VANCE PACKARD, WHERE ARE YOU WHEN WE NEED YOU? THE GROWING INCOMPETENCE OF THE AMERICAN WORKER!

VANCE PACKARD, WHERE ARE YOU WHEN WE NEED YOU?

THE GROWING INCOMPETENCE OF THE AMERICAN WORKER!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 4, 2014

Vance Packard, the American sociological commentator, died December 12, 1996 at the age of 82.  In 1997, he wrote The Hidden Persuaders, showing how the advertising industry exploited American shoppers through subliminal stimulation with coded messages in advertisements. 

He followed with The Status Seekers (1959). 

This piggy backed on his previous book.  It showed how advertisers and merchandisers, social and cultural programmers, exploited the American weakness for status and its compare and compete obsession.  

Social stratification and its accompanying behavior is the old idea of everyone trying to keep up with the Jones with the belief system that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Hardly getting started, Packard came out with The Waste Makers (1960) in which he criticized manufacturers who purposely made products that would not last.  

He called this mindset “planned obsolescence,” and pointed out that the technology existed in 1960 to make automobiles last a generation, with the mileage on gasoline possible upwards of 50 miles a gallon or more, that light bulbs could be manufactured to last decades, that razor blades did not have to go dull so fast, and so on.  

He took a quantum leap from economics to identify the growing lackadaisical trend in the American character to prefer to use and discard rather than to preserve and maintain.

Then in 1962, when I was myself climbing the corporate ladder, he came out with The Pyramid Climbers.  

I had read his previous books and saw first hand what he was writing about.  Now, I had to ask myself, was I a pyramid climber?  

Packard claimed pyramid climbing was the business of being more committed to climbing the executive ladder than doing the job you were paid to do, to be more interested in making an impression than a difference, to be bent on finding a willing mentor to assure your rapid ascendancy, while your competition fell by the wayside.

The Naked Society (1964) followed.  

Much as The Pyramid Climbers touched my conscience, this book touched my soul.  

Packard had no aspirations to be seen as a savant or soothsayer, no philosophical claims to prescience.  Indeed, he was a social commentator without portfolio, an observer who saw what anyone else could see if they but opened their eyes.  

Remember this book came out fifty years ago, when there was already palpable evidence that new technology was a threat to our privacy.  Packard was referring to computerized files, sophisticated surveillance techniques, and other intrusive technologies, which he could see were being used to influence human behavior.

The Sexual Wilderness (1968) was published in the midst of the sexual revolution, where gender identity was no longer accepted as matter of fact, but had become ambiguous and ambivalent in the light of the AIDS epidemic and the Gay Rights Movement.

A Nation of Strangers (1972) implied that the growing presence of a corporate society was resulting in a fragmentation of communities.

The book dealt with the boom and bust of commercial entities, the collapse, merger and relocation of businesses, the introduction of the concepts of reengineering, redundancy and outsourcing, the pulling up roots and being forced to move on of families at the whim of their corporate fathers, and the inevitable spiritual disconnect between economic advantage and spiritual need.

Packard was not done.  His attention was shifted to The People Shapers (1977).  

He questioned the ethics of the rapid use of psychological and biological testing to manipulate human behavior to find the key to its mystery.  This was in the era of behaviorist B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning.  It was not yet the era of stem cell research or cloning, and the genetic Genome had not yet been unraveled.  But it did indicate a trend that Vance Packard found disturbing, and for reason.

Our Endangered Children (1983) became a concern as he could see childhood was being eclipsed by a world preoccupied with money, power, status, success, mobility, sex and immortality.  

No one wanted to grow old.  What’s more no one found a need to grow up.  Life was all about having and doing and being leaving little time to be parents or to nurture children during their impressionistic years.  So, children, their parents seldom home, too busy working or partying most of the time, became their own parents.  Juvenile delinquency no longer became a crime but a lifestyle for the young.

Finally, The Ultra Rich: How Much is Too Much? (1989) became his last book.  

Here he did research the conventional way examining the lives and lifestyles of thirty prominent American multimillionaires.  The young doc.com billionaires were on the horizon, but not yet on the radar.  

It is his least refreshing book because it is so predictable whereas this was not the case of his other books: the rich want more, and the rich never have enough because someone else is richer than they are.  Packard does manage to penetrate the myth that the rich are smarter than the average Joe, when clearly they are not.  

What makes the rich different is that they are more patient, greater risk takers, not discouraged by setbacks, not deterred by ethical demands as they push the envelope to its legal limits, and never have second thoughts about dissembling when it serves their purposes.  As I said, there are no surprises here.

Readers familiar with my many books and essays over the years will sense Packard’s influence.  I read his first book when it hit the bookstores in 1962.  It made an immediate impression on me.  Like Pitrim Sorokin, the great sociologist, who came to my attention in graduate school in 1970, the pedestrian researcher and the academic scholar became author bookends for me.

*     *     *

Packard came to mind today when a client shared with me his recent experience with the American worker.  I have had many of the same experiences, as I would imagine have many of my readers, but this man’s dilemma triggered new concerns because it dealt with our vaulted technology and how this has seemingly segued to growing worker incompetence.

The man had a laptop that needed additional ram capacity to do his work.  He went to Best Buy to get help.  The geek staff there told him he needed a certain part.  He purchased the part, took it home and installed it. The part did not work.

He brought the part back, and told the geeks on staff of his problem, and they gave him another part, and said this should work.  It didn’t.

He returned with the part and was told to take credit and purchase the “correct” part on line.  He said, “No, thank you.  Please give me my money back,” which they did.

He went on line and researched the problem carefully checking every detail over and over again before he made the purchase, information he suspected the geek staff at Best Buy should have possessed, but didn’t share with him if it did.  

The part arrived a week later.  He installed it and his ram capacity is now where he wanted it to be.

This young man wasn’t through.  

He drives an Audi, and has had a light fixture problem.  He went to the dealership, and was told the part would cost $60 but the labor would cost an additional $760 because the process was labor intensive.  

He told the Audi mechanics he didn’t have that kind of money, and so he left.

 

Given his experience on line, he purchased the part, again after exhaustive research, with it arriving a bit later.  

He had to disassemble the whole light fixture of his automobile with parts all over the floor of his garage.  He carefully followed the directions connecting the color coded wires as instructed, reassembled the total apparatus and turned the lights on – they didn’t work!

This young man is a learner not a knower, a person who is a student of whatever he does, and a careful student at that.  He was sure he did precisely what the instructions called for, and in checking found that to be the case.  What to do?

He said to himself, the only thing possible – if this is indeed the right fixture – was for him to scrap the instructions and try to figure out the connections himself.

Going on that premise, he turned to what seemed most logical in tying the wires to what he believed to be the "right" connections, and “voila!”  It worked!

He said to me in disbelief, “How is this possible, Dr. Fisher?  How could the instructions be so wrong?”

Well, I've worked with technical writers, and found them first of all, not to be writers, and second, to be driven by deadlines and paid essentially on a piece work basis, or on completing an assigned manual.

Pride in work has gone out the window.  People are so busy collecting degrees that provide no skills, gravitating to jobs that promote winging it, failing to care one way or the other whether what they do brings customer satisfaction or not.

“It will not occur to you,” I told him, “because you have mechanical acumen and the intelligence to use that skill conscientiously that there are many like myself, with extensive university educations, that would have no other recourse then to have to pay that $760 plus the $60 for the fixture, or the light fixture would not have been fixed.”

“But, Dr. Fisher, I couldn’t have afforded it.”

“That is not relevant.  What is relevant is that you have developed the skills to do it yourself whereas many of us have not developed such skills, and therefore are easily exploited.  

"We once trusted American workmanship whatever the job, and whatever the cost to be satisfied with the work.  That is no longer true, as you have discovered, and I have experienced to my sorrow."

He smiled, “I did save $760, didn't I?"  Then he added, "It took me two days to get the light fixture working.”

Indeed.  That said there is growing incompetence in the American worker and it is a cultural phenomenon, touching every profession, every trades craft, every job that I can think of.  

There was no point in burdening this jubilant young man with this.  Suffice it to say I thought of Vance Packard and wished that he was here to take note of this further erosion in the American character and the American experience.

Eric Hoffer once said the single thing that set Americans apart from the rest of the world was its dedication to maintenance.  He, too, is no longer with us.  I can imagine his sadness were he not.

*     *     *