Some people decorate their houses creatively; some people make money creatively; some people aren’t creative at all. NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman thinks that in our exciting new economy, only those in the second camp will be able to eat—and he seems to be cool with this. Sure, not all of us are superstar hustlers, but that’s just because we have bad educations. If public schools start teaching “entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity” then wealth disparity will melt.
What inspired Friedman to blame poverty on uncreativeness?
“A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained.”
Another interesting factoid about laid off lawyers: lots of them are recent graduates who would’ve been laid off plus punched in the face if they’d told a partner that they wanted to change how he practiced law.
I guess the Friedmanian solution is to start our own firm. Clients will love us because we’re cheap, we tweet, and our memory of Introduction to American Legal History is way sharper than those old experienced guys’.
Or here’s a less dangerous idea: since America is wealthy but there’s not a lot of work to go around, we should distribute the wealth according to some other metric besides work. Niceness, maybe, or funniness. And we should give everyone a few sandwiches per day just for being themselves.
UPDATE: here’s an anti-Friedman rant from a lawyer who survived layoffs at her firm. She refuses “to fall into the trap of blaming all the people who had to lose their jobs to justify my own privileged position[.]”
