I live in California where it is very clear that voice is no longer an option in the political sphere which is why so many choose to exit.
The Democratic Party is especially good at demonizing people who exit and effectively uses voice to normalize the far-left to prevent exit. AB5 is a law in California which sets limits on independent contracting. When it was about to be passed, Uber and Lyft knew the law would decimate their operations. I was riding in an Uber when all of this was happening and asked the driver if she was worried about her job. She acknowledged the law could make her unemployed but said, “I know those politicians have good intentions, Uber will fix it.”
When Jimmy Carter passed the 1977 Farm Bill that made farming operations unprofitable for thousands of farmers including my husband’s grandpa Al, Al didn’t ascribe Carter’s actions to good intentions. Al vehemently detested Carter for the rest of his life. That Uber driver is probably still voting Democrat.
Just as a side note- Rob’s podcast about the Barbie movie was spot on and fun to listen to so go listen if you haven’t already.
I was watching a terrific YouTube video of Michael Shellenberger talking about how modern liberals tend to ruin big cities and he was very clear that he doesn't think they wake up in the morning and say, "How can I make the homeless and drug crisis worse?" Although I think that is true, they also seem to completely disregard any of their opponents' concerns about the consequences of their actions. I can't agree with your Uber driver's naive world view, I also can't support uncle Al's lifelong hatred.
I romanticized England, Scotland, and Ireland for a very long time. My family from all sides talked about our relatives that came from those places, they passed down all of these neat things (songs, food, tradition) that were brought with them from "across the pond." When things started getting crazy in the USA, around 2008 and 2021, I thought about going back to a place in my head. Then, I thought to myself, "No. Those people who came here hundreds of years ago wanted this, they fought for this, they helped build this life I have. I will not leave. This is my home." And, so I've lived through my traveling son to see what I've been missing. He wraps up his Master's in August. He can't wait to come home. God Bless America. Voice it is.
The most intriguing ideas with the most weight are the ones lying right in front of us like this book and now, it's synopsis here by Rob. Somehow - not sure exactly how - these concepts dovetail with Charles Murray's book: COMING APART. The residents of "Belmont" left, or their ancestors did via exit. The residents of "Fishtown" do not have the option of exit and therefore use voice even in the form of graffiti or gang violence to alter their unfortunate circumstances. Conservative Americans have used "exit" more successfully than any other population anywhere on earth. Other than native Americans, we are all products of "exit" at some point in the past. But with the frontier closed, and the four corners of the US filled to the brim and run by those from whom we might wish to exit, we have to use voice as a change strategy. Ironically (and not accidentenaly) "voice" has and is being stymied via cancel culture censorship. Those who would seek to thwart opposition are welding the top in place on a pressure cooker as the heat underneath continues to produce pressure inside. The leftists, the victims, the marginalized and those who benefit from their plight have robbed heretofore ordinary folks of the choices of "exit" and "voice" yet the loyalty runs deep. Truly a thought provoking read. Thanks!
I own security guard company in Toronto with 5000 employees and about 200 managers. (Yes, rentier class incarnate.)
We are a polity. I’ve always intuited my role as company owner in this context, even in those tender years when I first inherited the company, age 29. It’s difficult for a 29 year old to manage 50 year olds, their duplicity is well advanced.
Ive keep myself honest for 30 years by having no employment contracts and pay no commissions. In this way, employees are unencumbered, they may leave for a competitor anytime and they are not incentivized financially for sales, yet we grow. This holds me to account. If we are not better they will exit.
I used to expend great energy trying to be liked. Cajoling. Maybe appropriate for a young man.
Now I rule through fear, it’s more effective and the proper affect for capitalism. You should fear your employer. Not afraid, mind you, I mean fear as in God fearing.
People should fear losing their job, it is a tremendous blow personally and a ferocious setback financially. And I too am ruled by fear. I am trying to avoid firing a 45 year old who earns 125k but he self sabotages endlessly. It’s a fearsome thing what I’m going to do to him. But I find solace in my approach, 80 or 90 managers fired, but I trust it is him not me and for evidence I have the other 199 managers who choose not to leave even though they could.
I think about this often. Fear your employer, it’s healthy.
There is no need to fear your employer if you are fairly trading your skills for his money. The employer has no need to watch good employees like a hawk, because, well, they're the good employees. But, if you have 5,000 employees, then roughly 70 of them do 50% of the work according to Price's law (the square root of the total number of employees do 1/2 the work). I think at most places that sounds about right. Meaning 4, 930 of your employees do the other half of the work. Those 4,930 do need to fear the unemployment scythe, because it will be hard for them to find their next job. For the 70 though, they're the ones you do everything you can to keep them happy.
I think that the American tradition of exit is also reflected in our religious culture (namely, the thousands of sects and denominations that have sprung up here). And of course, the founders’ decision to bar established churches (driven in part by the same sense that there should be a right to exit) is that allowed that culture. Very interesting.
There is a lot to think about here. I thought about my career and the schools my children went to, and I have just started expanding that to my friend's and children's careers as well.
The surprise for me was when I applied this to churches. As I was in a deteriorating church that recovered and then fell apart again, have been in a church with a moderate but consistent upward trajectory in an area of a lot of turnover, and been part of a startup church that failed after thirteen years, there is a lot to go over in my mind. This is going to provoke a lot of thought. thank you.
As a lifelong Catholic, I'm unfamiliar with being part of a church that "fails" per se, but I did notice that certain parishes will ebb and flow depending on the parish priest and how he interacts with the people. I changed my parish when a great priest was reassigned and the new guy wasn't very good. A 10 minute drive in the opposite direction wasn't a big deal to "exit".
I moved from Essex County in Massachusetts in 2003 down to the Raleigh, NC area, the first thing I noticed was that the Catholic churches were actually pretty full and included people under 80 years old.
It is great to be given terms that map onto real experiences in my past: deciding to speak to a boss about things I perceive as worthy of improvement (that have deteriorated or look broken) or leaving a job if it seems irredeemably beyond repair.
Two aspects I didn’t see discussed -- and maybe they are not covered in the book either: religious/moral education of the people who are confronted with the choice between voice and exit, and skill training in how to apply voice truly effectively.
My intuition is that proper moral education, making a person aware of their broad moral responsibility for the “commons” in which they want to live and thrive, be that their family and community or their natural environment and nation state, seems likely to provide an incentive to use voice over exit. If people know that their voice matters and *can* be used to improve the context in which they find themselves, I imagine them more likely to at least attempt using voice as a strategy.
It then seems incredibly important to give people at least some pointers as to how voice as a strategy is most likely to fail -- which is dependent on the culture one finds oneself in. Each organization has its own culture, and comes with some expectations for how voice ought to work, as well as some duplicity of the people who hold relatively more sway in having created ways of justifiably ignoring the voice coming from the masses.
My strong hunch is that the most likely approach to voice functioning properly goes in the direction of Jordan Peterson’s overall example: reaffirm the values of the organization in those who are likely to experience the deterioration the most, and then rebuild the culture from the bottom-up. It is also the most laborious path, and it may at times feel like Don Quixote’s futile attempts, and yet it is our faith in our ability to overcome impossibly seeming odds that have, in the past, produced the best results.
In short, I would love to see a discussion on how faith in voice as a strategy influences its effectiveness...
[edit/added]: I also wonder whether there is a third choice altogether: "burn the whole thing down." It is the cynical response in light of a dystopian outlook on the "whole" -- if no exit seems possible, and voice is an equally ill-fated option, then maybe people become "mass shooters" and would rather see the context they cannot exit or voice upon brought to its knees, in order for some other, new form to emerge like a phoenix from the ashes. Sometimes I feel the mood in the country can tip into that direction as well...
It would be interesting to extend this to academia and the absence of conservatives but to do that one would have to think not just about those in the organization but those on the outside deciding whether or not to join it.
One could also do this with males and academia. It seems it’s a vicious circle. More leave and fewer join so the group in power and their ideology becomes stronger, so those who dislike it not only leave but don’t join.
People have been complaining about bad grammar of others since the time of Robert Lowth in the late 1700s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowth and I detect no break point where things were better or worse since that time. Nor can I see any basis for the year 1965 or thereabouts for things going insane in society. Pick a year 20 years earlier, or 200 - either is just as defensible.
If you want to champion logic, you have to rely on more than feelings and impressions yourself.
You may have the last word without fear of further contradiction from me.
I also use 1965 as the last sane year in the United States, although I can also accept the Kennedy assassination. When the Johnson administration took over, it was the acceleration of the federal government pouring money into things that were traditionally state and local concerns. That money changed how people viewed who was in charge. It was no longer the small town mayor or your state rep in the capital of your state, it was someone with a big staff in Washington, D.C. When you start subsidizing anything you get more of it. The feds started to subsidize poverty in an attempt to fix it. They subsidized single mothers to "help" them. They subsidized "community organizers" to help fix urban decay. They subsidized and regulated the public school system in an attempt to help the underperforming districts.
There are lots of lines to be drawn, but for most of us alive today, the early to mid 1960's seems like the starting point for many of the social concerns we seem to still be fighting 60 years later.
I contend that one could point to such things in any years. We are chronocentric, as CS Lewis and Owen Barfield would say, and the events of our own years loom largest. One could pick the New Deal, or the immigration limitations of 1927 or the end of Reconstruction, or the war in Korea not being declared just as well. And once we had picked our time frame, we could find many things that happened about then to "confirm" our choice, but it would just be confirmation bias.
I am also minded of (early) Garrison Keillor's line about the past "We think of those as simpler times, because we were children and our needs were looked after by others. But it wasn't simpler for those others, it was as complicated as what we have now."
Agree 100%. I also think we often miss things happening in our times. For example, the change over the last 40 years from lawmakers actually making laws and then having to campaign on whatever they voted on to a more regulatory state where bureaucrats write regulations that have the power of law and Presidents sign executive orders that nobody has to vote up or down. Congress hands over more and more power and then complains that they don't have any power! It's no longer 3 co-equal branches that's for sure.
what an amazing book ! totally unfamiliar to me. i may be mistaken but i believe you wonderfully explained the concepts of A. Hirschman's book and your clarity of exposition flabbergasts me almost as much as the concepts he explicates in his book. i'll have to get a copy !
Small note on grammar/logic: "If a recruit engages in desertion, they are thrown in jail." It is just jarring to an alert reader to have the singular "a recruit" then be referred to as "they." It jolts the attentive reader, like a small bump in the road to a moving vehicle. I realize we are all trying to be alert to the horrible, terrible, no good sexism of "he" . . . but it can be handled another way without confusion: "If recruits engage in desertion, they are thrown in jail." I know, I know, who cares about rules and logic as long as one is understood. But I believe it is a Chestertonian fence: unthinkingly tearing down logic and grammatical rules results in sloppy thinking--and that way be dragons . . . and ebonics.
You said that before. There is no evidence that changes in grammar result in sloppy thinking. None. It's a cherished myth. You might also listen to an actual linguist (I again recommend John McWhorter) about African American Vernacular English. It's not what you think it is..
It is also not a good example of a Chesterton's Fence, as no one is tearing grammar down, at least not in this instance. It is language changing, as it always does.
It does sound rather romantic when you put it that way, but it loses something when you are just flat wrong. There is a difference between being precise about definitions, which do also change but should be slowed in this as much as possible, and grammatical constructions, which are fairly arbitrary.
I think it indisputable that society has been slowly then suddenly going insane since about 1965. Which is approximately the same starting point for abandoning logic and grammar in written English. I understand correlation is not the same as causation . . . and perhaps the decline in writing standards is merely a symptom of the insanity rather than a cause. But I say, why take a chance when it is simple enough to promote the traditional and logical use of singular and plural. One small step in the thousand mile journey back to sanity.
Initially I had your preference for consistent pronouns, singular and plural. With the internet, some individuals are referred to by their online names which are often neither male nor female, and no way to discover. Example would be your own ID, ronetc. No way to determine which gender pronoun to use. Deferring to the male, “he”pronoun as I was taught seems simple enough, but not entirely satisfactory when a quick google search may or may not reveal the precise details. It’s messy, but I foresee a default of “they” becoming more accepted. Language is most certainly a living art and it will confound our sensibilities as new slang and jargon are added daily.
Great read . What are the other 2 books ROB ? Some of this is highly relatable with our job satisfaction but with money a factor. As far as family , I think of my East German grandmother.
Wow! This is so relevant to me- from my ancestors, one line exited Scotland then Ireland, and another exited England and another Switzerland {Huguenots), and to my own life decisions.I was so lucky to be hired right out of College at Leo Burnett but I exited 12 years later and have spent my career trying to teach people that effective marketing is not whitewashing and the best companies were viral (& sustainable) because they treated their suppliers employees and customers like partners. I left Connecticut (where people were fearful and manipulated by social media/govt) to come to a place where people are generally happy and open-minded, Central FL, very happy.
Did you post about this before? I feel like I learned of these concepts from some of your earlier writing but maybe it was some other review. Great stuff and I appreciate you summarizing it for us in any case.
My wife and I have a successful life in a deep blue area so while we don’t want to exit (deep roots and beautiful surroundings) we also choose to quiet our voice for the sake of comity with neighbors. On the other hand, our sons are both heading to college far away and unlikely to come back. Greatly increases the chance we will exit once they settle somewhere redder.
In most cases, the decision to exit or voice depends on transaction costs. If someone is building an eyesore in my neighborhood, it is much less costly to get together with my neighbors and voice a complaint than to sell my house and move away.
Excellent topic, I really appreciate the synopsis and I clearly recognized some real life experiences of decline, voice/exit choices. In the USA we have a great option of 50 states plus a few territories that can give an exit option, even within states, cities and towns have dramatically different conditions and cultures, moving is often a happier alternative. For employment there are other employers, or even the opportunity to switch professions. It might be more helpful to use voice over exit, and we can’t forget that exit is easier for the wealthy than the poor.
I live in California where it is very clear that voice is no longer an option in the political sphere which is why so many choose to exit.
The Democratic Party is especially good at demonizing people who exit and effectively uses voice to normalize the far-left to prevent exit. AB5 is a law in California which sets limits on independent contracting. When it was about to be passed, Uber and Lyft knew the law would decimate their operations. I was riding in an Uber when all of this was happening and asked the driver if she was worried about her job. She acknowledged the law could make her unemployed but said, “I know those politicians have good intentions, Uber will fix it.”
When Jimmy Carter passed the 1977 Farm Bill that made farming operations unprofitable for thousands of farmers including my husband’s grandpa Al, Al didn’t ascribe Carter’s actions to good intentions. Al vehemently detested Carter for the rest of his life. That Uber driver is probably still voting Democrat.
Just as a side note- Rob’s podcast about the Barbie movie was spot on and fun to listen to so go listen if you haven’t already.
I was watching a terrific YouTube video of Michael Shellenberger talking about how modern liberals tend to ruin big cities and he was very clear that he doesn't think they wake up in the morning and say, "How can I make the homeless and drug crisis worse?" Although I think that is true, they also seem to completely disregard any of their opponents' concerns about the consequences of their actions. I can't agree with your Uber driver's naive world view, I also can't support uncle Al's lifelong hatred.
I romanticized England, Scotland, and Ireland for a very long time. My family from all sides talked about our relatives that came from those places, they passed down all of these neat things (songs, food, tradition) that were brought with them from "across the pond." When things started getting crazy in the USA, around 2008 and 2021, I thought about going back to a place in my head. Then, I thought to myself, "No. Those people who came here hundreds of years ago wanted this, they fought for this, they helped build this life I have. I will not leave. This is my home." And, so I've lived through my traveling son to see what I've been missing. He wraps up his Master's in August. He can't wait to come home. God Bless America. Voice it is.
The most intriguing ideas with the most weight are the ones lying right in front of us like this book and now, it's synopsis here by Rob. Somehow - not sure exactly how - these concepts dovetail with Charles Murray's book: COMING APART. The residents of "Belmont" left, or their ancestors did via exit. The residents of "Fishtown" do not have the option of exit and therefore use voice even in the form of graffiti or gang violence to alter their unfortunate circumstances. Conservative Americans have used "exit" more successfully than any other population anywhere on earth. Other than native Americans, we are all products of "exit" at some point in the past. But with the frontier closed, and the four corners of the US filled to the brim and run by those from whom we might wish to exit, we have to use voice as a change strategy. Ironically (and not accidentenaly) "voice" has and is being stymied via cancel culture censorship. Those who would seek to thwart opposition are welding the top in place on a pressure cooker as the heat underneath continues to produce pressure inside. The leftists, the victims, the marginalized and those who benefit from their plight have robbed heretofore ordinary folks of the choices of "exit" and "voice" yet the loyalty runs deep. Truly a thought provoking read. Thanks!
Very helpful for me personally.
I own security guard company in Toronto with 5000 employees and about 200 managers. (Yes, rentier class incarnate.)
We are a polity. I’ve always intuited my role as company owner in this context, even in those tender years when I first inherited the company, age 29. It’s difficult for a 29 year old to manage 50 year olds, their duplicity is well advanced.
Ive keep myself honest for 30 years by having no employment contracts and pay no commissions. In this way, employees are unencumbered, they may leave for a competitor anytime and they are not incentivized financially for sales, yet we grow. This holds me to account. If we are not better they will exit.
I used to expend great energy trying to be liked. Cajoling. Maybe appropriate for a young man.
Now I rule through fear, it’s more effective and the proper affect for capitalism. You should fear your employer. Not afraid, mind you, I mean fear as in God fearing.
People should fear losing their job, it is a tremendous blow personally and a ferocious setback financially. And I too am ruled by fear. I am trying to avoid firing a 45 year old who earns 125k but he self sabotages endlessly. It’s a fearsome thing what I’m going to do to him. But I find solace in my approach, 80 or 90 managers fired, but I trust it is him not me and for evidence I have the other 199 managers who choose not to leave even though they could.
I think about this often. Fear your employer, it’s healthy.
There is no need to fear your employer if you are fairly trading your skills for his money. The employer has no need to watch good employees like a hawk, because, well, they're the good employees. But, if you have 5,000 employees, then roughly 70 of them do 50% of the work according to Price's law (the square root of the total number of employees do 1/2 the work). I think at most places that sounds about right. Meaning 4, 930 of your employees do the other half of the work. Those 4,930 do need to fear the unemployment scythe, because it will be hard for them to find their next job. For the 70 though, they're the ones you do everything you can to keep them happy.
I think that the American tradition of exit is also reflected in our religious culture (namely, the thousands of sects and denominations that have sprung up here). And of course, the founders’ decision to bar established churches (driven in part by the same sense that there should be a right to exit) is that allowed that culture. Very interesting.
There is a lot to think about here. I thought about my career and the schools my children went to, and I have just started expanding that to my friend's and children's careers as well.
The surprise for me was when I applied this to churches. As I was in a deteriorating church that recovered and then fell apart again, have been in a church with a moderate but consistent upward trajectory in an area of a lot of turnover, and been part of a startup church that failed after thirteen years, there is a lot to go over in my mind. This is going to provoke a lot of thought. thank you.
As a lifelong Catholic, I'm unfamiliar with being part of a church that "fails" per se, but I did notice that certain parishes will ebb and flow depending on the parish priest and how he interacts with the people. I changed my parish when a great priest was reassigned and the new guy wasn't very good. A 10 minute drive in the opposite direction wasn't a big deal to "exit".
Parishes have closed up here in New England. Your situation sounds like a balance between voice and exit.
I moved from Essex County in Massachusetts in 2003 down to the Raleigh, NC area, the first thing I noticed was that the Catholic churches were actually pretty full and included people under 80 years old.
I recommend a field trip down to Greenville SC to hear Fr. Longnecker. Or just buy one of his books.
It is great to be given terms that map onto real experiences in my past: deciding to speak to a boss about things I perceive as worthy of improvement (that have deteriorated or look broken) or leaving a job if it seems irredeemably beyond repair.
Two aspects I didn’t see discussed -- and maybe they are not covered in the book either: religious/moral education of the people who are confronted with the choice between voice and exit, and skill training in how to apply voice truly effectively.
My intuition is that proper moral education, making a person aware of their broad moral responsibility for the “commons” in which they want to live and thrive, be that their family and community or their natural environment and nation state, seems likely to provide an incentive to use voice over exit. If people know that their voice matters and *can* be used to improve the context in which they find themselves, I imagine them more likely to at least attempt using voice as a strategy.
It then seems incredibly important to give people at least some pointers as to how voice as a strategy is most likely to fail -- which is dependent on the culture one finds oneself in. Each organization has its own culture, and comes with some expectations for how voice ought to work, as well as some duplicity of the people who hold relatively more sway in having created ways of justifiably ignoring the voice coming from the masses.
My strong hunch is that the most likely approach to voice functioning properly goes in the direction of Jordan Peterson’s overall example: reaffirm the values of the organization in those who are likely to experience the deterioration the most, and then rebuild the culture from the bottom-up. It is also the most laborious path, and it may at times feel like Don Quixote’s futile attempts, and yet it is our faith in our ability to overcome impossibly seeming odds that have, in the past, produced the best results.
In short, I would love to see a discussion on how faith in voice as a strategy influences its effectiveness...
[edit/added]: I also wonder whether there is a third choice altogether: "burn the whole thing down." It is the cynical response in light of a dystopian outlook on the "whole" -- if no exit seems possible, and voice is an equally ill-fated option, then maybe people become "mass shooters" and would rather see the context they cannot exit or voice upon brought to its knees, in order for some other, new form to emerge like a phoenix from the ashes. Sometimes I feel the mood in the country can tip into that direction as well...
It would be interesting to extend this to academia and the absence of conservatives but to do that one would have to think not just about those in the organization but those on the outside deciding whether or not to join it.
One could also do this with males and academia. It seems it’s a vicious circle. More leave and fewer join so the group in power and their ideology becomes stronger, so those who dislike it not only leave but don’t join.
People have been complaining about bad grammar of others since the time of Robert Lowth in the late 1700s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowth and I detect no break point where things were better or worse since that time. Nor can I see any basis for the year 1965 or thereabouts for things going insane in society. Pick a year 20 years earlier, or 200 - either is just as defensible.
If you want to champion logic, you have to rely on more than feelings and impressions yourself.
You may have the last word without fear of further contradiction from me.
I also use 1965 as the last sane year in the United States, although I can also accept the Kennedy assassination. When the Johnson administration took over, it was the acceleration of the federal government pouring money into things that were traditionally state and local concerns. That money changed how people viewed who was in charge. It was no longer the small town mayor or your state rep in the capital of your state, it was someone with a big staff in Washington, D.C. When you start subsidizing anything you get more of it. The feds started to subsidize poverty in an attempt to fix it. They subsidized single mothers to "help" them. They subsidized "community organizers" to help fix urban decay. They subsidized and regulated the public school system in an attempt to help the underperforming districts.
There are lots of lines to be drawn, but for most of us alive today, the early to mid 1960's seems like the starting point for many of the social concerns we seem to still be fighting 60 years later.
I contend that one could point to such things in any years. We are chronocentric, as CS Lewis and Owen Barfield would say, and the events of our own years loom largest. One could pick the New Deal, or the immigration limitations of 1927 or the end of Reconstruction, or the war in Korea not being declared just as well. And once we had picked our time frame, we could find many things that happened about then to "confirm" our choice, but it would just be confirmation bias.
I am also minded of (early) Garrison Keillor's line about the past "We think of those as simpler times, because we were children and our needs were looked after by others. But it wasn't simpler for those others, it was as complicated as what we have now."
Agree 100%. I also think we often miss things happening in our times. For example, the change over the last 40 years from lawmakers actually making laws and then having to campaign on whatever they voted on to a more regulatory state where bureaucrats write regulations that have the power of law and Presidents sign executive orders that nobody has to vote up or down. Congress hands over more and more power and then complains that they don't have any power! It's no longer 3 co-equal branches that's for sure.
what an amazing book ! totally unfamiliar to me. i may be mistaken but i believe you wonderfully explained the concepts of A. Hirschman's book and your clarity of exposition flabbergasts me almost as much as the concepts he explicates in his book. i'll have to get a copy !
Small note on grammar/logic: "If a recruit engages in desertion, they are thrown in jail." It is just jarring to an alert reader to have the singular "a recruit" then be referred to as "they." It jolts the attentive reader, like a small bump in the road to a moving vehicle. I realize we are all trying to be alert to the horrible, terrible, no good sexism of "he" . . . but it can be handled another way without confusion: "If recruits engage in desertion, they are thrown in jail." I know, I know, who cares about rules and logic as long as one is understood. But I believe it is a Chestertonian fence: unthinkingly tearing down logic and grammatical rules results in sloppy thinking--and that way be dragons . . . and ebonics.
You said that before. There is no evidence that changes in grammar result in sloppy thinking. None. It's a cherished myth. You might also listen to an actual linguist (I again recommend John McWhorter) about African American Vernacular English. It's not what you think it is..
It is also not a good example of a Chesterton's Fence, as no one is tearing grammar down, at least not in this instance. It is language changing, as it always does.
And so did you. It is a lonely hill, but I choose to dwell there, even alone. Think of the monks in Ireland.
It does sound rather romantic when you put it that way, but it loses something when you are just flat wrong. There is a difference between being precise about definitions, which do also change but should be slowed in this as much as possible, and grammatical constructions, which are fairly arbitrary.
I think it indisputable that society has been slowly then suddenly going insane since about 1965. Which is approximately the same starting point for abandoning logic and grammar in written English. I understand correlation is not the same as causation . . . and perhaps the decline in writing standards is merely a symptom of the insanity rather than a cause. But I say, why take a chance when it is simple enough to promote the traditional and logical use of singular and plural. One small step in the thousand mile journey back to sanity.
Initially I had your preference for consistent pronouns, singular and plural. With the internet, some individuals are referred to by their online names which are often neither male nor female, and no way to discover. Example would be your own ID, ronetc. No way to determine which gender pronoun to use. Deferring to the male, “he”pronoun as I was taught seems simple enough, but not entirely satisfactory when a quick google search may or may not reveal the precise details. It’s messy, but I foresee a default of “they” becoming more accepted. Language is most certainly a living art and it will confound our sensibilities as new slang and jargon are added daily.
Great read . What are the other 2 books ROB ? Some of this is highly relatable with our job satisfaction but with money a factor. As far as family , I think of my East German grandmother.
Only this specific book (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty) was mentioned in the lecture.
Wow! This is so relevant to me- from my ancestors, one line exited Scotland then Ireland, and another exited England and another Switzerland {Huguenots), and to my own life decisions.I was so lucky to be hired right out of College at Leo Burnett but I exited 12 years later and have spent my career trying to teach people that effective marketing is not whitewashing and the best companies were viral (& sustainable) because they treated their suppliers employees and customers like partners. I left Connecticut (where people were fearful and manipulated by social media/govt) to come to a place where people are generally happy and open-minded, Central FL, very happy.
Did you post about this before? I feel like I learned of these concepts from some of your earlier writing but maybe it was some other review. Great stuff and I appreciate you summarizing it for us in any case.
My wife and I have a successful life in a deep blue area so while we don’t want to exit (deep roots and beautiful surroundings) we also choose to quiet our voice for the sake of comity with neighbors. On the other hand, our sons are both heading to college far away and unlikely to come back. Greatly increases the chance we will exit once they settle somewhere redder.
I'm interested if your neighbors also quiet their voices for the sake of comity.
Hah. Good point. Many do not.
In most cases, the decision to exit or voice depends on transaction costs. If someone is building an eyesore in my neighborhood, it is much less costly to get together with my neighbors and voice a complaint than to sell my house and move away.
Excellent topic, I really appreciate the synopsis and I clearly recognized some real life experiences of decline, voice/exit choices. In the USA we have a great option of 50 states plus a few territories that can give an exit option, even within states, cities and towns have dramatically different conditions and cultures, moving is often a happier alternative. For employment there are other employers, or even the opportunity to switch professions. It might be more helpful to use voice over exit, and we can’t forget that exit is easier for the wealthy than the poor.