Beware the professional ghetto

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So what do we think: can Will Lewis survive at the Post? Or are the problems there going to slow down the British takeover of American newsrooms? Have we reached peak Substack? Whither the BBC under a Labour government? Didn’t season two of Succession get the Murdochs so right? And what about that columnist at the FT? A rash hire, wasn’t it?

When journalists convene, some or all of these matters get an airing, which is an excellent reason to be elsewhere. The challenge is to build and maintain that alternative circle.

Even the greatest cities on Earth fail to honour their central promise: that of wide-ranging human contact. Urbanites live near a jumble of different people but, in the absence of strenuous effort, end up in the social swim of their own and adjacent professions. This ghettoisation sets in during those hard-working years after university. By 30, it is difficult to undo. So — and here I address the young, chiefly those starting work this autumn — avoid this trap from the beginning. For it is a double curse. First, it creates a single point of failure. If your job goes, much of your social life goes with it. 

The second and still larger problem is a mental narrowing. It was Nassim Nicholas Taleb who clocked that the great “moderns” — Darwin, Marx, Freud and the Einstein of the annus mirabilis — were “scholars but not academics”. That is, each had enough exposure to life outside their specialism to produce unlikely swoops of thought. (Taleb might have added Keynes, who was in and out of Cambridge.) For the rest of us, toiling at a humdrum level, the point still holds. No writer, management consultant or engineer should consort too much with their own. Employers half-understand this. It has become Leadership 101 to drag in high performers from alien fields to disclose their “insights” for staff. But it won’t do. You have to socialise with them at length. You want their patterns of thought, not so much their thoughts. 

Tim Walz is the first person on either the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school

Last week, I came across a statistic that made me put down the newspaper, rub my eyes with my knuckles and contemplate the middle distance for a while. Tim Walz is the first person on either the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school. That is 20 individuals across 10 elections over 40 years who pursued a JD or LLB. Not one of the four Republican presidents over the period had a legal background.

Law is a great subject and career. I’ve come to know it a little bit for a side project. But all professions have their deforming effects. And those of law are all over modern American liberalism.

Such as? A belief that voters care about or even understand constitutional proprieties. (Notice that the current and successful attack on Donald Trump and JD Vance dwells on their oddness, not their Caesarean ambitions.) An exhausting primness about words and their use. (A good thing in a contract dispute. Less so in a conversation with the electorate about gender and other sensitivities.) Also, a gross overvaluation of ideological fads that spring from universities. A JD takes three years, after an undergraduate degree: a party so steeped in the campus experience can’t help but overrate the strength of the militant young.

I don’t suggest that senior Republicans are a people’s alliance of lumberjacks and night-shift nurses. JD himself has a JD. But their recent presidents came from acting, oil and real estate. The one postgraduate among them did an MBA. Even that modicum of cognitive variety must confer an electoral edge. The right was quicker than the left to spot that something had changed in the public mood in those years after the 2008 crash. Because it was cleverer? No. But perhaps because it was less bovine and insular.

If this is what professional ghettoisation can do at the organisational level, imagine its risks for the individual. It is your boss’s job to wheel in a star athlete or supermarket magnate once in a while for their key takeaways. It is yours to find and retain friends of diverse kens in your own life. One needn’t emulate the twenty-something John Updike, who quit New York for Ipswich, Massachusetts, in part to meet people who “aren’t in [his] game”. But no effort at all, and even that game is lost. 

janan.ganesh@ft.com

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