We're Going On A Stag Hunt!

Also: Why appeals to enlightened self-interest won't make corporations treat front-line employees like human beings.

Today I have two moderately ambitious pieces up on the New Republic’s website.

One is a review of MIT Business School Professor Zeynep Ton’s new book The Case for Good Jobs, a sequel to her 2014 The Good Jobs Strategy. Ton has done excellent work documenting the ways in which corporations screw themselves by shortchanging front-line employees. But she doesn’t discuss the social mechanisms necessary to preserve worker-friendly policies after the rare enlightened CEO initiates them. In my piece, I fill in those blanks. You’ve probably guessed already that I fill in the first blank (of four) with a word that begins with U. To find out how I fill in the other three, you have to read my piece.

Before I tell you about my second New Republic article, please give it up, ladies and gentlemen, for Jean-Jacques “Man Was Born Free And Everywhere He Is In Chains” Rousseau. That’s a painting of the great man above. When I think of Rousseau I often think of Alain Tanner’s 1976 film Jonah Who Will Be 25 In the Year 2000, a sort of hippy-dippy Swiss Boomer take on Rousseau’s Emile. Whenever I think about that movie, which I saw at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, Mass., a candy-colored, marijuana-scented temple to Film that burned down in 1986, I recalculate the age of that adorable baby Jonah. Today he’s pushing 50. I picture the Jonah of 2023 balding, 30 pounds overweight, and working for Credit Suisse, whose pending takeover by UBS will end with the poor bastard’s licenciement. Jonah’s wife left him last year, his kids take three days to return his texts, when they return them at all, and he’s drowning his sorrows in a bottle of Carlsberg and a bubbling pot of fondue. But I digress.

My second New Republic article up today takes the debt-ceiling negotiations that, according to today’s papers, may be nearing their end, and plugs them into Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s stag hunt game-theory matrix, wherein two hunters have to decide whether to hunt stag, which requires cooperation, or hare, which does not. If you want to know more, read my piece. And know that no matter how this ends, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will be totally screwed. You can read that piece here.