireable. I understand that people want these things, but I would also like to be able to force other people to buy me dinner at will; this does not mean that I should be given that right. I too, would enjoy being protected from ever losing my job no matter what, and having all my raises based on my ability to keep my butt in a chair. But I don't think this would be good for my employers, my readers, or for that matter, me....
McArdle never intended to go into "public service." It just happened. And her idea of public service is an extremely strange one. She works for a multi-millionaire's pet magazine and is routinely pimped out to corporations. She doesn't inform the public, she propagandizes to it--for a very nice chunk of change...
