The government of British Columbia would like you to know: hipster is not a job choice.
No word on whether slacker counts as a career track.
Archive for the ‘Economic Development’ Category
Wanted: Hipster?
Saturday, October 13th, 2012Man versus ditch
Thursday, September 8th, 2011The Atlantic has a fascinating feature, first-person accounts, one profession per letter of the alphabet, from workers about what others may not know about their job. That engineers have fun. That zookeepers don’t hug the animals. That, as you might have suspected, some fashion models don’t eat.
Interestingly, the piece I liked least was the one written by the member of my own profession, the journalist. Self-loathing, right? Also, it was in list form, while practically every other author managed to pull together a paragraph or two. I think lists are lazy; I hate them almost as much as Q&As. Plus there’s this:
This profession encompasses a significant part of my writerly output. The insight I want to offer is that among the people who do this on a daily basis, there is a lot of implicit disagreement about what our purpose is or should be.
My insight is that you compose boring prose. I mean, come on, as the professional writer you’ve got to step it up, especially when the bass player comes out with this (admittedly run-on) description:
As they stare at the singer who has abandoned the melody in favor of melismatically emoting, or the guitar player who has put his foot on the monitor and thrown his hair back to squintily wee a mishmash of pentatonic drivel, people don’t understand that I’m making their backsides wiggle and bringing us all together in funky communion.
My favourite, though, is Mr. C for Construction Worker, who manages to make the fact that he and his companions are all leaning on their shovels while one guy actually digs the ditch — you know you’ve seen it — about ancient impulses hard-wired into his brain:
What they don’t see is the struggle going on inside your brain. The part of you that has lived in the wild for millions of years is saying it’s too exhausting, it’s too hot, why don’t you go lay in the shade for a while. That part of your brain sees the shovel, sees the ditch, sees the pipe to be laid, and it doesn’t see how this is getting you food or sex.
Take that, Professional Writer.
Dynamic dysfunction
Friday, June 10th, 2011I spent just a month in India, so I have no incredible insights about the country. But I’d highly recommend Jim Yardley’s piece on Gurgaon in the Times. He is spot-on in capturing the contradictions of the satellite city, home to many of India’s multinationals, with gleaming modern office towers above and muddy sewage puddles below. Go to lunch, surrounded by casual-Friday-outfitted 20- and 30-somethings and, except for the lack of pork in the Chinese buffet, you might as well be in a suburban Virginia office park. Later that same afternoon, my car got stopped on the highway leaving the city, a hour-long backup caused by a meandering cow.
The entrepreneurial spirit that enables a place like Gurgaon to go from barren pasture to commercial hub in two decades is part of the genius of India. But to my Westernised eyes, that vitality, that drive often seems on the verge of devolving into chaos. And the hyper-officiousness, the minute micromanging that is so frequently the response threatens paralysis. These wild pendulum swings (See: national economic policy) seem like they ought to hobble India — and yet it booms.
It’s equal parts fascinating and frustrating.
“Mad” economics
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009Edward Glaeser has a Creative Class-esque take on Mad Men in today’s Times: that the intellectual value of proximity draws idea-driven industries to cluster close to urban cores.
Personally, I don’t watch Mad Men much for the economics. Bigger draws: the fashion, the design, John Slattery. But it’s an interesting prism through which to see the show, and the industry on which it focuses.
Still, as one of the commenters on Glaeser’s blog notes, will being electronically connected dilute the significance of cities in an idea economy?