Il bamboccione americano SAGGIO

Il bamboccione americano

Industriousness – Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

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Premessa: studiamo i bamboccioni d’America immaginando il paese come una città divisa in due quartieri: Belmont – dove abitano i ricchi – e Fishtown – dove abitano i poveri.

Tesi: il bamboccione esiste, vive a Fishtown ed è tale perché non si sposa.

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In which evidence is presented that industriousness has declined among all white males, but mostly among Fishtown males.

Note:EVIDENZA

EUROPEANS HAVE BEEN disdainful of Americans’ enthusiasm for work. “Americans live to work,” they say, “while Europeans work to live.” Many Americans have agreed, me among them, and felt sorry for Europeans. Yes, you can overdo it. There is more to life than work, and a life without ample space for family and friends is incomplete. But this much should not be controversial: Vocation—one’s calling in life—plays a large role in defining the meaning of that life.

Note:UE-USA

Vocation—one’s calling in life—plays a large role in defining the meaning of that life. For some, the nurturing of children is the vocation.

Note:VOCAZIONE

Industriousness is a resource for living a fulfilling human life instead of a life that is merely entertaining.

Note:IL TUNNEL DEL DIVERTIMENTO

What Whites Said About Work

Among prime-age whites, the most popular first choice was always work that “gives a feeling of accomplishment,” getting an average of 58 percent of the votes in each decade. The two least-chosen first choices were always short work hours (averaging 4 percent) and no danger of being fired (6 percent).

Note:PREFERENZE 70-90

In 2006, the GSS resurrected the question, and the results were startling. The 58 percent that had always voted first place to work that “gives a feeling of accomplishment” was down to 43 percent. First-place votes for short working hours more than doubled to 9 percent. “No danger of being fired” doubled to 12 percent, with another 13 percent ranking it in second place.

Note:PREFERENZE 06

This is not the way Tocqueville or Grund described the American attitude toward work. In fact, the responses in 2006 looked downright European.

Note:TOCQUEVILLE SMENTITO

What Whites Did About Work: Men

Until recently, healthy men in the prime of life who did not work were scorned as bums. Even when the man was jobless through no fault of his own, America’s deeply rooted stigma against idleness

Note:LO STIGMA DELLA PIGRIZIA

The Unbelievable Rise in Physical Disability

The percentage of workers who actually are physically or emotionally unable to work for reasons beyond their control has necessarily gone down since 1960. Medical care now cures or alleviates many ailments that would have prevented a person from working in 1960. Technology has produced compensations for physical handicaps

Note:DISABILITÀ ATTESA

Yet the percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from 0.7 percent of the size of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3 percent in 2010.

Note:DISABILITÁ EFFETTIVA

This rising trendline is not produced by changes in the legal definition of physical disability or the pool of people who qualify for benefits. Both have been tweaked but not substantially changed since 1960.

Note:DEFINIZIONE DI DISABILITÁ

Labor Force Participation More evidence for the weakening of the work ethic among males comes from the data on labor force participation—the

Labor Force Participation

When the average labor force participation rate in 1960–64 is compared with the rate from 2004 through 2008 (before the recession began), as shown in Figure 9.2, white male labor-force participation fell across the entire age range.1

Note:CALO PARTECIPAZIONE MASCHILE

Whatever that reason may have been, it affected men with low education much more than men with high education.

Note:COLPA DEI MENO ISTRUITI

Unemployment

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, Fishtown men did a little better than the average person who was looking for work. That changed in the 1980s. For the most recent two decades, Fishtown men have done worse than the average person looking for work, and the overall trend has been up.

Note:LA DISOCCUPAZIONE COLPISCE FISHTOWN OGGI PIÙ DI IERI

Hours of Work

As a group, prime-age white males continued to work long hours throughout the half century, averaging around forty-five hours per week throughout.7 But a growing minority of them weren’t working a forty-hour week, as shown in Figure 9.5. The increase in less-than-full-time work in Fishtown is notable, doubling from 10 percent in 1960 to 20 percent in 2008. Since the rise continued throughout the hottest boom years of the 1990s, it is difficult to attribute the rise to an ailing economy in which men couldn’t find as many hours of work as they wanted.

Note:UNA CRESCENTE MINORANZA CHE LAVORA SEMPRE MENO

Despite the other indications of decay, the proportion of Fishtown men who worked long hours was still 23 percent in 2008, exactly what it had been in 1960, and 5 percentage points higher than the proportion of men in the bottom quartile who had worked more than forty-eight hours in 1960.

Note:QUI FISHTOWN LIMITA I DANNI

Meanwhile, Belmont left Fishtown in the dust.8 By the end of the 1980s, almost half of Belmont men reported that they worked more than forty-eight hours in the preceding week. The percentage of hardworking Belmont men began to slack off in the 2000s, drifting down to 40 percent by 2008.

Note:È BELMNT CHE DECOLLA: RICCHI E LAVORATORI

“It’s the Labor Market’s Fault”

In one respect, the labor market did indeed get worse for Fishtown men: pay. Recall Figure 2.1 at the beginning of the book, showing stagnant incomes for people below the 50th income percentile. High-paying unionized jobs have become scarce and real wages for all kinds of blue-collar jobs have been stagnant or falling since the 1970s.

Note:PAGA STAGNANTE A FISHTOWN

Insofar as men need to work to survive—an important proviso—falling hourly income does not discourage work.

Note:MA LA PAGA NON SPIEGA LE MENO ORE

So far, I have put the scenario in terms of 2009 wages. What about all the previous years when dropout from the labor force was rising in Fishtown but jobs were plentiful? The last twenty-six years we are examining coincided with one of the longest employment booms in American history,

Note:TREND CONFERMATI ANCHE NEL BOOM 80-00

Economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst gave us another kind of look inside that black box with their analysis of American time-use surveys from 1965 through 2005. “Time-use surveys” ask respondents what they did on the previous day, separated into fifteen-minute increments… Aguiar and Hurst document what they call an increase in “leisure” that primarily affected men with low education…. Aguiar and Hurst write, “men who had not completed high school increased their leisure time by eight hours per week, while men who had completed college decreased their leisure time by six hours per week.”…

Note:BLACK BOX: CHE FA CHI NON LAVORA E NON STUDIA?

To sum up: There is no evidence that men without jobs in the 2000s before the 2008 recession hit were trying hard to find work but failing. It was undoubtedly true of some, but not true of the average jobless man. The simpler explanation is that white males of the 2000s were less industrious than they had been twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago, and that the decay in industriousness occurred overwhelmingly in Fishtown.

Note:RIASSUNTO: SIAMO PIÙ PIGRI. SPECIE A FISHTOWON

“It’s Because They Didn’t Marry”

Men with high earnings are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced.15 But there’s another possibility: Married men become more productive after they are married because they are married. Economist Gary Becker predicted this outcome in A Treatise on the Family because of the advantages of role specialization in marriage.16 George Gilder predicted it even earlier, in Sexual Suicide, through a more inflammatory argument: Unmarried males arriving at adulthood are barbarians who are then civilized by women through marriage. The inflammatory part was that Gilder saw disaster looming as women stopped performing this function, a position derided as the worst kind of patriarchal sexism.17 But, put in less vivid language, the argument is neither implausible nor inflammatory: The responsibilities of marriage induce young men to settle down, focus, and get to work.

Note:MATRIMONIO E SUCCESSO… NESSI

The puzzling thing about the marriage premium (if you do not agree with either Becker’s or Gilder’s argument) is that it cannot be a simple case of women choosing to marry men who are already more productive—the marriage premium occurs after the wedding vows have been taken.

Note:MARRIAGE PREMIUM

it something about being married that produces the effect, or is the marriage premium the result of women seeing potential in men that they are going to fulfill, even if they haven’t already done so while they are single?

Note:ORIGINE DEL MP

Put plainly, single prime-age males are much less industrious than married ones. Both the decline in marriage and the increased detachment from the labor force in Fishtown cannot be understood without knowing that the interaction exists.

Note:I PIGRI SINGLE DI FISHTOWN: SI SPOSANO MENO NON CERCANO LAVORO SONO DISOCCUPATI E LAVORANO MENO ORE

The meaning of all this is that the labor force problems that grew in Fishtown from 1960 to 2010 are intimately connected with the increase in the number of unmarried men in Fishtown. The balance of the literature suggests that the causal arrow for the marriage premium goes mostly from marriage to labor force behavior—in other words, George Gilder was probably mostly right.

Note:AL CENTRO IL MATRIMONIO

What Whites Did About Work: Women

Detecting changes in industriousness among American women is impossible unless you assume that a woman working at a paid job is more industrious than a full-time mother, which is not an assumption that I am willing to make.

Note:LE DONNE LAVORANO DI PIÙ? IMPOSSIBILE RISPONDERE

America experienced a social and economic revolution from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. The percentage of white women in the labor force rose from 40 percent in 1960 to 74 percent by 1995.

Note:IN MASSA AL LAVORO

Who Joined the Revolution and When?

The short story is that married women in Belmont and Fishtown behaved similarly, starting out within 6 percentage points of each other in 1960 and ending up within 7 percentage points of each other in 2008. Married women in both neighborhoods roughly doubled their labor force participation.

Note:DONNE DI BELMONT E FISHTOWN

Women Working Full Time

Women with jobs have never worked as many hours as men.22 The demands of child care are a major reason for the lower hours—women with children under age 5 worked an average of thirty-three hours… Even women with no children of any age worked an average of forty hours in the week preceding the CPS interview, compared to the male average of forty-five….

Note:LE DONNE CHE LAVORANO LAVORANO MENO ORE DEGLI UOMINI

For women working more than forty-eight hours, the pattern looked almost exactly the same as the one for men: increases for Belmont, flattening in the 1990s and then dropping slightly in the 2000s, with a nearly flat trendline for Fishtown.

Note:A BELMONT SI LAVORA COMUNQUE DI PIÙ ANCHE TRA LE DONNE

Adding Up the Pieces

the graph adds up the separate divergences among both men and women on labor force participation, unemployment, and hours worked. It portrays a divergence between Belmont and Fishtown nearly as great in aggregate as the change in marriage.

IL MATRIMONIO SPIEGA

Che fine farà la mia collezione di dischi? SAGGIO

THE RESPITE OF THE WELL-ORDERED MATCH: LOVE, MUSIC, AND EVEN YOUR DOG - The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

Il nostro è il mondo della libera scelta: la ricchezza le aumenta, la tecnologia le facilita.

Ma che mondo è un mondo del genere?

Probabilmente un mondo con un grado di soddisfazione che gli indicatori canonici non colgono...

... individuals can become happier without many of the core economic indicators, such as sales, revenue, or GDP, necessarily registering big improvements...

Lo capiscono al volo gli amanti della musica: per loro il Paradiso è sceso in terra a costo zero, eppure il settore è in crisi...

... Revenue is down for the music companies and for some artists, but the listening experience has never been better. Consumers are spending less for music and yet getting more in terms of aesthetic delight. To cite one example, an advanced Spotify subscription for unlimited music streaming costs only $10 a month, sometimes less with discounts. And yet, circa 2016, the listener has access to about 35 million songs... One measure counted 1,369 different kinds of music on Spotify, and growing. These categories include “black sludge,” a combination of black metal and sludge, “unblack metal” (explicitly opposed to Satanism), “crustpunk,” “deep filthstep,” “mallet” (with mallets), “new weird America” (perhaps appropriate for this book), “vegan straight edge” (hardcore punk but vegan and antidrug), and “abstract” (it’s like complextro, but more abstract than rhythmic)... YouTube offers many millions of musical cuts for free, and it is no accident that it is owned by Google, which means its search function is run by Google; YouTube is fundamentally about matching. There are also other venues—Amazon streaming, millions of artist websites, iTunes (still), and illegal download sites.... I can hear pretty much what I want, when I want, and in whatever version I want it. On the side, I still can buy CDs and LPs, but I use modern matching and search techniques, such as googling reviews, to decide what to buy... In the so-called good old days, people bought albums without always knowing much about the music... Even the successful purchases often had no more than two or three good songs, or maybe just one; not every long-playing record was as consistent as Sgt. Pepper’s or Led Zeppelin IV...

E nella classica la storia si ripete..

.... Classical music enthusiasts put great effort into finding exactly the right performance, knowing that sometimes pianist Artur Schnabel’s fingers went off the rails, or Horowitz had a bad day, or, on the brighter side, Nelson Freire really was an underrated Chopin player... You could buy thick guides to the best classical CDs, but keeping up with all this stuff wasn’t that easy—was the mono or stereo Otto Klemperer Beethoven recording thought to be best? (P.S.: It was the mono. Today you can use Google to confirm.) All that has changed. You can listen for free, read web reviews until you are tired of staring at your screen, or text a friend for quick musical advice. Every few days I receive an email from a total stranger (typically a blog reader) giving me free music tips, requesting them, or most likely both at the same time. Usually I give it a try on YouTube or Spotify and follow up accordingly, or not. That’s how I found out I like the jazz trumpeter Kamasi Washington. These days, it is hardly ever the case that people are buying music they don’t like...

L'acquisto sbagliato?: un'idea del passato...

... before streaming and YouTube became so popular, the idea of a mistaken or unsatisfactory music purchase was on the way out...

Un mondo di scarti e di selezione accurata...

... In my new Hyundai automobile, I just speak to the satellite radio system and it changes the channel by itself, using voice-recognition software. I do that every time there is a song I don’t like or, for that matter, a song I consider less than excellent. Music hardly ever disappoints...

Qui è più evidente che altrove: PIL giù, felicità su... è il mondo della scelta...

... We live in a setting where one part of GDP has gone down—GDP for recorded music—while consumer satisfaction with music almost certainly has gone up... revenue from recorded music worldwide was about $60 billion, but now it is only about $15 billion. Domestically, revenue from recorded music has fallen by about 70 percent since 1999, even though the American population has grown by about 46 million.... And yet this new world is not so bad for the earnings of artists, especially for the ones who are willing to go out and tour. In 2014, over 60,000 Americans reported their primary occupation as musician, music director, or composer, up from 53,000 in 1999; in percentage terms, that’s a bigger rise than for the American job market as a whole. The number of self-employed musicians rose even more, going up 45 percent from 2001 to 2014...

Il punto chiave: stiamo meglio di quel che ci dicono i grafici...

... The key point is this: By using better matching, the American economy is in some fundamental ways doing better than the numbers indicate. Our preferences are better satisfied, above and beyond how this might be reflected in GDP and other economic measures...

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Parliamo d'amore: oggi non sposiamo più il vicino di casa o il compagno di scuola. Lo sposo ce lo scegliamo con più cura su una gamma allargata di opzioni. Altro vantaggio che sfugge ai registri ufficiali...

... in the 1930s, one study showed that over a third of urban Americans married people who lived within five blocks. But for couples who married between 2005 and 2012, more than one-third of them met online; that number rose to nearly 70 percent for same-sex couples...

Un bel vantaggio, specie per gli omosessuali...

... For same-sex couples, the benefits of online connections appear to be much stronger, because their search and discovery problems are usually tougher...

Trovare il partner a tavola. Un' app bizzarra ma che rende l'idea...

... Oscar Mayer, the food products company, is marketing Sizzl, a dating app that tries to pair people on the basis of whether they share a common taste for a preferred kind of bacon...

Un' app per il batticuore...

... The very latest I have heard about is the app called “Once.” It connects to your Fitbit or Android Wear device and tracks your heart rate while you look at someone else’s profile...

È un mondo che ci spinge ad essere noi stessi. Fingere non serve...

... There is experimental evidence that if you enter a speed dating room and just try to be nice and welcoming to everyone, rather than looking for “the right match,” the other participants discriminate against you, and it is hard to come away from such events satisfied. It seems to work better to present some version of “who you really are” and then look for the person who will appreciate that, or in other words, it is better to try to match...

Introduciamo i primi inconvenienti: il matrimonio tra simili implica segregazione...

... “Assortative mating”—that is, the marriage of people of similar educational and socioeconomic backgrounds—has become more widespread than in the past. That phrase refers to matching generally, but it also refers more specifically to men of high education and income marrying women of high education and income. More concretely, lawyers marry other law partners, or perhaps investment bankers, rather than their secretaries. This in turn propagates inequality across the generations...

Facilitate le scelte sessuali...

... The influence of matching spreads far and wide, so maybe sex is better too for many Americans. It’s certainly easier to find, and if you have unusual tastes, or maybe just religious- or culturally based tastes, you are no longer confined to the circle of people you know from ordinary daily life....

Incoraggiata anche la ristrettezza mentale: chiudersi nel proprio mondo è sempre più facile...

... Some of this choice may encourage a narrowing of horizons, or too much choice may be alienating, or maybe the surfeit of choice makes it harder to settle down and be content.... Still, we need to seriously entertain the hypothesis that, on average, our sex lives and love lives are considerably better than they were a few decades ago...

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La grande semplificazione di Ebay... un posto dove trovi chi e cosa vuoi...

... EBay is another IT company that facilitates the well-ordered match, though here we are back to the more benevolent side of the practice. Some people own collectibles and others want to buy them. Before internet auctions, the garage sale, the flea market, and the antique shop coordinated the market, but usually you had to visit them in person...

Fine dell'eredità. Un oggetto non scelto non ha più senso. Come passerò la mia collezione di dischi ai miei figli?...

... EBay and other contemporary institutions have so attuned us to favorable and most favorable matches that the Millennial Generation has rebelled against the idea of taking on parental possessions. Parents often want to hand down their leather sofas, their music collections, and their photo albums, if only to downsize. But American kids are not accepting these items from their parents as they used to... Scott Roewer, who works as a “professional organizer,” put it this way: “They [Millennials] are living their life digitally through Instagram and Facebook and YouTube, and that’s how they are capturing their moments. Their whole life is on a computer; they don’t need a shoebox full of greeting cards.” And the very fact that we now have “professional organizers” says at least as much as that quotation...

Anche qui: più ricchezza di quanto appaia...

... With respect to matching, I would say contemporary society has a lot more “happiness capital” than the available numbers indicate...

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Il mondo dei libri: una biblioteca infinita a costo (quasi) zero...

... Or consider the used books for sale on Amazon. These days you can buy Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or many other classic works, for only a penny, plus $3.99 for shipping. And it’s not just classics; Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Visit from the Goon Squad also sells for a penny plus shipping... That the price is so low is an indication of how many books are being matched to buyers rather than being pulped or sitting in a used book store barn somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, waiting three or four years for someone to come along and pay the $8 price inscribed in pencil on the inside title page...

La tecnologia dell'incontro facile sta migliorando il mondo.

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Scegliersi il cucciolo. Boom di adozioni nei canili...

... There is one other statistic that I find indicative of the new trend toward better and more powerful matching, and that has to do with how we treat our pets. When I was a kid, I remember that most dogs given away to shelters or to the dog pound ended up being put to sleep. That is no longer the case. In New York City, the adoption rate for shelter dogs and cats now stands at 87 percent, compared to a much lower 26 percent in 2003. In San Francisco, the placement rate for shelter animals stands at 91 percent. The number of dogs and cats put to sleep has gone down by about 80 percent since the 1970s.17 And why is that? Well, shelters have become much better at matching pets to owners, albeit at the cost of some extra bureaucracy...

Cani a noleggio. Impensabile senza tecnologia dell'incontro...

... And by the way, don’t think that these days you have to own a dog to get the benefits. Just use the app Bark‘N’Borrow, an Uber-like sharing economy service to help you spend some time with a dog—and then, when you are done, send it back to its owner. The dog’s owner feels less guilty about keeping the pet in her apartment all day while she is working, the dog gets to go for a walk, your seven-year-old is delighted by the experience, and at the end of the day, everyone’s carpet remains fully unsoiled. Don’t forget to specify which breed you want...

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Va bene cuccioli e dischi, ma nei settori chiave (casa, salute, istruzione) la tecnologia dell'incontro è altrettanto rivoluzionaria?...

... If we look at the budget of a typical middle-class American, commonly the major items include rent (or mortgage payment), health care (if only indirectly through employer provision of insurance and thus lower wages), higher education, transportation, and food...

Direi di no...

... Unfortunately, not all of these areas are seeing big gains in the quality of matching, and that is one way to understand why some big parts of the American economy remain somewhat stuck...

I traslochi sono diminuiti anche se dovrebbero essere facilitati (perché non cambiamo casa ogni sei mesi?)...

... The decline in residential mobility also makes the American economy less dynamic and less able to adjust to recessions, again, as discussed earlier...

Sanità e istruzione: prezzo e prestigio sono ancora centrali, la cosa rallenta l'interscambiabilità...

... It is much easier than before to discover who are the best doctors, or which are the best hospitals and colleges, mostly because of the internet and superior techniques of performance measurement. That said, these are not fully open markets for matching. Knowing that Harvard may be the best university doesn’t mean you can go there, even if you are willing to pay full price...

Nel mondo della musica tutti ascoltano Bach e i Beatles. Non sembra che nei settori chiave l’analogia regga.

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Tuttavia, anche nella sanità e nell’istruzione la tecnologia della scelta ha fatto passi in avanti. Alvin Roth ha incamerato il suo Nobel proprio in quest’area…

… Alvin Roth, an experimental economist now at Stanford University, won a Nobel Prize in part for using economic theory to come up with better algorithms for matching, and these methods are supposed to be robust across many realms in a quite general sense. His Nobel Prize was an especially deserved one, as it reflects the spirit of our times more than was recognized in 2012, the year he won…

Anche la disoccupazione è spesso responsabilità di un cattivo “matching”…

… Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides, who won the Nobel in 2010, were obsessed with the question of why unemployment persisted for so long after an economic recession. In their minds, the problem of finding the right job was fundamentally one of matching…

Facilitare gli abbinamenti conta quanto creare lavoro…

… Earlier economists, notably John Maynard Keynes and his successors, framed the question in terms of whether there was enough spending in the economy to sustain job creation. That factor remains relevant, but Mortensen and Pissarides asked some deeper and more fundamental questions about why it takes so long to reemploy workers laid off during a downturn…

Spesso si licenzia per non contrattare in modo estenuante…

… People are often laid off because they are locked into a wage agreement that the employer no longer deems profitable…

Abbassare gli stipendi è sempre difficile…

… During a recession, employers, seeking to cut costs, which often starts with laying people off, are understandably less focused on finding new workers. Workers, for their part, take a long time to accept the proposition that they may have to take lower-quality/lower-paying work. After all, once they do this, they fear, they’ll be branded as lower-quality workers for the future…

Piccoli vantaggi nella ricerca, enormi benefici di sistema…

… One thing economists have learned about matching from Mortensen and Pissarides is that small changes in the ease of a match—as measured by, say, the returns to search in labor markets—can have a big impact on the final number and quality of matches…

Quanto vale una buona scelta sul mondo del lavoro?…

… One recent economics research paper found that the “standard deviation” of the quality of a labor market match was worth about $9.75 an hour. That’s statistical lingo, but basically it means that it is pretty common for one job match to be much better than another by that amount, if we translate the value of the different jobs’ perks into dollar terms…

***

Chi vince e chi perde nel mondo della “scelta facile”?

Vincono i macinatori di informazione, i googler (ricercatori compulsivi su google)…

… That all said, the gains from matching are distributed very unevenly, and they accrue mainly to people who are better at using and handling information, a group whom elsewhere I labeled infovores. If you are completely wired, with a smartphone and good digital skills, and you’re great at using Google, various apps, and knowing how to search for information, you’ll improve the quality of the matches that you find on the internet a lot…

I perdenti: i poco tecnologici…

… Some people are simply not so good at manipulating and interpreting digital information, so they don’t gain nearly as much from the internet and the matching capabilities it gives us… Another group that misses out from all these matching gains is those on the losing side of the digital divide. They are not well connected either at home or with smartphones, even if in a more just and less poverty-ridden world they might be superb at using the internet to improve their lives…

Ma il mondo della scelta facile sarà probabilmente un mondo bloccato…

… Most of the matching I’ve outlined truly is beneficial, but still, it has helped to cement in a lot of segregation, stasis, and complacency of the successful. In economic terminology, it might be said that the world of good matches is a world of stocks, not flows…

Chi non ha le idee chiare si perde nell’oceano delle informazioni. Poiché le classi elevate hanno le idee più chiare, il divario con chi sta sotto è destinato ad allargarsi…

… As both the conservative/libertarian Charles A. Murray and the liberal Robert D. Putnam have pointed out, America seems to be evolving two sets of social norms: a high-stability set of norms for the higher earners and upper socioeconomic classes and less-stable social and marriage norms for many of the less-educated lower earners. Our pro-matching technologies are mostly evolving to serve the needs of the former, wealthier group, and it remains to be seen just how much they will help individuals in the less-stable situations….

Chi viene dal basso è colto dalla “sindrome del buffet”: di fronte a “tanta roba” resta disorientato.

Chi ha già molto sa meglio cosa vuole e cosa gli manca.

La scelta facile porta i migliori a stare con i migliori: nuova segregazione in vista…

… In chapter 4, I discussed how more and more of the top talent is being clustered in the largest and most successful firms. America’s productivity problem is coming from small and medium-size enterprises, not the market leaders. Probably not all of Google’s ideas will work out, but still, the company isn’t just search. Gmail is pretty useful, YouTube is running and has been significantly upgraded, driverless cars and trucks seem to be on the horizon, and someday a version of Google Glass may even change our lives, even if Google Glass as we know it remains stillborn. What is happening is that technology has made it easier for better corporations to identify those workers with stronger skills, more demanding work ethics, and higher intelligence, and vice versa…

Verrà ostentata una superiorità morale…

… As I think you already can sense, the downside is never far away. All the talk of “business morale” is very often code for a kind of profiling, that nasty cousin of segregation…

Prendiamo il mondo dell’impresa. Con l’ “O-ring production” ci saranno aziende iperproduttive e aziende scarsamente produttive: le prime segnaleranno la loro condizione di privilegio per i loro alti standard etici, che le seconde non potranno permettersi…

… That’s the other downside to all of this. For all the benefits produced by the elite tech firms, in the longer run, a lot of businesses will end up less innovative, as the best workers get pulled into a relatively small number of companies and sectors… If anything, top companies will be eager to parade their diversity and tolerance in full public view, as their customers and potential customers are probably no less diverse. Credit Suisse, in addition to its tolerant hiring and promotion policies, has promoted an LGBT Equality Index, an investment product that focuses on companies with superior performance in supporting LGBT rights…

***

Ma ci sono altri inconvenienti: sarà più difficile tornare sulle cose.

Quante volte ci siamo innamorati di un disco solo dopo un ripetuto ascolto?…

… When I first heard Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, I didn’t like the album. It sounded discordant and too jazzy for my taste. At fifteen years old, I put it aside. Still, I had bought the damned thing, and some guy in a book wrote that it was important, so a while later I returned to the purchase. Besides, at that time in the 1970s, I didn’t have a free universal jukebox at my immediate disposal, so that was the music in the house and I didn’t have the money to go out and buy all the albums I wanted. But a funny thing happened—after five or so listens, I liked the album. Soon enough, I grew to love it…

Non c’è solo l’innamoramento a prima vista, si impara anche ad amare.

Soprattutto si impara ad amare i difetti. E’ una grande dote. Sarà ancora possibile svilupparla?…

… I’ve heard and read some related complaints about internet dating. The eternal possibility of finding a better match yet makes it harder for many people to settle down and make any match at all. Aziz Ansari relates the story of a middle-age guy, not rich or gorgeous or famous, who went through a list of ads from women and rejected them for one arbitrary reason after another. He didn’t pursue one of the ads because the woman was a Boston Red Sox fan. He didn’t hate sports or baseball; rather, it was the attachment to the Red Sox that turned him off. The prospect of the perfect match has become, for this person, the enemy of the good match…

E poi: tante scelte, tante opportunità che sfumano…

… There is now an extensive literature in behavioral economics about how, under some circumstances, having more choice can make it harder for us to be content with our final selections…

***

Ma il mondo della “scelta facile” non sarà un paradiso per tutti.

Sarà un paradiso per i curiosi, per gli amanti della nicchia, per chi apprezza le cose nel merito…

… The enthusiasts have niche tastes, and some of their happiness comes from finding other people who share those passions, whatever they may be. They might seek friends with comparable collections of Motown 45s, or people who play the same computer games…

Ma puo’ essere un inferno per i competitivi, per chi prende i beni a pretesto per competere…

… On the other side of this spectrum, the competitive strivers are driven less by their interests than by their drive to win in whatever context they find themselves. These are the people who strive to have the biggest office, bed the most mates, earn the most money, or climb whatever else the relevant status ladder may be…

Nell’abbondanza sta bene chi vuol star meglio, sta male chi vuole tutto o vuole stare meglio di tutti…

… Unlike the enthusiasts, the competitive strivers often face more intense competition for what they want because everyone else also can pursue it through online means. The strivers are trying to win rather than to match… The competitive strivers face yet another problem: The internet makes it harder for them to feel they have reached the top of the heap. Maybe two generations ago it was about marrying the most beautiful girl in town, but these days the standards for beauty are global…

Quando il campo da gioco è così vasto, chi compete è destinato alla sconfitta e alla frustrazione.

Internet tassa la competitività e premia chi apprezza le cose particolari…

… The internet puts a stiff implicit tax or penalty on competitive status seeking, and it rewards those who are content with something niche and unusual…

Forse questa dinamica spiega la scarsa ambizione che mostrano i millennial…

… This may be one reason for the oft-reported diffidence that characterizes many of the Millennial Generation. They are not actually indifferent or lazy or lacking in enthusiasm—quite the contrary—but more and more of their passions take forms other than those of the old climb-the-social-ladder variety…