For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.hoover.org/research/vanishing-american-adult
The Vanishing American Adult
interview with Ben Sasse via Uncommon Knowledge
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Podcast the-vanishing-american-adult
Recorded on June 2, 2017
Senator Benjamin Sasse joins Peter Robinson to discuss his book*The Vanishing American Adult*and the growing crisis in America of prolonged adolescence. Senator Sasse argues that children are growing up, entering adolescence, and becoming stuck in the transitional stage to adulthood as they fail to become financially independent from their parents. He argues that because this generation of children is growing up during a time of relative peace and prosperity, it has allowed millennials to grow up without the issues of previous generations that were raised in war time. In this era of consumption and material surplus, he argues that adolescents are leading age-segregated lives and not developing a work ethic and that both their parents have an obligation to teach their children to grow up. Furthermore, he stresses the importance of intergenerational learning by allowing children to be raised around their grandparents and other adults to help them learn that the trivial trials of youth don’t matter in the long run.
Senator Sasse believes that there are certain virtues that*American*children have to learn *to become productive and happy adults. Part of that is by teaching children the distinction between production and consumption and how to find happiness and self-worth through jobs that make one feel like a necessary part of the company/society. This, he argues, will help raise peoples’ self-worth and lead them to happiness and fulfillment in their everyday.
Senator Sasse finishes by stressing the importance of building children’s identities as readers to help foster the growth of ideas and active learning over the passive activities of sitting in front of screens. He notes that sedentary life is not fulfilling and that by encouraging people to participate in production over consumption will lead to more fulfilling lives. He ends on the optimistic note, that while our youth may still need guidance, overall America’s best days still lie ahead.
Video
Full transcript below:
Peter Robinson: Millennials, have we gone from the greatest generation to the softest? With us today, a member of the United States Senate who knows how to turn millennials into adults, Ben Sasse of Nebraska on Uncommon Knowledge now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. A fifth-generation Nebraskan and the son on a football coach, Ben Sasse attended public schools in Fremont, Nebraska, spending his summer working in cornfields. He holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. He spent five years as president of Midland University. Ben Sasse was elected to the United States Senate in 2014. Unlike most members of the Senate who leave their families behind in their home states, Senator Sasse takes his family back and forth with him from Nebraska to Washington, helping his wife home-school their three children. Senator Sasse is the author this spring of the Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming of Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance. Senator Sasse, welcome back to Uncommon Knowledge.
Ben Sasse: Good to be here.
Peter Robinson: Shooting today from Stanford University. Welcome to Stanford.
Ben Sasse: Beautiful place.
Peter Robinson: Tell us the story of the Midland University Christmas tree.
Ben Sasse: I was 37 when I became a college president. I'm a business turn around guy and I live in this town where this special 130 year old college is in danger of going bankrupt. Nobody thinks they're hiring me to run this college because I know anything about student affairs or student culture. Yet, that's the thing that's keeping me up at night my first six, 12 months, 18 months at this school. I knew we were going to get the debt restructured and we were going to raise new money and we were going to try to buy another college. We were going to be able to solve the business problems but I was worried about what was happening in student life. One event crystallized it more than anything else. It's the anecdote doesn't make the world but it sort of captured an angst I had. We had a big athletic arena. There was a 20 foot Christmas tree to be erected the day before or day after Thanksgiving. I don't remember when it was. We had a bunch of students who were employed by the athletic department or the advancement and development office. These are good jobs. These are the best of the best students.
Peter Robinson: They're being paid.
Ben Sasse: They're being paid and it's desirable to work in the development office or work in the athletic department. These are hearty and healthy vital young, 19, 20, 21 year olds. They were supposed to decorate the Christmas tree. It's 20 feet tall. The tree was there and all the decorations were there and they decorated all the bottom eight feet of the tree with twice as many decorations as you would probably need because they spent all their decorations in the bottom eight feet and then they're packing up to leave. The tree is naked from foot eight to 20. The vice president for development happens by and she's like, "Hey, what are you guys doing?" They said, "Yeah, we used all the decorations. We're done." She said, "What about the top half of the tree?" They said, "We didn't know how to get up there." She said, "Did maintenance refuse to bring you a ladder?" It turned out that nobody had really thought to ask. There was no real problem solving in the group. It was, we've been given a task and we're going to leave when the task is done.
Peter Robinson: Bright kids. Healthy kids.
Ben Sasse: Able kids.
Peter Robinson: Able kids but passive.
Ben Sasse: Passive is the right adjective.
Peter Robinson: Okay. This book lays out the figures. Millennials and those coming up behind them do they have a name yet? Does this next generation ... Let's call it millennials. Kids. They marry later, they live with their parents longer, they know less about American history, they demonstrate less initiative and more passivity, they participate less in religious organizations. They're softer not just psychologically but physically. You know that whereas in the 1960s only one teen in 20 was obese. Today, one teen in five is obese. That is a quintupling. Soft. Passive. This despite having grown up during a period of peace and by and large economic expansion in the richest and most powerful nation in human history. What has gone wrong?
Ben Sasse: You said in spite of. Maybe it's because of. I want to be clear. This book is a constructive book. It's two-thirds program for how to think about habit formation for 13 year olds and 15 year olds and 17 year olds. The part we're going to talk about first it sounds like is the one-third stage setting about the problem. This book is not a blame laying book. It is not a beat up on millennials book. It is a, "Wow, what is this category perpetual adolescence" book. That's a new thing in human history. I want to be clear. Adolescence is a pretty special concept. It's only about two millennia old. We came up with this idea that you go from the dependent state of childhood to the independent state of adulthood and you don't have to, boom, transition from one to the other instantaneously when you become physically an adult. Two millennia ago people came up with this concept that when you biologically transition from childhood to adulthood at puberty that doesn't mean you have to immediately be fully independently financially, emotionally, morally, in terms of school even or household structure. We have this idea that for 18 months to four years you can have a greenhouse phase of intentional transition from one to the other. That's great as long as we remember that adolescence is meant to be a means to an end. It is not the destination. Peter Pan is a dystopian hell. It is not a utopia as Disney has tried to remake it. Peter Pan is a character who becomes physically an adult and yet he has no historical awareness. He has no moral awareness. He kills people and he doesn't even remember their names. That's a bad thing. We don't want to be man babies. We want our kids to go from a stage of necessary dependence to more and more independence when they can.
Peter Robinson: The argument here is that if the children grow up in conditions of peace and prosperity, parents, the society, cannot simply leave it to reality to slap them around and shape them up. Parents have to help them grow up more intentionally.
Ben Sasse: Right. I think that though there's no blame laying in this book, if there were it would be at we, the parents, and grandparents feet to not have thought through what does it mean that our kids are growing up at the richest time and place in human history? There's a lot about that that is obviously great. To be protected from levels of violence that most people have known throughout human history, to be protected from abject poverty. We're going to need to figure out how to celebrate scar tissue with these kids because scar tissue is the foundation of future character. We need to celebrate it.
Peter Robinson: We cannot do the book justice because this is video, not print. We're going to do as well as we can. As you say, two-thirds of this book, this marvelous book, is a handbook on how to help kids grow up into real adults. Let's take a few of your maxims. Discover the body. I'm quoting. "Discover the body. Teens need to appreciate the joys of birth and growth and the tragedy of pain and decline." Discover the body. That's your first bit of instruction. Why?
Ben Sasse: Yeah, I wanted to think about as you transition from childhood to adulthood it isn't enough to just progress through grades in school. Most people, most times in human history have had rites of passage. They've had the big hunt. They've had intentional home leaving. They've had first job or first economic self-sufficiency. We've sort of muddled all these markers together. What I really care about is when you're 13 versus 15 versus 17. What are these habits? What are the affections and loves? What are the exposures you should have? Some of it is about work ethic and limited consumption, et cetera. One of them is the body is necessary ... You need to understand your body inter-generationally because you go from a state of dependence to independence but you're ultimately going to decline and become dependent again. We're raising 15 year olds that spend almost all of their time with 15 year olds. 19 year olds that spend almost all of their time with 19 year olds. That's really weird historically. No one has ever done that before. If you brought people in a time machine from 300 years ago to 3000 years ago and you dropped them in today I think the main thing they would think is weird about our life at first is just the material surplus. There's a cornucopia of produced goods that they would have known a world of nature and a couple of things that have been built. Our world is just filled with tools and instruments and consumption aids and whatnot. 30 days past that I think that people from another place, another time would think the strangest thing about us is that we live entirely age-segregated lives.
Peter Robinson: Got it. You quote, "Puritan minister Cotton Mather was severely blunt." Now you're quoting Cotton Mather in your book, "Go into Burying-Place, children; you will there see graves as short as your selves. Yea, you may be at play one hour; dead, dead the next." You quote that approvingly.
Ben Sasse: It's a winsome book, isn't it?
Peter Robinson: You're very serious about this point. It's a kind of memento mori. You want children to understand ... You want children to spend time with grandparents. You want them to spend time with the declining neighbor across the street. You want them to be aware of the way this all ends even as they're beginning.
Ben Sasse: If our kids are going to be wise they need to be around people who have actually passed through some years. A 13 year old is never going to become wise spending all of their time with 13 year olds. I have two teenage daughters. My kids are 15, 13, and six. Our girls are the teenagers. It hurts when a 13 year old girl experiences the slight of another 13 year old girl. Yet, if you know 60 year olds and 75 year olds and 90 year olds, it doesn't hurt quite as much because probably this moment you're living at is not the be all and end all of your whole experience.
Peter Robinson: Ben Sasse and The Vanishing American Adult. Develop a work ethic. Tell us about your grandmother Elda Krebs Sasse.
Ben Sasse: My grandmother I don't think she ever clocked in at 100 pounds. She was about 4'11, this tiny woman, and yet had larger than life personality and charisma. When I was a kid I used to travel with my grandparents a lot in the back of their car. My grandfather came back from World War II, never went to college himself, but was the business manager of this college for 35 years. The college that I was the president of half a century later.
Peter Robinson: Oh, really? Really?
Ben Sasse: He was the business manager, ultimately kind of CFO type of role, but the athletic department reported to him so he'd travel and go to all the away sporting events and I'd ride in the back of the old Chevy Impala with my grandparents. I would ask them questions about the war and the Great Depression and Dustbowl era upbringing that they had. They never thought anything was exceptional about their upbringing. Yet, I was stunned as a kid in the early 1980s at just how much hardship they had gone through that was just like water off a duck’s back. That they didn't think anything about any of it. It was just what you did. My grandma had this great story about how my dad's older brother, about six years older than he was, he was born ... Grandma was pregnant when Grandpa left for the war and then my uncle Roger was born while Grandpa was away at the war. Grandma and Grandpa had just leased some property. They grew up on a farm. Grandpa was the hired man. They had only a year apart in age but they met as teenagers when Grandpa was the hired man on my Grandma's parent's farm. *They had leased some property and they were going to start farming and Grandma had grown up around farms but she had never driven a tractor. All of a sudden her husband is away at war, she's giving birth, they have new land, there's planting and harvesting to be done, and she had to figure out how to do it. She had this leased property and she had a borrowed tractor and she figured out a way to take my uncle's bassinet and attach it to the side of the John Deere tractor and she taught herself how to plow and harvest. I thought this was stunning as a 10 year old kid. Grandma was always amazed that I wanted her to tell me the story again and again because she just thought it was necessity is the mother of invention.
Peter Robinson: Okay. Now here's what I need to ask you to do. Please persuade me that this book written by a fifth-generation Nebraskan, which is filled with stories ... Not filled with stories. There's a number of stories about your grandparents, your own upbringing, as of course there should be, about your kids de-tassling corn. You have to persuade me that this isn't in some way a lament for a lost agrarian way of life that characterized America through almost all of its history and that you, in your generation and where you grew up in Nebraska you saw the last glimmerings of this way of life, and that you, young man though you may be, are filled with nostalgia. Well, you and Thomas Jefferson, "Oh, no. We're not all farmers anymore. The country can't work." Address that critique. That thought in the back of a reader's mind.
Ben Sasse: Let's locate ourselves in economic history for a minute. Hunter gatherers, agrarianism, industrialization, the big tool economy, and whatever this thing is that we're entering now. The global economy, the digital economy, the IT economy, service economy. Sociologists are throwing in the towel. They're just calling it the post-Industrial economy. It's kind of a weird thing to name something. We don't refer to industrialization as ...
Peter Robinson: Post-agrarian.
Ben Sasse: Yeah, the de-agriculturalization of America. It's not just the push from the farm that was technological substitution for labor that made it more efficient. It was also the pull of factories and cities. Mass urbanization, mass immigration. We're going through a transition that is pretty unique in human history. We didn't have alphabets when hunter gatherers settled down and began to farm. I think the only analog for the economic disruption we're going through, and frankly what I care about even more than the economic disruption, is the social network and human capital implications for neighborliness of this moment. I think the only analog we have to this moment is the progressive era where people are leaving the farm, moving to the city, and there is bipartisan panic in America that America can't long endure. Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Republican Teddy Roosevelt, this won't work because you won't have transparency and virtue and neighborliness. They were wrong. We ended up recreating a kind of human capital in the cities. Urban, ethnic neighborhoods were every bit as neighborly and accountable as the Tocquevillian village had been. That was a massive disruption in root to figuring out what human capital looked like in the cities again. I think we're going through an analogous disruption in the nature of work now but probably even more than what they went through. We're going to have a shrinking of the average duration at a job that probably accelerates forever more. Hunter gatherers and farmers they didn't choose jobs. They just became eight or 10 or 12 and they did more of what their parents and grandparents did. When you went from the farm to the city you had a massive disruption. 15 to 25 year old males went to the city and they had to get a job. It was hugely unsettling for everybody's social structure. Once you got a job you tended to keep it until death or retirement. What we're going through now is what they panicked we were going through back then, which is ever more rapid disintermediation. Not just of jobs but of firms and of industries. This is not agrarian romanticism. It is an awareness that if you separate work from the household, as we've done, and so kids come of age with lots of material surplus and very little exposure to production. You're going to have to create something that's going to feel a little bit artificial but that is a structured way of habit-forming, that build a work ethic, even when necessity didn't mandate it.
Continued.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.hoover.org/research/vanishing-american-adult
The Vanishing American Adult
interview with Ben Sasse via Uncommon Knowledge
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Podcast the-vanishing-american-adult
Recorded on June 2, 2017
Senator Benjamin Sasse joins Peter Robinson to discuss his book*The Vanishing American Adult*and the growing crisis in America of prolonged adolescence. Senator Sasse argues that children are growing up, entering adolescence, and becoming stuck in the transitional stage to adulthood as they fail to become financially independent from their parents. He argues that because this generation of children is growing up during a time of relative peace and prosperity, it has allowed millennials to grow up without the issues of previous generations that were raised in war time. In this era of consumption and material surplus, he argues that adolescents are leading age-segregated lives and not developing a work ethic and that both their parents have an obligation to teach their children to grow up. Furthermore, he stresses the importance of intergenerational learning by allowing children to be raised around their grandparents and other adults to help them learn that the trivial trials of youth don’t matter in the long run.
Senator Sasse believes that there are certain virtues that*American*children have to learn *to become productive and happy adults. Part of that is by teaching children the distinction between production and consumption and how to find happiness and self-worth through jobs that make one feel like a necessary part of the company/society. This, he argues, will help raise peoples’ self-worth and lead them to happiness and fulfillment in their everyday.
Senator Sasse finishes by stressing the importance of building children’s identities as readers to help foster the growth of ideas and active learning over the passive activities of sitting in front of screens. He notes that sedentary life is not fulfilling and that by encouraging people to participate in production over consumption will lead to more fulfilling lives. He ends on the optimistic note, that while our youth may still need guidance, overall America’s best days still lie ahead.
Video
Full transcript below:
Peter Robinson: Millennials, have we gone from the greatest generation to the softest? With us today, a member of the United States Senate who knows how to turn millennials into adults, Ben Sasse of Nebraska on Uncommon Knowledge now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. A fifth-generation Nebraskan and the son on a football coach, Ben Sasse attended public schools in Fremont, Nebraska, spending his summer working in cornfields. He holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. He spent five years as president of Midland University. Ben Sasse was elected to the United States Senate in 2014. Unlike most members of the Senate who leave their families behind in their home states, Senator Sasse takes his family back and forth with him from Nebraska to Washington, helping his wife home-school their three children. Senator Sasse is the author this spring of the Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming of Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance. Senator Sasse, welcome back to Uncommon Knowledge.
Ben Sasse: Good to be here.
Peter Robinson: Shooting today from Stanford University. Welcome to Stanford.
Ben Sasse: Beautiful place.
Peter Robinson: Tell us the story of the Midland University Christmas tree.
Ben Sasse: I was 37 when I became a college president. I'm a business turn around guy and I live in this town where this special 130 year old college is in danger of going bankrupt. Nobody thinks they're hiring me to run this college because I know anything about student affairs or student culture. Yet, that's the thing that's keeping me up at night my first six, 12 months, 18 months at this school. I knew we were going to get the debt restructured and we were going to raise new money and we were going to try to buy another college. We were going to be able to solve the business problems but I was worried about what was happening in student life. One event crystallized it more than anything else. It's the anecdote doesn't make the world but it sort of captured an angst I had. We had a big athletic arena. There was a 20 foot Christmas tree to be erected the day before or day after Thanksgiving. I don't remember when it was. We had a bunch of students who were employed by the athletic department or the advancement and development office. These are good jobs. These are the best of the best students.
Peter Robinson: They're being paid.
Ben Sasse: They're being paid and it's desirable to work in the development office or work in the athletic department. These are hearty and healthy vital young, 19, 20, 21 year olds. They were supposed to decorate the Christmas tree. It's 20 feet tall. The tree was there and all the decorations were there and they decorated all the bottom eight feet of the tree with twice as many decorations as you would probably need because they spent all their decorations in the bottom eight feet and then they're packing up to leave. The tree is naked from foot eight to 20. The vice president for development happens by and she's like, "Hey, what are you guys doing?" They said, "Yeah, we used all the decorations. We're done." She said, "What about the top half of the tree?" They said, "We didn't know how to get up there." She said, "Did maintenance refuse to bring you a ladder?" It turned out that nobody had really thought to ask. There was no real problem solving in the group. It was, we've been given a task and we're going to leave when the task is done.
Peter Robinson: Bright kids. Healthy kids.
Ben Sasse: Able kids.
Peter Robinson: Able kids but passive.
Ben Sasse: Passive is the right adjective.
Peter Robinson: Okay. This book lays out the figures. Millennials and those coming up behind them do they have a name yet? Does this next generation ... Let's call it millennials. Kids. They marry later, they live with their parents longer, they know less about American history, they demonstrate less initiative and more passivity, they participate less in religious organizations. They're softer not just psychologically but physically. You know that whereas in the 1960s only one teen in 20 was obese. Today, one teen in five is obese. That is a quintupling. Soft. Passive. This despite having grown up during a period of peace and by and large economic expansion in the richest and most powerful nation in human history. What has gone wrong?
Ben Sasse: You said in spite of. Maybe it's because of. I want to be clear. This book is a constructive book. It's two-thirds program for how to think about habit formation for 13 year olds and 15 year olds and 17 year olds. The part we're going to talk about first it sounds like is the one-third stage setting about the problem. This book is not a blame laying book. It is not a beat up on millennials book. It is a, "Wow, what is this category perpetual adolescence" book. That's a new thing in human history. I want to be clear. Adolescence is a pretty special concept. It's only about two millennia old. We came up with this idea that you go from the dependent state of childhood to the independent state of adulthood and you don't have to, boom, transition from one to the other instantaneously when you become physically an adult. Two millennia ago people came up with this concept that when you biologically transition from childhood to adulthood at puberty that doesn't mean you have to immediately be fully independently financially, emotionally, morally, in terms of school even or household structure. We have this idea that for 18 months to four years you can have a greenhouse phase of intentional transition from one to the other. That's great as long as we remember that adolescence is meant to be a means to an end. It is not the destination. Peter Pan is a dystopian hell. It is not a utopia as Disney has tried to remake it. Peter Pan is a character who becomes physically an adult and yet he has no historical awareness. He has no moral awareness. He kills people and he doesn't even remember their names. That's a bad thing. We don't want to be man babies. We want our kids to go from a stage of necessary dependence to more and more independence when they can.
Peter Robinson: The argument here is that if the children grow up in conditions of peace and prosperity, parents, the society, cannot simply leave it to reality to slap them around and shape them up. Parents have to help them grow up more intentionally.
Ben Sasse: Right. I think that though there's no blame laying in this book, if there were it would be at we, the parents, and grandparents feet to not have thought through what does it mean that our kids are growing up at the richest time and place in human history? There's a lot about that that is obviously great. To be protected from levels of violence that most people have known throughout human history, to be protected from abject poverty. We're going to need to figure out how to celebrate scar tissue with these kids because scar tissue is the foundation of future character. We need to celebrate it.
Peter Robinson: We cannot do the book justice because this is video, not print. We're going to do as well as we can. As you say, two-thirds of this book, this marvelous book, is a handbook on how to help kids grow up into real adults. Let's take a few of your maxims. Discover the body. I'm quoting. "Discover the body. Teens need to appreciate the joys of birth and growth and the tragedy of pain and decline." Discover the body. That's your first bit of instruction. Why?
Ben Sasse: Yeah, I wanted to think about as you transition from childhood to adulthood it isn't enough to just progress through grades in school. Most people, most times in human history have had rites of passage. They've had the big hunt. They've had intentional home leaving. They've had first job or first economic self-sufficiency. We've sort of muddled all these markers together. What I really care about is when you're 13 versus 15 versus 17. What are these habits? What are the affections and loves? What are the exposures you should have? Some of it is about work ethic and limited consumption, et cetera. One of them is the body is necessary ... You need to understand your body inter-generationally because you go from a state of dependence to independence but you're ultimately going to decline and become dependent again. We're raising 15 year olds that spend almost all of their time with 15 year olds. 19 year olds that spend almost all of their time with 19 year olds. That's really weird historically. No one has ever done that before. If you brought people in a time machine from 300 years ago to 3000 years ago and you dropped them in today I think the main thing they would think is weird about our life at first is just the material surplus. There's a cornucopia of produced goods that they would have known a world of nature and a couple of things that have been built. Our world is just filled with tools and instruments and consumption aids and whatnot. 30 days past that I think that people from another place, another time would think the strangest thing about us is that we live entirely age-segregated lives.
Peter Robinson: Got it. You quote, "Puritan minister Cotton Mather was severely blunt." Now you're quoting Cotton Mather in your book, "Go into Burying-Place, children; you will there see graves as short as your selves. Yea, you may be at play one hour; dead, dead the next." You quote that approvingly.
Ben Sasse: It's a winsome book, isn't it?
Peter Robinson: You're very serious about this point. It's a kind of memento mori. You want children to understand ... You want children to spend time with grandparents. You want them to spend time with the declining neighbor across the street. You want them to be aware of the way this all ends even as they're beginning.
Ben Sasse: If our kids are going to be wise they need to be around people who have actually passed through some years. A 13 year old is never going to become wise spending all of their time with 13 year olds. I have two teenage daughters. My kids are 15, 13, and six. Our girls are the teenagers. It hurts when a 13 year old girl experiences the slight of another 13 year old girl. Yet, if you know 60 year olds and 75 year olds and 90 year olds, it doesn't hurt quite as much because probably this moment you're living at is not the be all and end all of your whole experience.
Peter Robinson: Ben Sasse and The Vanishing American Adult. Develop a work ethic. Tell us about your grandmother Elda Krebs Sasse.
Ben Sasse: My grandmother I don't think she ever clocked in at 100 pounds. She was about 4'11, this tiny woman, and yet had larger than life personality and charisma. When I was a kid I used to travel with my grandparents a lot in the back of their car. My grandfather came back from World War II, never went to college himself, but was the business manager of this college for 35 years. The college that I was the president of half a century later.
Peter Robinson: Oh, really? Really?
Ben Sasse: He was the business manager, ultimately kind of CFO type of role, but the athletic department reported to him so he'd travel and go to all the away sporting events and I'd ride in the back of the old Chevy Impala with my grandparents. I would ask them questions about the war and the Great Depression and Dustbowl era upbringing that they had. They never thought anything was exceptional about their upbringing. Yet, I was stunned as a kid in the early 1980s at just how much hardship they had gone through that was just like water off a duck’s back. That they didn't think anything about any of it. It was just what you did. My grandma had this great story about how my dad's older brother, about six years older than he was, he was born ... Grandma was pregnant when Grandpa left for the war and then my uncle Roger was born while Grandpa was away at the war. Grandma and Grandpa had just leased some property. They grew up on a farm. Grandpa was the hired man. They had only a year apart in age but they met as teenagers when Grandpa was the hired man on my Grandma's parent's farm. *They had leased some property and they were going to start farming and Grandma had grown up around farms but she had never driven a tractor. All of a sudden her husband is away at war, she's giving birth, they have new land, there's planting and harvesting to be done, and she had to figure out how to do it. She had this leased property and she had a borrowed tractor and she figured out a way to take my uncle's bassinet and attach it to the side of the John Deere tractor and she taught herself how to plow and harvest. I thought this was stunning as a 10 year old kid. Grandma was always amazed that I wanted her to tell me the story again and again because she just thought it was necessity is the mother of invention.
Peter Robinson: Okay. Now here's what I need to ask you to do. Please persuade me that this book written by a fifth-generation Nebraskan, which is filled with stories ... Not filled with stories. There's a number of stories about your grandparents, your own upbringing, as of course there should be, about your kids de-tassling corn. You have to persuade me that this isn't in some way a lament for a lost agrarian way of life that characterized America through almost all of its history and that you, in your generation and where you grew up in Nebraska you saw the last glimmerings of this way of life, and that you, young man though you may be, are filled with nostalgia. Well, you and Thomas Jefferson, "Oh, no. We're not all farmers anymore. The country can't work." Address that critique. That thought in the back of a reader's mind.
Ben Sasse: Let's locate ourselves in economic history for a minute. Hunter gatherers, agrarianism, industrialization, the big tool economy, and whatever this thing is that we're entering now. The global economy, the digital economy, the IT economy, service economy. Sociologists are throwing in the towel. They're just calling it the post-Industrial economy. It's kind of a weird thing to name something. We don't refer to industrialization as ...
Peter Robinson: Post-agrarian.
Ben Sasse: Yeah, the de-agriculturalization of America. It's not just the push from the farm that was technological substitution for labor that made it more efficient. It was also the pull of factories and cities. Mass urbanization, mass immigration. We're going through a transition that is pretty unique in human history. We didn't have alphabets when hunter gatherers settled down and began to farm. I think the only analog for the economic disruption we're going through, and frankly what I care about even more than the economic disruption, is the social network and human capital implications for neighborliness of this moment. I think the only analog we have to this moment is the progressive era where people are leaving the farm, moving to the city, and there is bipartisan panic in America that America can't long endure. Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Republican Teddy Roosevelt, this won't work because you won't have transparency and virtue and neighborliness. They were wrong. We ended up recreating a kind of human capital in the cities. Urban, ethnic neighborhoods were every bit as neighborly and accountable as the Tocquevillian village had been. That was a massive disruption in root to figuring out what human capital looked like in the cities again. I think we're going through an analogous disruption in the nature of work now but probably even more than what they went through. We're going to have a shrinking of the average duration at a job that probably accelerates forever more. Hunter gatherers and farmers they didn't choose jobs. They just became eight or 10 or 12 and they did more of what their parents and grandparents did. When you went from the farm to the city you had a massive disruption. 15 to 25 year old males went to the city and they had to get a job. It was hugely unsettling for everybody's social structure. Once you got a job you tended to keep it until death or retirement. What we're going through now is what they panicked we were going through back then, which is ever more rapid disintermediation. Not just of jobs but of firms and of industries. This is not agrarian romanticism. It is an awareness that if you separate work from the household, as we've done, and so kids come of age with lots of material surplus and very little exposure to production. You're going to have to create something that's going to feel a little bit artificial but that is a structured way of habit-forming, that build a work ethic, even when necessity didn't mandate it.
Continued.....
