Economusing

So my friend's lovely smart daughter, the first in her family to graduate from college, majored in business at NYU and landed a job in NYC. The recession took out a lot of her more expensive colleagues first. The yearlings hoped they would be safe for a while but the while ended and she is coming home. This is so sad but maybe it is better to not spend a whole career working at Bogusville Inc.

America has experienced an internal brain drain. (Remember the brain drain? It was the migration of the smartest rich kids from India, etc. to the United States. They became American doctors and scientists and engineers and computer whizzes.) For the past many years, the bright kids in America's high schools swarmed off to college to become not doctors but financial alchemists, transforming someone else's money on paper, making huge salaries and nothing tangible. They built McMansions in Mamaroneck, next to the Mafiosi and the Kuwaiti royalty. They hired 2 nannies for the weekdays but just one for the weekends. They paid $22,000 in property/school taxes.

The real estate mess has not really hit those who already own their homes and still have jobs. They are, however, letting one or 2 of the 3 nannies go and getting by with one housekeeper. If these "folks" try to sell their houses, they may feel the pain. (Your house may be the surrogate for a rainy day fund and may lose a lot of its value, but the pop of the real estate bubble only hurts when you need the cash.)

Think of the people who clean those fancy houses: they work 3 jobs, they support 6 people, they send money to Mamacita in Guatemala, and they have no benefits. Even those with green cards have no health insurance. If you work 3 jobs and lose one of them, you are screwed. Did your rent go down? Did your food get cheaper? Did your car payment get reduced? Did you get younger and healthier? You are screwed. My parents were lucky to have the same "cleaner" since 1982. She started work at my backyard wedding and ended up essential to their being able to avoid the dreaded nursing home death. No one but my folks ever did the social security thing with her paycheck. She was essential and beloved and her situation gives a different significance to "under employed."

So what happens to a business major when business contracts? Can a business major make anything anyone would buy? One thinks of "starting a business" as opening a store front and selling something or offering some service. But business school does not teach one to manufacture a product. Business grads get jobs in companies. What will the federal stimulus do for hispanic housekeepers and business majors? Perhaps a business grad might start a company that offers to clean people's houses and hire all those hard working Central Americans who have awakened from the American dream.