By James Pethokoukis

The New York Times would have me believe this is the “Age of Anti-Ambition.” As reporter Noreen Malone puts it: “Essential or nonessential, remote or in person, almost no one I know likes work very much at the moment.” (The “I know” part does some heavy lifting here.)

The piece gets off to a bad start with this misstep: “For decades, job productivity has been increasing while real wages haven’t.” This chart (from colleague Michael Strain’s Strain’s 2020 book The American Dream Is Not Dead, suggests otherwise:

Indeed, since the 1990 business cycle peak, wages are up 20 percent in real terms. And if you use the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index rather than the Consumer Price Index as the inflation measure — it’s the one preferred by the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office — you find a 32 percent increase in average worker wages and about the same for the bottom fifth of workers.

That statistical slip-up got me wondering what, exactly, I have to believe or ignore to accept the dreary premise of the piece?

• For starters, I would have to believe people find their jobs meaningless. That, despite a YouGov poll from last summer finding only one in five working Americans feels that their job is “not making a meaningful contribution to the world.” 
• Similarly, a March 2021 Conference Board survey poll found an increase in job satisfaction from 56.3 percent in 2019 to 56.9 percent in 2020. Moreover, the results showed that the job satisfaction of those working remotely was “not significantly different from the satisfaction level of other workers.”
• I would have to ignore (as analyst Matt Darling points out) the sharp rebound in the prime age employment-population ratio (the percentage of the population that is currently working):

• I would have to ignore this insightful answer from Strain after I asked him (via my Substack) what he would want a reporter to know before writing a story about the supposed “Great Resignation.” Strain:

Four things: The first is that resignations are certainly extremely elevated. But it’s also the case that more people are being hired each month than in any month prior to the pandemic. The second is that people’s decisions about job opportunities depend on their circumstances. When savings account balances — swollen thanks to generous pandemic support from government programs — come back to earth, many of these “bad jobs” will look a lot better. Third, I am worried that labor demand will cool before many workers who are currently on the sidelines come back to work. Workers who are waiting for the perfect job — enabled to do so in part by swollen savings accounts — might find it difficult to secure any job if they wait too long. Finally, I am concerned about the tenor of this debate. Lower-wage service-sector jobs give people the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to society. That work has inherent dignity. Opinion leaders are both wrong and doing the nation a disservice when they degrade those jobs.

I’ll be honest, I’m not so sure this is the Age of Anti-Ambition.

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