Little Miss Perky Nose and Silk Blouse is not making mad benjamins
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con…
Fulfillment Elusive for Young Altruists In the Crowded Field of Public Interest
Armed with a Georgetown University diploma, Beth Hanley embarked in her 20s on a path hoping to become a professional world-saver. First she worked at nonprofit Bread for the World. Then she taught middle school English in central Africa with the Peace Corps. Finally, to certify her idealism, she graduated last spring with a master’s degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University.
But now the 29-year-old faces a predicament shared by many young strivers in Washington’s public interest field. After years of amassing so many achievements, they struggle to find full-time employment with decent pay and realize they might not get exactly what they set out for. Hanley, a think tank temp who dreams of aiding the impoverished and reducing gender discrimination in developing countries, is stuck.
You know, somewhere there’s a guy, toiling in a cube, who just spent six weeks working out a way to make toilet paper with 1% less energy input, thus cutting the cost of goods sold by 0.25%, while keeping the TP just as soft and smooth as it was before.
…and that man has added more to the sum total of human happiness and productivity over those six weeks than little-Miss-altruist Beth Hanley has in her decade of getting elite degrees, wasting time in the Peace Corps, and getting her masters degree in rectal thumb insertion international relations.
I’m not saying that Mr-TP-improvement is a hero (“because what’s a hero?”).
And I’m not saying that little-miss-perky-nose-and-silk-blouse is a bad person.
But, aside from her own sense of self worth, what has she accomplished in the last decade?
Pretty much zero.
Numerous young Washingtonians bemoan the improvisational and protracted career track of the area’s public interest profession. They say the high competition for comparatively low-paying jobs saps their sense of adulthood, forcing them to spend their 20s or early 30s moving from college to work to graduate school and back…
Many globally minded people choose to work for nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, that advocate certain causes…
So the best they can imagine doing is “advocating”.
Here’s a hint: maybe the reason that your “sense of adulthood” is “sapped” is because you haven’t been doing anything at all adult.
Adults accomplish things.
They do not bounce around a meaningless series of do-nothing graduate programs, NGOs, and the sophisticated social scene in DC.
If you want to help the poor in Africa, go over there, find some product they make that could sell here, and start importing it. Create a market. Drive up the demand for their output.
Or find a bank that’s doing micro-finance.
Or become a travel writer, to increase the demand for photography safaris, which would pump more dollars into the region.
Or design a better propane refrigerator, to make the lives of the African poor better.
Or get a real job and give 25% of your salary to buy anti-malarial netting for Africans. (a) you’ll do about 100 times more good than if you worked at an NGO, and (b) even after your tithing, you’ll still have more money in your pocket.
These wannabe world-changers, ubiquitous in Washington, New York and San Francisco,
One thing that disgusts me about “wannabe world changers” is that mortaring together a few bricks almost always is beneath them – they’re more interested in writing a document about how to lobby the government to fund a new appropriate-technology brick factory.
Coyote wrote the definitive critique of this a while back in his post I Want a Big Picture Job.
(re-reading it just now, I see that I had forgotten that in that post Coyote linked to a post of mine, here…and despite being thus marred, Coyote’s post is still a great on).
By the way, notice the commonality, whether we’re talking about useless drama queens in the non-profit, or for-profit sectors:
- inefficient levels of education (or, rather, schooling)
- overinflated opinion of how they’re going to change the world
- overinflated opinion of what the world owes them
“I have friends who did investment banking,” Hanley said.. She continued: “A couple of them made comments to me suggesting I haven’t grown up, like, ‘I’ve been working for five years — isn’t that incredible?’ “
No, you haven’t. You’ve been fudging around in an NGO.
I know, I know, it has the outward trappings of work.
…but if you’re not creating value for anyone (whether by providing expert legal advice, or by flipping burgers for hungry consumers, or by creating art that people want to buy, or by raising kids, or whatever), then it’s not work.
Hanley … just turned down an offer from a for-profit consulting firm to manage a government contract. It paid well, but she was not ready to jump off the international aid track.
Wow. Her horizons range all the way from taking government dollars at a non-profit to “advocate”, to taking government dollars at a for-profit to “consult”.
Amazing.
Of thousands of NGOs in the region, many focus on such issues as children’s health or farmer education in developing countries. But the supply of jobs is limited because the organizations have lean budgets built from government funding…
Oh, great.
I’m earning the same crappy low salary as these NGO folks (because I’m trying to grow a business, and create value for other people), and I’m being taxed on my modest salary, so that the government can then take it and dole it out to NGOs who spend it on salaries of people who then – wait for it – advocate causes…which is to say, pester the government to tax me more, and send more money to them.
Rope.
Get me rope.
November 3rd, 2007 at 2:47 am
Yeah, well, at least they’re not generally considered a representative sample of your age group. I’ve been hatin’ on my peers since time immemorial.
November 3rd, 2007 at 8:50 am
[quote]Armed with a Georgetown University diploma, Beth Hanley embarked in her 20s on a path hoping to become a professional world-saver.[/quote]
No, no, no! If you must go to college for that career path, then what you want is a degree from here, here or here.
November 3rd, 2007 at 9:33 am
I met someone like Ms. Perky in DC a few months ago. He worked for a “non-profit that advocates social justice”. He had a hard time explaining what the actual product of his organization was.
Not much to be done about it: our country ascribes equitable value to this crap. Ms. Perky’s cohorts actually believe that her path is just as valuable to society as, say, a doctor or engineer, and should thus be paid as much. The cloud of smug is just as prevalent in D.C. as it is in the other self-appointed epicenters of our civilization, like N.Y.C. and L.A. Only these places have that special magic that convinces a 20-something that they’re naturally qualified to tell the rest of the world how to live by virtue of residence.
November 3rd, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Not commented on to date – the crime that these graduate schools are perpetrating on their students. $35 – $45K tuition to prepare them for jobs that they; 1) readily acknowledge won’t pay much more than that and 2) admit that they probably won’t be available anyway. Another crime/master sales job conducted by the “higher” education establishment.
November 3rd, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Everyone wants the dream job, but no one seems to want an entry-level position in it…
November 3rd, 2007 at 1:45 pm
The problem is the idea that there’s a “career track” in a “public interest profession”. Used to be, charity work was something you did after you’d made real money (or your parents or husband had) – but that was back when it was called “charity work”, and funded by private money, not government.
People who’ve been exposed to economics realize that “high competition” for jobs they and their friends consider high-status is why those jobs are low-paying.
Want to make real money doing good works? Find a method for said works that isn’t choked with competition – perhaps obtaining funding from private sources instead of by writing government grant proposals, by mastering the skill of persuading rich lefties that their money would get more results if spent on field projects rather than on campaign donations and lobbyists.
November 4th, 2007 at 2:12 am
[quote]to increase the demand for photography safaris, which would pump more dollars into the region. [/quote]
NO, NO, NO! Those photo safaris do little to inject currency in the local markets. You know what does? HUNTING. Something like 4 times as much money winds up in locals hands as the socalled “Photo Safaris” – Hunters don’t fly in, spend the night in tents, take a few photo’s and then leave – they often spend weeks in a “Hunt camp”(some of them are rather like B&B’s) which employ alot of local people. They have trackers, skinners, cooks, washers, waitstaff, etc. etc. The tips are often enormous by local standards. They get paid more to start with. And there’s the meat – on elephant hunts, most, if not all the meat winds up in the stewpots of local villagers(USDA won’t let you import it), once the Hunter has claimed his trophy, especially in the case of larger animals like Elephants, Hippoes and Cape Buffalo.
Plus they’re the sheer dollar difference – A Photo safari might be $5000. That’s an extremely cheap low end plains game hunt – a Cape Buff Hunt is around $20K, and an “Tusker” (a Bull Elephant with a big pair of tusks) might go OVER $75,000. Even on percentage basis, that’s significantly more money.
Then there’s one other difference between them – REPEAT BUSINESS? How many people on Photo safaris go again, 3 years later? Hell, Most of the guys I know online that hunt Africa go back as soon as they can scratch up the bread for it.
August 11th, 2008 at 10:42 am
This article (and Coyote’s, which is how I found this article) explain in a nutshell why with 30 years of ‘development’ Africa is worse off than ever.
Perhaps it’s because of people like these!
The people going over to ‘aid’ Africa are young people with inflated egos, with degrees disciplines rife with neo-marxist and post-modern theories, from comfy middle class backgrounds who are unable to differentiate between their idealism and how the world actually functions.
At the same time, it is partially the education system itself, and the student’s won parents who are likely equally indulgent that fill their heads with these ideas to begin with.
August 11th, 2008 at 11:17 am
[quote comment="158544"]This article (and Coyote’s, which is how I found this article) explain in a nutshell why with 30 years of ‘development’ Africa is worse off than ever.
Perhaps it’s because of people like these!
The people going over to ‘aid’ Africa are young people with inflated egos, with degrees disciplines rife with neo-marxist and post-modern theories, from comfy middle class backgrounds who are unable to differentiate between their idealism and how the world actually functions.
At the same time, it is partially the education system itself, and the student’s won parents who are likely equally indulgent that fill their heads with these ideas to begin with.[/quote]
Well said.
August 12th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Don’t worry, it’ll all come out in the wash. In two or three hundred years, probably.
February 1st, 2009 at 6:28 pm
The problem in Africa is always the same, the groups or governments there have problems spending the money they get correctly. Why is it every year, through data, that no matter how much money we give in African aid, nothing improves? Don’t forget there’s corruption in the upper echelons of the governments there, plus, some NGO’s are just plain lazy and incompetent.
You’re right we get taxed for creating value so the tax dollars can go to people who basically legally steal and leech our hard work. And save the poor advocates wonder why we don’t want to give foreign aid to certain areas. It’s disgusting.