The End of Work

by John Tamny

  Not long after Apple went public, a pre-med student at the University of Texas named Michael Dell started PCs Limited out of his dorm room. Lacking funds to take on a lot of inventory, Dell hit on the idea of selling computers over the phone so he wouldn’t have to commit capital to equipment until he had actual orders.46

  It’s a safe bet that most of those new Apple millionaires, like the tycoons at Apple’s competitors, had gone to college. But had they studied computer science? It’s highly unlikely. Even if their studies were related to computers in some way, what they learned in the classroom would have had little relevance to what they were doing in the business of computers. We know this because even the established technology companies of the era were skeptical about the future of the PC. The personal computer didn’t even exist when they were in college.

  Orville and Wilbur Wright were famously “first in flight.” But as their biographer David McCullough notes, “they had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own.”47 Assuming they’d had the means to attend college, what could they have been taught that would have helped them develop a flying machine?

  “For years, I struggled in school,” recalls the film and television producer Brian Grazer (Splash, Parenthood, Apollo 13, Arrested Development, 24, Empire, etc.).48 He managed to graduate from the University of Southern California but hardly as a marquee student. So what? What school could have taught Grazer to produce a film about a man falling for a mermaid? More recently, actor-director-producer Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor, Patriots Day, etc.) decided, “I could probably get more following a bellman around in a hotel . . . for three months than I could by going to film school and learning about cameras.”49

  The Internet was introduced to consumers in the mid-1990s. It’s hard to imagine a world without it today, but by the end of that decade most people around the world were still untouched by this remarkable innovation. A 1992 graduate of the University of Texas, I never took a computer course, and I didn’t use email until late 1998. My experience was hardly unusual. Today, of course, just about all the work I do is Internet-related.

  There are always outliers, of course, and you can find an anecdote to prove anything, including the low value of a college degree. The point, however, is that whether in entertainment, e-commerce, or any other field of business, the present rarely predicts the future. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Britney Spears was at the top of the music world, Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods were sports heroes and role models, Robert Downey Jr. and Ben Affleck were jokes in Hollywood, and the CEO of Enron was the standard by which corporate chieftains were to be judged.

  Forgive the cliché, but change is the only thing that’s certain. Universities talk a grand game about preparing their graduates for tomorrow, but they don’t know a darned thing about tomorrow. Now, none of this is to say that you shouldn’t go to college. College is great. It’s a place to grow up, to be exposed to new ideas, to meet a husband or wife, and to make lifelong friends, some of whom might be crucial contacts in the working world. Moreover, a college degree is a great door-opener in the job market. That’s important, especially if you’re not equipped with the genius of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates or a Michael Dell. Even if it requires going into debt, college is generally a good idea.

  My point is that what you learn in school will have little direct relevance to what you do when you’re out. College is a way of branding yourself. A degree is a credential you obtain with the future in mind, but the acquired knowledge it represents is not what sets you up for success in the real world.

  The United States is not the richest country in the world because it has many of the most prestigious universities in the world. The United States has many of the world’s most prestigious universities because it’s the richest country in the world. Stroll around campus and note the names of great businessmen on the buildings. Our universities are an effect of economic growth, not the driver. To see why, let’s conclude this chapter with a look at China.

  In 1978, Shanghai, the commercial center of China, had only fifteen skyscrapers. By 2006, there were 3,780 of these gleaming symbols of prosperity, and the number continues to rise.50 A visit to Shanghai or to many other cities in this rapidly growing nation reveals mind-boggling economic activity.

  In the late 1970s, China was emerging from decades of doctrinaire communist rule in which property and profits were generally prohibited, and the country was predictably destitute. But with the economic liberalization that followed, China’s economy took off. Today, any business that wants to grow globally has China very much in mind.

  What drove this rapid transformation from poverty to prosperity? Some point to education. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Paul E. Peterson and Eric A. Hamushek of the conservative Hoover Institution argue that “raising student test scores in this country up to the level in Canada would dramatically increase economic growth.” Their view is that “long-run growth rates are mainly accounted for by differences in cognitive skills. . . .”51 The liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof agrees: “One reason China is likely to overtake the United States as the world’s most important country in this century is that China puts more effort into building human capital than we do”52—an assertion that would doubtless amuse the thousands of Chinese who come to the United States each year to attend high school and college.

  But these writers confuse cause and effect. If the educational thesis were true, a major factor in China’s ascendance would be a top-level education system that prepared the citizenry for a sharp-elbowed capitalist world. Not so fast.

  As Fox Butterfield wrote in 1982, “12 percent of those who finish primary school are unable to go on to junior high, and there is no room in high school for 50 percent of the students who complete junior high.” Regarding access to college education, “only 3 percent of the college-age population in China, about a million students, can get into university.”53 While most Chinese had no access to college-level instruction in the early 1980s, 35 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old Americans were in college, as were 23 percent of Soviets in that age group. Even the Philippines, whose population was a fraction of the size of China’s, could claim more college students “than in all of China.”54

  Peterson, Hamushek, and Kristof have put the educational cart before the production horse. It’s undoubtedly true that there is a “correlation” between test scores and prosperity. But China’s tremendous economic growth began long before it was educating even a sliver of its population. This tells us that economic freedom trumps education. Just as America’s great schools and colleges are the fruit of abundant growth, China’s growth begot good schools.

  We can expect that as China’s economic boom continues, top-notch universities will follow. Rich people frequently seek status through their kids, and sending them to exclusive schools is a popular way of doing that. But let’s not mistake cause and effect. Poorly educated for decades, the Chinese became prosperous faster than any major nation in the history of mankind. Good schools are merely catching up to that growth.

  It’s worth remembering, too, that scholars commonly predicted in the 1980s that the superiorly educated Japanese would soon eclipse the United States economically. And while there are many fathers of Japan’s economic slowdown since the eighties, that country’s experience is a reminder that the role of education in driving prosperity is grossly overrated.

  Just ask Jack Ma, a hapless Chinese student who failed his university entrance exams. Fortunately for him, he was turned down for every job he applied for—even at Kentucky Fried Chicken55—so he founded Alibaba, the Amazon of the Orient, and is now worth billions.

  In his classic book Wealth and Poverty, George Gilder notes that while education and credentials are most important in government, “elsewhere most skills are learned on the j
ob.”56 It’s not that people should avoid education, but education has little to do with success in the working world.

  It’s said that we live in a “knowledge economy,” but most people don’t understand what that means. Precisely because the economy is evolving faster and faster, classroom teaching can’t keep up. The “knowledge” that wins is gained by doing the work that corresponds with your skills.

  We’re all intelligent, but in different ways. A prosperous economy means more of us will get to express our intelligence regardless of whether an impressive degree is attached to our name.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  What Was Once Silly Is Now Serious

  “I can’t not act. It’s what I was made to do, and I swear to God, it’s the only thing I’m good at.”1

  —Jennifer Lawrence

  “Success has a way of making the work seem less like, well, work.”2

  —Grant Achatz

  Danny Meyer was born into a rich and prestigious St. Louis family. His maternal grandfather, Irving B. Harris, a graduate of Yale, co-founded the Toni Home Improvement Company with his brother. In 1948, they sold the business for what was then the princely sum of $20 million.3

  Meyer’s paternal grandfather, Morton Meyer, a graduate of Princeton, ran a St. Louis chemical company called Thompson-Howard. Meyer’s father, Morton Louis Meyer, also a Princeton graduate, returned from service in France as an army intelligence officer to St. Louis and started a number of businesses, including a global travel services company, hotels, and restaurants.4

  Traveling the country and the world from a young age with his father, Meyer developed an early fascination with food. He recalls a trip to Miami at the age of four on which he was “talking to anyone who would listen about the ‘cwacked cwab.’” On a family trip to France when he was seven, his mother insisted that he keep a diary, in which he “chose to write about food.” He liked to swap his lunch at school, “not because the other kids’ lunches were better, but because this was the best way I knew of to learn about another family. I had never heard of Miracle Whip until I traded my braunschweiger on rye with another for his baloney sandwich (one slice of Oscar Mayer and Miracle Whip on Tastee white bread).”5 By his teen years, Meyer was cooking for his friends, creatively transforming everything from hot dogs to barbecue sauce.6

  Though he attended one of St. Louis’s most prominent schools, he was an underachiever and was turned down by Princeton and Brown, eventually worming his way into Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.7 He continued to work for his father’s travel business during college, and his long-term plan was rather conventional.

  Upon graduation, Meyer moved to New York City, not to work in travel or in restaurants, but to take a $16,500-per-year job as a special projects manager for a growing company that manufactured devices to detect shoplifters. Meyer eventually migrated to sales, where he was the company’s top salesman for three straight years, earning $125,000 annually.8

  His success led to an opportunity to open a London office for the company, but Meyer had politics on his mind. Having worked for John Anderson’s quixotic 1980 presidential campaign, he thought he’d try law school. But at dinner the night before he was to take the LSAT, he admitted to an uncle, “I don’t even want to be a lawyer.”9 His uncle, who had observed Meyer’s lifelong fascination with food, responded, “Why don’t you just do what you’ve been thinking about doing your whole life” and open a restaurant?10

  Meyer took his uncle’s advice. In 1984, he got a job as a daytime assistant at an Italian seafood restaurant in Manhattan, starting at the bottom—à la Keith Richards—to reach the top, with a weekly paycheck of $250 per week; a far cry from the $2,000+ he earned each week as a commissioned salesman.

  That was quite a pay cut, but it was Meyer’s first step in pursuit of his passion. Yet, the substantial reduction in compensation that surely loomed large in Meyer’s career change must be considered in light of his personal interests. Food animated his intelligence and drive in the way that hitting did for Tony Gwynn. Meyer would get into restaurants because, as he explained in his memoir/business book, “there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. I was born to go into business for myself—and I was destined to find a business that would allow me to share with others my enthusiasm for things I find pleasurable.”11 For Meyer, that was food.

  Despite Meyer’s lifelong expression of fascination with all things food related, his family, with the exception of his uncle, thought he was crazy to be getting into restaurants. While they invested alongside him when he found the space for what became Union Square Café, getting into food service as a career was, in a sense, not what people like the Meyers did.12 In 1984, restaurant toil “was considered blue-collar work not befitting a liberal arts background.”13

  But Meyer wasn’t going to be deterred, and in 1985, he opened Union Square Café. In what proved a wise move given his keen restaurant acumen, the man who loved being in the kitchen fired himself as chef long before the restaurant opened. Meyer would outsource the kitchen work so that he could focus his energies on the big picture.

  Union Square Café became a grand success, and Meyer was just getting started. Gramercy Tavern followed Union Square, then Eleven Madison Park, The Modern, numerous other restaurants, and a full-service catering business. Most famously, Meyer turned a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park into an international fast-casual dining concept known as Shake Shack.

  In his memoir, Meyer muses about how often “people laughed at me when I said I’d be parlaying a political science degree into a career as a restaurateur!”

  [T]hey nodded politely and then winked, smiled, or gestured under the table. The common perception was that restaurants were a shady, cash-driven racket where money was always being passed illicitly and everybody kept two sets of books. This was not the career for which suburban parents sent their kids to college.14

  But as Meyer points out, that perception of the restaurant business was dated. By the early 1980s, “many American culinary stars were being recognized and celebrated.”15 One of those stars was Wolfgang Puck. Born in Austria to a chef and a butcher, Puck left school early to work in the kitchen at Maxim’s, then at the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo. He came to the United States in 1973 and eventually opened Spago on West Hollywood’s then-decrepit Sunset Strip.16 Spago’s success made Los Angeles a restaurant town and was the launching pad for a global restaurant and retail operation.

  When he shunned school in favor of cooking, Puck faced the same kind of skepticism Meyer experienced, but he “has seen the job of a chef change from a last-resort career to a ‘rock-star profession.’” Puck tells the Wall Street Journal, “These days, people become cooks instead of becoming lawyers or doctors.”17 One of those people is the chef Grant Achatz, the owner of Chicago’s world-renowned restaurant Alinea.

  Achatz grew up in St. Clair, Michigan, “flipping eggs” at his parents’ diner. The cooking bug got to him early. His friends viewed his interest in restaurants as the stuff of a “deluded dreamer,” but he told himself, “I’m going to own a great restaurant, a famous one.”18

  Cooking consumed Achatz just as music had consumed Lennon and McCartney. It wasn’t work to him. At culinary school, he writes, “[m]ost of the students looked at the classes as an inconvenient interruption of their leisure activities. While they were going out to bars and partying, I hit the gym every day and then spent each night reading cookbooks.”19 Food was his education. After scoring a job with the world-famous chef Charlie Trotter, he spent each night studying Trotter’s cookbook, learning “the dishes and the techniques cold.”20

  Achatz moved on to a job at the renowned French Laundry in northern California’s wine country, so thrilled by the chance to work for Thomas Keller that he didn’t bother to ask what the salary was or what he would be doing. Returning to the Chicago area as head chef at Trio, he got to know Nick Kokonas, a frequent guest, and four years later the two of them opened Alinea in Lincoln Park. Within eighteen months of its
opening, Alinea was ranked the number-one restaurant in the United States by Gourmet magazine.21

  Achatz has since opened additional restaurants and authored the kind of cookbooks that great chefs publish. Cooking is what he loves. As he explains in his autobiography, Life, on the Line, “You know, it’s what I do. It just makes me really happy. That’s all there is to it.”22

  If Grant Achatz had been born fifty years earlier, odds are he would have labored in obscurity. While he might have loved what he was doing, the public wasn’t much interested in eccentric geniuses pursuing “last resort” careers in the kitchen. Achatz is the beneficiary of a dramatic rise in prosperity that has given enough people the discretionary income and leisure to support him in the pursuit of his passion for haute cuisine.

  What’s important, and requires stressing again, is the economic world has changed a great deal since the sixties. To paraphrase George Will from chapter two, as our increasingly affluent society increases its leisure time and discretionary income, the rewards will increase for those who fulfill those demands.

  While a career in food was once dismissed, the dismissal was the creation of a perception of a world that no longer exists, particularly in rich countries such as the United States. Americans are incredibly rich, and they want restaurants of all stripes to fulfill their myriad needs; high and low end, and in between. It’s an economy that allowed Danny Meyer’s Eleven Madison Park to hire a “coffee director” who personally prepares diners’ twenty-four-dollar cups of coffee at their tables. Crucial here with The End of Work’s theme very much in mind is that this extravagant cup wasn’t simply rolled out as much Meyer hired—if you can believe it—a coffee director who, according to the Wall Street Journal, “spends about 10 minutes preparing the beverage tableside.”)23

  Never forget what this book is about. And if readers do, fear not, the theme will be repeated throughout. As the U.S. economy continues to grow, and for that matter the global economy continues to soar, more and more people will get the chance to pursue the kind of work that most matches their skills, excites their passions, and elevates their often unique intelligence. As wealth grows, demand for formerly prosaic consumer items like coffee becomes specialized such that individuals are hired to oversee a restaurant’s coffee operations.