Chrysler's Super Bowl ad is powerful, moving and inspirational. It's also dead wrong.
"Halftime in America" isn't selling us cars so much as it's selling us the playbook of the Greatest Generation. A playbook of hard work and perseverance. Obedient factory workers, who don't think different, they just build bigger cars, better planes or faster widgets. Chrysler even tapped Clint Eastwood, the era's toughest tough-guy, to coach us through our rough patch.
"It's halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they are hurting. They are all wondering what they are going to do to make a comeback," Eastwood narrates. "And we're all scared because this isn't a game."
"Quit your whining and get a job," our grandparents are telling us. "And, Occupiers, get off our lawn!" This formula worked for the Greatest Generation, and they've endowed it to us. But, the Grand Bargain of the 1950s is gone and isn't coming back. Ever.
Now, if you go to college, you become burdened by student loan debt. Our national student loan debt exceeds one trillion dollars. When we graduate, there aren't many stable jobs. The Economist reports that America's under-25 unemployment rate is more than18 percent. This generation will have more job changes in our 20s than the Greatest Generation had in their lifetimes. If you buy a house, you're probably underwater. The gold watch only goes to public employees.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, "Since unemployment among young college graduates still shows no improvement, the class of 2011 will likely face the highest unemployment rate for young college graduates since the Great Recession began."
Like American politicians, the Chrysler ad is spot-on with America's problems, but then offers a flawed formula for success. We're not in the industrial age anymore, a time when more work, harder work, translated into greater rewards. Millennials are working hard, but it's not helping. We're in the information age and a forever recession.
"Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever?" writes best-selling author and entrepreneur Seth Godin. "The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon."
In January, vice president Joe Biden promised high school students in Columbus, Ohio that the Obama administration was working to put the "great-pay for replaceable-work" bargain back together.
There was a bargain in place for last 50 years that if you worked hard, you played by the rules, you helped increase productivity in America, you got a piece of the action. You benefited... A college degree was more than a ticket to be able to make a living; it was about who you are... about the American Dream, the dream that your parents could put you in a position where you could do better than they could do.
Biden's big solution was the administration's "Pay-As-You-Earn" student loan plan, which limits federal student loan payments to 10 percent of discretionary income. The Obama administration, like its Republican predecessor, has doubled down on a flawed strategy of American toughness and government bailouts. They're committed to the bargain, just at a discounted rate.
America can't succeed by bailing out failed institutions. Come to think of it, the Super Bowl ad represents another outdated advertising institution. It's blasting information to the masses without regard for who your customers really are. While 110 million people may have watched the ad, only a fraction of us are in the market to buy a new Chrysler. It doesn't matter how many times I view the ad: it will never persuade me to buy a car because I don't need one. Also, as a rule, I never buy new cars. This year's Super Bowl ads sold for $3.5 million for a 30-second spot. Just think of how much targeted advertising that could have bought.
The American recovery won't come from Detroit's dogged persistence. It will come from innovative computer geeks and social misfits. Instead of a pep talk, we need a lesson in computer programming. Less Dirty Harry, more Steve Jobs and Peter Thiel.
Thiel, the venture capitalist behind Paypal and Facebook, is encouraging innovation in an unconventional way with his 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowships. "Thiel Fellows are given a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 to skip college and focus on their work, their research, and their self-education," the Foundation's website explains. "They are mentored by our network of visionary thinkers, investors, scientists, and entrepreneurs, who provide guidance and business connections that can't be replicated in any classroom. Rather than just studying, you're doing."
Like me, you might be too old to earn a Thiel Fellowship. That doesn't mean we're helpless. Google fellow Sebastian Thrun recently traded his tenured position at Stanford University to teach classes online for free. Millennials can improve our lot by visiting Udacity.com and enrolling in a free computer science course. In seven weeks, we'll know how to build a search engine. We'll have a valuable skill that didn't require $14 million for a Super Bowl ad or $12.5 billion for a government bailout.
Come to think of it, Dirty Harry might be right after all, "We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines."
Our roaring search engines.
Follow John Hrabe on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnhrabe
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Facebook MAY have 10K employees. It's hard to develop software that will employ large numbers. And Steve Jobs sent the MANUFACTURING away so please don't bring him up as innovative or helping our economy AT ALL.
Apple has MORE THAN enough money to build here and still make ridiculous amounts of money, but how many devs do you think work on iOS or MacOS? Or even all of the SW in Apple's infrastructure.
is a lot more interesting than
"Go on, make my 4G connection."
Statistically, only the top 5% of students are intelligent enough to successfully pursue a career in engineering, science, or technology. Only the top 1% or 2% of students are intelligent enough to create the Next Big Thing. These people WILL survive the downturn, and in fact will do very well for themselves, but only because they're naturally gifted and can perform tasks almost nobody else can perform. The option of making money from high technology is SIMPLY NOT AVAILABLE to the rest of society. We should stop dangling it in front of people as if they have some chance of ever taking advantage of it, because it's a vicious lie. Joe Sixpack can no more become a software developer or engineer than he can become an NFL star and play in the Super Bowl. Joe Sixpack NEEDS manufacturing jobs, but the wealthy are making too much money sending them overseas for them EVER to come back.
You want to save the country? Use Tariffs and trade policy to make it more expensive to manufacture things overseas. Don't want to do that? Enjoy the slide to third world status.
What? You know it's true.
P.S.: What exactly does one need to become a qualified "Freelance Foreign Correspondent?"
hung on by your fingernails. that ad was directed at the people who have. it was the pep talk
they needed to hear, not you. it was ok, we are building cars again, some poor schlub got
a job, maybe you will get one soon. BECAUSE the american economy has historically always
come back, better, stronger, different - but back. in spite of stupid greedy plutocrats every couple generations.
See: http://revolutionofreason.com and http://www.youtube.com/RobertLBlackburn
Isn't that how we got in this place? We believed that we didn't need to make stuff anymore, because people around the world will do 'Those' kinds of jobs for far less money, and that would free our best and brightest to do the Smart things that need to be done, except we don't hold any magical bag of virtual expertise.
I work with Indian, Chinese and even Filipino IT people that are every bit as good at their American counterparts. Sure there are language barriers and other things that detract such as Time Zones and Cultural differences but most are quite competent.
And since we do Outsource so much of our IT nowadays, the best and brightest have going into the Financial world, where they have gamed the system for the super rich, it has been said by better than me that 'We in America don't make anything but Money anymore.' And that speaks volumes, our Financial system make money off of the action, they don't produce anything of real value except a game for the super Rich to get even more money by taking say a nickle of every dollar the rest of us spend.
I say it is time we start making our own crap again. The dollar store is not our friend.
Nope. That's not how we got in this place. Jobs are being outsourced because it is more profitable for corporations, not because of any mistaken 'belief' held by anyone. What we 'believe' is completely irrelevant.
Wait those jobs are gone. That is old industrialism and we are in the new age. And all of the things around us are made............China, Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, etc. So the jobs exist. The issue is that the US has adopted a foolish trade policy coupled with an equally foolish tax code. People were sold the information and knowledge economy spiel unless they had enough knowledge to see it was snake oil. That spiel now includes exactly what this article says. "Get over it. Jobs are gone. Technology is the way." Basic economics bah humbug. Of course we could build new things based on technology. Which is really what happened in the past. Cars, planes, radios. Or wind turbines, solar panels and things we have not imagined. Designed by innovative engineers and built in US factories. What a thought.
How many jobs will this new technology company create. Maybe none, realistically a few hundred and if it was real successful several thousand. Which is not very much. How hard is it to accomplish this. Depends but it does take capital, perserverance and knowledge. Businesses are like that. Finance, HR, technology. But the reality is that tech does not create the kind of business ecosystems that manufacturing does.
Your glaring lack of understanding of the working class is astounding; it almost sounds like the rights harangue against the working class, "they are merely workers who don't produce ideas or capital for the growing of wealth."
My father was a UAW man for 34 years. During his time at GM, he was conscientious, hard working, and often made suggestions to management about how to more efficiently operate their plants. And many time this suggestions were taken because they were coming from a worker who actually spent time on the floor of the plant instead of a corporate office. \
"We're not in the industrial age anymore, a time when more work, harder work, translated into greater rewards. Millennials are working hard, but it's not helping. We're in the information age and a forever recession."
Really? So, are those millennials with all that computer and information knowledge going to build cars? Are they going to work routers and jointers while making furniture? Are they going to operate the machinery that creates a lawn tractor? Are they going to work the snake that cleans out the sink?