I
I’m sure you’ve heard about this thing called the Great Recession.
Maybe you got laid off. Maybe you didn’t even get the chance to get laid off, since you were never able to get a job in the first place. Maybe you were speculating on the bubble, but then found out, to your chagrin, that the bubble bit back. Maybe you were smart, swooping in as the sky was falling (and banks were shutting down, or merging in droves to save themselves, as analysts screamed bloody murder on CNBC).
Maybe, you just decided that enough was enough, and so you’re going back to school/leaving the country/laying low somewhere while this all blows over.
You’ve probably heard the statistics—youth unemployment is at a record high throughout the world. The economic scene has been BLEAK for the past two years for many—but especially so for we so-called millennials; the 30-and-under group, mostly fresh out of school.
Virtually everyone I know has struggled in some way—friends, family, "frenemies," enemies and myself. Kids with degrees from Harvard and Cambridge are waiting tables in New York. Top-notch lawyers toil as glorified paralegals in windowless basements. Former masters of the universe, who blew their money on bottle service and ugly handbags two years ago, have moved back in with their parents. They try to pay off debt from their six-figure MBAs.
Friends with jobs they hate do whatever it takes to not get fired and to keep their health insurance, whether that means working until 2:00 a.m. on weekends and holidays, or putting up with a massively incompetent boss. Those who have found themselves still in possession of a well-paying job? One that they truly like, and could see being at 10 years from now?Well, these folks have become something akin to sparkly unicorns, or the Yeti: Mythical, and disbelievingly discussed.
II
The end of the 19th century and first half of the 20th was the age of industry, where fortunes were minted and titans were celebrated for building more, bigger, faster, now. Master plans became the order of the day. Huge swaths of cities were torn down, rebuilt and metastasized when cars became the primary mode of transportation. Highways were built, countrysides electrified and factories arose overnight to pump out goods later marketed to an ever-fatter, but hungrier public.
In the past 30 years or so, the industrial titans of yore have been replaced by financial titans who command billions on paper. Traders who started out with practically secretarial wages in the 1980s have been replaced by cocky brahs expecting five and six-figure bonuses as a matter of course. Complex financial instruments requiring teams of math and physics PhDs to create--and which virtually nobody understands (that might have been the point)--are bought and sold basically as articles of faith.
Just put your money in, pray for the best, and maybe find a way to short it as an insurance measure. It’s kind of like roulette, but with more graphs. At least with roulette, I can discern between red and black.
In Florida, nobody--including myself--growing up at the very tail end of the millennium had any idea what an investment banker did. My idea of a banker was someone at the local Citizen’s Bank branch who cashed my checks, and maybe offered me a mortgage. By the time I graduated university in the mid-2000s, I still didn’t know what investment bankers did... but I did know that it was apparently the closest thing a 21-year-old could get to winning the lottery.
Now, Goldman Sachs is the bogeyman that Bolivian tourists try to locate in guidebooks when they come visit New York. Financial institutions can apparently be held responsible for everything ranging from empty houses and depressed property values in south Florida, to colicky babies in the Pacific Northwest. But that’s OK, because they’ve made more money than ever in the past year! This befuddles the hell out of anyone outside of the financial sector. Gun-toting wannabe militia men and latte-sipping café Marxists unite in agreement that it ain’t right.
III
Enough with the lamentations. The flipside of the so-called Great Recession, and all of the financial disasters and corporate collapses that preceded it in the past decade (technology bubble, Enron, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, take your pick) have gotten people to think about our contemporary capitalist world.
Forced from their jobs, or stuck at jobs where they’re treated like expendable pieces of breathing machinery, many of my peers have gotten to thinking: Is the way we have been making money for the better part of the last century right?
In the wake of all of the corporate and financial disasters of the past decade, business schools and economists are latching on to buzzwords like “sustainability,” “social enterprise” and “triple bottom line,” the latter of which emphasizes the three “Ps”: people, planet and profits. It’s like hippies left their commune and started teaching MBA workshops. Which is true, in a way; old hippies have become successful entrepreneurs and corporate leaders. The rise of the entire green/natural products sector--ranging from organic groceries, to environmentally-friendly forms of everyday goods, to clean tech--is a testament to that generation's presence.
These companies are no doubt making plenty of money, and the upside in the future is huge—but part of their wider success lies in their social goals. Being a “do-gooder” in a way that’s integrated with the consumer product and business model generates awareness about the means of production that create everyday goods, and how these impact our society and environment. But this very awareness-raising doubles as an effective, built-in marketing device for these companies. They capture market share, even amongst those only casually concerned with social issues.
In tandem with this emerging approach to business is the resurgence and celebration of small entrepreneurship. What only a decade ago was seen as quaint fringe resistance to big-box retailers and corporate chains now takes root in cities, suburbs, and towns. Community identity thrives. Kids recently laid off, or unable to find regular employment with a company, are finally getting around to learning an old maxim: If you can’t find a job, make your own.
Add to that the low-to-no barriers of entry for setting up a business, thanks to the internet. My generation has seen the rise and flourishing of sites like Etsy, which supports direct sales between producers and consumers, and Kickstarter, which helps creative small-scale projects find seed capital to start a venture. Combine all this with the DIY mentality cultivated by punk kids, Martha Stewart, grandmothers and recessionistas alike--and, all of a sudden, mass small-scale entrepreneurship becomes a very real possibility.
Social enterprise is an on-trend topic in both business and charity, since it ostensibly combines the two. Disillusioned refugees from the private and nonprofit sectors are meeting halfway. They are figuring out how to take business principles and dynamism to run self-sustaining nonprofits, while applying nonprofit principles to run businesses that are more transparent and socially responsible. Sometimes these fail spectacularly (see for-profit microfinance institutions in India); sometimes, they succeed spectacularly (see Ten Thousand Villages, Newman’s Own.)
Having a socially-oriented enterprise doesn’t make you a saint overnight, however. And it doesn’t necessarily fix the greed component that contributed to our economic mess. Plenty of those who have come to embody this “not just for profit” movement are most certainly cads (John Mackey and Dov Charney come to mind) and have exhibited structural or ethical weaknesses.
Regardless of the movement's public faces, three important points are being made through these enterprises: 1) That it simply isn’t enough to make money just to make money. Perhaps in the short term--but in the long term, everything comes back around, and the blowback is inevitably an order of magnitude worse. 2) That a strong social mission is not necessarily inimical to turning a profit—whether it be keeping production in the United States, promoting environmentally friendly standards, or fair trade. Conversely, trying to make money, when done correctly, is not antithetical to maintaining a socially responsible, productive and accountable operation. 3) That when things are broken, you can’t just sit and wring your hands, or wish for the system to be smashed outright. Creation takes effort, but it’s the only solution to broken and outdated mechanisms.
So I’ll end my final Fortnight contribution with a quote from Jose Marti, the original Cuban revolutionary and a polymath par excellence. Though Marti writes towards the end of the 19th century, during a time of turmoil and the birth of Latin American identities, his commentary could easily have been written at the end of 2010. Appropriately, this quote originally came to my attention from being posted on my friend’s profile on Facebook, the digital repository for our generation:
The youth of America are rolling up their sleeves, digging their hands in the dough, and making it rise with the sweat of their brows. They realize that there is too much imitation, and that creation holds the key to salvation. 'Create' is the password of this generation. The wine is made from plantain, but even if it turns sour, it is our own wine!