The Baffling Mind of Anya Kamenetz
Anya Kamenetz’s mind is an ideological funhouse mirror designed to baffle and enrage the economically literate. In an op-ed yesterday in the NY Times, Kamenetz laments the rise of unpaid internships, and asks the question foremost in all our minds: “What if the growth of unpaid internships is bad for the labor market and for individual careers?”
Kamenetz suggests, sensibly enough, that some students might be better off getting a paying gig rather than going into debt to finance an unpaid internship. Otherwise the article is a bundle of nonsense packaged in hypocrisy.
It’s hard to know what to pick out, let’s try here:
Although it’s not being offered this year, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s Union Summer internship program, which provides a small stipend, has shaped thousands of college-educated career organizers. And yet interestingly, the percentage of young workers who hold an actual union card is less than 5 percent, compared with an overall national private-sector union rate of 12.5 percent. How are twentysomethings ever going to win back health benefits and pension plans when they learn to be grateful to work for nothing?
So, the Cato Institute has an internship program that has turned out thousands of highly informed college educated libertarians. Would it be “interesting” to note that, say, only 5 percent of twenty-somethings are libertarians? I don’t know. Are you interested? I think she meant “tragically,” or better yet, “embarrassingly,” not “interestingly.” It would be more interesting—more informative at least—to know at what age most unionized workers got their union cards. I imagine that less than 1 percent of 18 year olds have a union card. At that rate how will 18 year olds ever achieve social justice! (Let us not speak of the rates of union participation among 12 year olds!) The last sentence above is a triumph of misguided hope over intelligence. Lavish benefits packages—the sort causing GM to tank—will return just as soon as workers become less grateful and more unionized? Is really she saying that ingratitude is a precondition for unionization?
Moving on…
The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not identify interns or track the economic impact of unpaid internships. But we can do a quick-and-dirty calculation: according to Princeton Review’s “Internship Bible,” there were 100,000 internship positions in 2005. Let’s assume that out of those, 50,000 unpaid interns are employed full time for 12 weeks each summer at an average minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. That’s a nearly $124 million yearly contribution to the welfare of corporate America.
Hold on! Earlier, Kamenetz mentions unpaid internships on Capitol Hill, which is full of more corporate shills than it should be, but still. Here in DC, surely the intern capital of America, most of the gigs are in government and non-profits. Anyway, just a few paragraphs back, Kamenetz writes that “unpaid internships are not jobs, only simulations,” in which case one would expect them to be making only a simulated contribution to the concern, corporate or not, to which they are attached. Are unpaids really working or aren’t they? Pick one!
This may be my favorite:
In this way, unpaid interns are like illegal immigrants. They create an oversupply of people willing to work for low wages, or in the case of interns, literally nothing. Moreover, a recent survey by Britain’s National Union of Journalists found that an influx of unpaid graduates kept wages down and patched up the gaps left by job cuts.
Those first two sentences are . . . good lord . . . they are . . . a veritable library containing volume upon volume of what Kamenetz doesn’t understand about social reality. Man, I’ve gotta say, the whole world crashes in upon your head these days—ideological shock troops descend to declaim your scientific illiteracy—if you raise a well-informed peep about the uncertain art of modeling immensely complex dynamic systems, like the climate, mathematically. Yet you can nonsensically say that there is “an oversupply of people willing to work for low wages” without the editors of the NYT batting an eye, apparently.
Kamenetz means what by “oversupply”? That there are people willing to work for low wages milling around with nothing to do—that there is a high unemployment rate for workers willing to work for low wages? That’s what an “oversupply” of workers should mean. But no. Kamenetz’s complaint is that too many people are working and getting paid—paid less than Anya Kamenetz thinks they should. I don’t know if Kamenetz has had a bad experience with an intern, or a Mexican, but why would she should would want to deny them the right work on terms they find attractive? What is the correct supply of people, like interns, willing to work for nothing? How about people willing to pay to work for you? How many of those should we allow? Let us consult the planners… Kamenetz clearly wants to subsidize certain privileged classes of workers by creating barriers to free labor market participation. The “correct” supply of Mexicans and free interns is, I suppose, a function of how big Kamenetz thinks that subsidy should be. Of course, she has no idea how big. She hasn’t even thought about it.
Last, I guess we should not be shocked to discover that Kamenetz—now infamous for her socially tone-deaf braggadocio over her overabundance of wedding silver as she was promoting her book about the inescapable financial woes of twenty-somethings like her!—may well be the poster child for the benefits of the unpaid internship. In her column she writes,
I was an unpaid intern at a newspaper from March 2002, my senior year, until a few months after graduation. I took it for granted, as most students do, that working without pay was the best possible preparation for success; parents usually agree to subsidize their offspring’s internships on this basis. But what if we’re wrong?
Well, she certainly didn’t mislead her no doubt generous parents. On her personal website, Kamenetz reproduces a profile from the Boston Phoenix, which tell us that:
She began contributing as an intern for the Village Voice — writing music and book reviews — during her senior year in college. A Voice assignment on “the new economics of being young” soon turned into the “Generation Debt” column.
And the “Generation Debt” column turned into the Generation Debt book published by a Penguin imprint, which won her a growing reputation for semi-coherent economics and labor punditry—op-eds in the NY Times, even, about how unpaid internships, like the one that made her semi-famous, are just terrible.
Those of us who cringe in sympathetic embarrassment upon reading Anya Kamenetz’s attempts at “analysis” can only wish she had followed her own advice to spend “Long hours on your feet waiting tables,” doing work that “may not be particularly edifying,” learning “that work is a routine of obligation, relieved by external reward, where you contribute value to a larger enterprise.” And may the Voice have the courage to bar the doors against odious free labor, and spare us all.
[Update: Just checked Technorati links... Garance Franke-Ruta thinks Kamenetz's piece is "brilliant"! However, it speaks well of young Ezra Klein that "Anya Kamenetz's op-ed didn't make much sense to [him].” Elsewehere, Andrew Samwick, a real economist, “shakes [his] head in disbelief” and points out the “sheer lunacy” of Kamenetz’s argument. I think that perhaps one thing that Kamenetz may have in common with me, and many others, is that her success shakes all our faith in the meritocracy.]
May 31st, 2006 13:38
Ouch! Speaking as a native of the twenty-something demographic, can we deport Anya to another generation?
I may have permanently strained that metaphor, but she started it.
May 31st, 2006 15:43
I’ve interviewed a lot (really a lot over 30 years as a recruiter) of folks who claim unpaid intern experience on their resumes. Most such experience is bogus. Employers generally get what they pay for, and they don’t get a lot of actual work from someone they don’t pay. Similarly, employees get a lot more actual experience from a job if they are being paid because that means there is (generally) a real and valuable function to perform.
May 31st, 2006 17:48
College students should get real jobs. Simple as that.
May 31st, 2006 17:54
Leaving aside for a moment the obvious technical deficiencies of Kamenetz’s piece, the most interesting/unfortunate question is this:
If Kamenetz has become such a popular and apparently influential figurehead of whatever the hell group of people are buying her book by being monumentally irrational, does it follow that monumental irrationality is the rational course of action for would-be columnists or politicians?
If so, it would seem to follow that your rational approach to the whole matter is pretty irrational and may explain why you don’t have a column with the NYT.
Alternatively, she may just have a good pair of tits for them to stick in the obligatory op-ed photo, in which case ignore all the analysis above.
May 31st, 2006 17:58
[...] Will Wilkinson savages the NYTimes op-ed of the woman who wrote Generation Debt, in The Baffling Mind of Anya Kamenetz. [...]
May 31st, 2006 19:15
> does it follow that monumental irrationality is the rational course of action for would-be columnists or politicians?
Read the New York Times — both the op-ed and politics sections — and you’ll have your answer.
May 31st, 2006 20:15
This was fucking brilliant, Will. That first line is priceless. Make sure you use that one somewhere in your book, because it’s dynamite.
May 31st, 2006 23:29
“unpaid internship” sets off “rent-seeking” alarm bells; of course, it’s just a symptom
Maybe Kamenetz is sensing the same thing, but isn’t familiar with the concept. If so, cut her some slack, because it’s a difficult concept.
May 31st, 2006 23:36
Thank you for this. I’m a writer for the Voice and have cringed at every Kamenetz column. May it remain at the top of the blogsearch for her name forever.
June 1st, 2006 09:02
I think Anya has a valuable message buried deep with in her rantings: college students are encouraged to take more and more debt for a degree that’s less and less valuable. Undergraduate degrees are basically high school diplomas now, it’s become so easy to go to school thanks to guaranteed student loans (and guaranteed loan money in the hands of youngsters doesn’t give much incentive for the universities to compete on price, they know the kids are flush with cash). Now that undergraduate degrees are the norm and aren’t paying off, everyone tells you to just “change fields to a more rewarding one” like in the Slate article. good advice, but get ready for even more extremely expensive student loan debt and time out of the work force if your career change requires more schooling.
The problem with Anya is that she so exaggerates the hardships of young people and is so full of shrill hyperemotional rants of self-pity and ridiculous economic logic that any good points that need to be addressed end up getting totally obscured by her more ridiculous sweeping pronouncements of doom and gloom.
June 1st, 2006 09:21
Not to pile on or anything, but actual union membership as a share of the private sector workforce is not 12.5 percent, it’s 7.8 percent. It hasn’t been as high as 12.5 percent since 1988 (http://www.unionstats.com/).
You’d think that someone on the NYT editorial board would know that, wouldn’t you? The fact that they published it lends support to my theory that the NYT op-ed page is not actually edited at all. They run submissions through MS Word’s “grammar check” feature and then go to press.
June 1st, 2006 10:13
What it comes down to is this:
She thinks that upper-middle class kids/young adults have it rough. They do not. I am one, and so are all of my peers. We have it super easy, perhaps moreso than any generation in the history of mankind.
If she were talking about inner city kids who go to violent, drug infested schools, she would at least have a point.
I don’t know her reader demographics, but it’s possible that he reason she’s successful is precisely the reason she’s wrong — twentysomething kids love to be told how rough they have it while they browse their NYTimes magazines in their plentiful spare time.
I suppose I should be thankful — it’s better to have it good while people proclaim gloom and doom than to be miserable and have no one care.
June 1st, 2006 11:02
I’m with Brian. The unpaid internship is the province of the upper middle class (or wealthier) college student. My girlfriend, whose family is middle-middle class, couldn’t afford to take one. The value of a 4 year degree over a lifespan, even outside of “hot” field, is still way more than tuition, even at the more expensive institutions that less wealthy students are likely to avoid. Since student loans are in many cases heavily subsidized, many relatively well-to-do students just borrow the money and instead of cutting personal expenditures or taking part-time jobs.
June 1st, 2006 12:12
Re: Brian Moore
Are you serious? I think it may be a mild case of white/class guilt speaking there. Poor, inner-city kids have it best when it comes to attending college. In my college we had the EOP program which allowed them to go to college with almost a free ride and lower academic credentials. Most of my friends’ colleges have similar programs for inner city kids. How can anyone say “no one cares” about poor, urban kids? NY Times, activists and limousine liberals lobby for them all the time. The busing programs, magnet schools, the education lobby, the class articles in the NY Times…how can you say that wel-off 20-somethings get more press than poor urban kids, especially in a progressive paper like the Times? I hope I don’t come off harsh, but it does bug me when people try to paint this image about America ignoring the plight of the poor when we dedicate billions of dollars to the war on poverty and give the issue plenty of coverage in the mainstream media.
June 1st, 2006 13:30
Pop quiz: What’s the difference between an education you get for free and an education you pay for?
Answer: The first is called an internship. The second is called college.
The notion that a business ought to pay someone for the privilege of on the job training, and then have that person leave after 3 months or 6 months is ludicrous. The real miracle is that there are actually paid internships.
June 1st, 2006 18:38
Why would gratitude ever be appropriate for an employee to feel simply in virtue of having been given a job? Supposedly, employers hire exactly the person that’s most to their advantage not as a benefit to the employee. That’s exactly what the economists’ moral norms of the labor market tells them they should do. Gratitude, by contrast, is appropriate where someone extends a benefit beyond what was required by the relevant norms, especially when the benefiting action shows conscientious care for the plight of the beneficiary.
It’s not appropriate for me to feel grateful to the employer who pays me a prevailing wage of $5/hr when they could afford to pay me $100/hr (if not for the demands of shareholders) and I would be willing to stave off starvation for $3/hr.
So now we must ask: Is ingratitude just the absense of gratitude? My view is that there is not really such an emotion as ingratitude. There is only gratitude and its absence. The actions that seem to manifest ingratitude really just exhibit a certain kind of anger and envy that come from feeling that one is being taken advantage of.
Any comments from the peanut gallery on the emotional psychology… as opposed to its ideological implications?
June 1st, 2006 22:23
Bill, If it’s a good opportunity, a good chance, then you should be grateful for the opportunity, and try to do it justice. There’s a reason people intern for free, and usually its because they think it will be a good opportunity.
June 2nd, 2006 13:56
2 things…
First, as a small business owner, I can’t imagine paying somebody who is not at least a little grateful.
Not that I need to feel appreciated, it’s that a grateful employee does a better job than one who is not. Period.
Also, internships are not just for the well-to-do.
I completed an internship while waiting tables and going to school….yes, it sucked….but it can be done. I ended up with a much better career opportunity
because of it. I’ve had many interns as well and I can say without hesitation that the time I spent teaching them didn’t even come close to the time they “saved” me by working there. However, it was a great way to find and hire talented kids who were serious about working and truly interested in our business.
June 10th, 2006 19:06
[...] Smith isn’t the first to deride internships. Anya Kamenetz, author of the apparently abysmal Generation Debt, has been making a career out of it. Go to her blog and weep tears of anger. Anya Kamenetz is like an Ailee Slater with a book deal and professional cred. Will Wilkinson says all that needs to be said about Kamenetz here (hat tip: The Agitator) [...]
December 10th, 2006 23:34
this is all pretty good info, but you know that successfully negotiating a pay raise with your employer is the most profitable way you can spend a few minutes.