My grandfather began his work for the railroad about 1900. He retired about 1946. The job changed almost not at all during that entire period. He learned telegraphy and he was a station
master.
My father was the world’s top consultant on brick making. But when he died in 1961 the brick plants were very little changed from the ones in the 1920s. Every single brick had to be moved individually by hand in each stage of the process. The clay had to be found, the clay mixed, then the brick was shaped and cut and dried and fired.
To start with the ground, find clay, then burn that clay into exactly into exactly the color you needed, all this took a lot of expertise.
But from the time he started to the time he finished, it was the SAME expertise.
NOTHING is like that now.
My other grandfather was a Methodist preacher. The Methodist Church like so many other Protestant churches had split before the Civil War into Northern and Southern branches. My grandfather began preaching in the 1870s and retired in the 1930s. During that entire time he was employed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
If you had asked my grandfather whether he was a fundamentalist, I doubt he would have understood what you meant. All Southern Methodist ministers were fundamentalists. There was no Modern Theology to learn, there was no Political Correctness to keep up with. Even the names for colored people didn’t change every couple of years.
His job was to bring people to Christ.
Not to teach them the latest progressive theories. Today it is hard to imagine a mainline Protestant minister taking “all that salvation and damnation stuff” seriously, but that was all he did.
We had doctors who learned their medicine in practice.
They even came to your house. They didn’t keep up with the latest fads in medicine, which is about all medicine is these days, and they didn’t keep up with “the latest developments in their field.”
They didn’t HAVE a “field.” They were doctors.
As for the latest developments, there were very few to keep up with. There were earthshaking drugs like penicillin developed was huge progress, but they took very little time to learn about.
My father took time out in his teens to read law and pass the bar exam, apparently for a lark, because he was too young to get a license to practice law. Lawyers practiced law in front of a jury or before a judge they knew.
The question was whether a guy was guilty or innocent and what to do about it. Like a preacher saving souls, this is now an old-fashioned and irrelevant business in the modern legal profession, but back then that was what they did for a living.
There were many last-minute decisions by the courts to keep up with. The law changed very slowly back then.
Preacher, station master, brick maker, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. These were careers.
There are no careers today.
#1 by joe rorke on 10/14/2005 - 10:48 am
Are all the clamdiggers gone too? I grew up on the bay. I don’t see how that could have changed very much. Last I heard duckshit had polluted the bay and the clamdiggers had to stay off the bay. Duck farms, you know. Them ducks have a tendency to dump a load now and again. They tell me it got into the bay and polluted it. Those were the days. I have many fond memories of working out on the bay. I knew nothing about the people who have a stranglehold on our country today. Real freedom seemed to exist in those days. If the criminals in charge today have their way, our children and our grandchildren won’t ever know what that freedom was like. Who would have dreamed such a thing could have happened in our country?
#2 by Trager Smith on 10/17/2005 - 10:58 am
Something much more basic is going on:
Computers make for more refined accounting.
More refined accounting means a better ability to find out which parts of a business are making or losing money.
Computers also mean that engineers can incorporate costs into their design and not have to send designs to top management, which will then get cost from accounting, buyer preferences from marketing, and so on. Top management alone has the information. (Engineers design cars that make them happy, but they cost too much and the public won’t buy them.) All this means that middle-management ranks, those who pass informatation from bottom to top and back down again, are getting delayered.
Computers also mean that it has become easier to buy outside the firm than make it yourself. Transactions costs are lowered. Did you ever hear of Ronald Coase and a paper he wrote in 1937, “The Economics of the Firm”? Of course *you* have.
All this means more and more creative destruction, shorter product cycles, more jobs in design and marketing, fewer semi-skilled and unskilled jobs (code for IQ, mostly), smaller sized plants and firms both.
This means a general increase in the tempo of change. Who now plans ten years ahead?
It means a greater premium on raw IQ. You’re OLD Bob and not as smart as you used to be and are living on you accumulated wisdom. There’s not much of a demand for “experience.” Peak earning years will go down. Not as much as it should, since our Stone Age brains tell us that with age comes wisdom. It did, when the oldsters were all of thirty.
It all adds up to no more careers, just jobs in the old sense that you get a very specific task.
Tell me, Bob, what are the last three bits of wisdom you’ve acquired.