Public service is hot. But you can do just as much good, and sometimes more, in the private sector.
Not that I ever could have gotten in to Wesleyan University, but if I had and if had somehow survived four years, and if, even more miraculously, I had actually managed to find employment somewhere, I know how I would have felt listening to Barack Obama give last spring's commencement address: Pretty awful.
"You
can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the
big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money
culture says you should buy," Obama lectured, and I imagine I would
have been nodding in agreement. Yes, I'd have been thinking, I'm
finally off Mom and Dad's dole. I'm going to support myself, make plans
for the future, and maybe even live someplace where I have my own room.
"But I hope you don't," Obama added.
Whoops. My bad. "There are so many ways to serve and so much need at this defining moment in our history," he went on. He then told the assembled graduates to think about becoming community organizers, joining the Peace Corps, or doing almost anything as long as it didn't involve making a buck. The message to me would have been crystal clear: The private sector is bad, the public is good.
Obama is hardly alone in these sentiments. Public service - particularly for the young - is the bipartisan rage du jour. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates favored a national public service program. John McCain devoted one night of his truncated convention to the theme of service. Advocacy groups such as Service Nation, backed by powerhouses such as the AARP and the United Way, believe that national service is just the thing to cure our ailing country. This year and last have seen Congress pass (and President Bush sign) two laws providing partial loan forgiveness for dogooding college grads. An Obama plan does more, offering up to $4,000 in tax credits. And Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren and law student Ganesh Sitaraman go even further with their proposed "Service Pays" program, forgiving one full year of student loans for every year spent in public service.
What's so bad about getting a job?
The common assumption is that those who serve the public are self-sacrificing and morally superior, doing their work not for greed but to help humankind. Maybe. You wouldn't know that from looking at salaries, however. For example, public-sector employees in the Boston metro area in general make 15 percent more than private-sector workers for the equivalent work. But there's more to this than just money. Underneath the push toward public service are an anti-capitalist animus and an assumption that a real job doesn't contribute all that much to society.
Really? I'd rather see an MIT grad join a biotech firm, discover some miracle drug, and save thousands of lives than I would have her spend two years as a teacher's assistant working in some inner-city school. It's not that there's anything wrong with the latter, but it's better for all of us if people exploit their talents to the fullest, even if - horrors! - they're getting well paid for it. Where would we be if students Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg had followed Obama's advice and joined the Peace Corps? We'd live in a world without Microsoft, Google, and Facebook - far different and, my occasional frustrations with Vista notwithstanding, far worse.
Beyond that, though, is the mistaken belief that public service and a private-sector job are mutually exclusive. Granted, one can do some good going overseas and, as the cliche goes, teaching people to fish (although, come to think of it, does anyone actually believe that people in poor countries need American kids to tell them how to bait a hook?). But this kind of stuff strikes me as more adventure than commitment. True public service is a lifelong thing, one that becomes integrated into your daily life. Consider, for instance, the homeowner who joins a crime-watch group or the cafe owner who hires local high school students for their first jobs. These are the people who are really building communities.
Nevertheless, it's trendy to demonize the profit seeking. So be it. I understand how political fashions come and go. Just don't be too effective at it, though. It's those private sector workers, remember, who ultimately are the ones paying the public sector's bills.
Originally published in The Boston Globe Magazine, September 21, 2008. Illustration by David Plunkert.