Competitive Advantage

For most white-collar jobs, from secretary, to copy writer, to a PR agency, you can hire extremely effective people in poor countries at a fraction of the cost. They will work remotely (and who doesn’t in these jobs?), put in about 500% of effort, and won’t pout or tell you about their endless mental crises.

White collar workers in rich countries know (or intuit) that their jobs are about to go the way manufacturing jobs went in the 1990s. So they press their competitive advantage which is that they are (in their opinion) better-quality human beings. They can’t say that in those exact words because it sounds icky, so they deliver the message through BLM signs and rainbows in their social media and LinkedIn, endless demonstrations of refined sensibilities as they film their mental collapses and post them on TikTok, the confusing language of wokeness, and bizarre identities and sexual preferences. The marketing slogan this is supposed to transmit is, “Hire me because I know how to protect you and your company from being hounded by a mob of rabid leftist protesters.” I’m not saying people think it in those precise words but neither do we think things like “let me cook this dish because my husband loves it and I love him and want to do something nice for him.” We just do it because it feels right.

#MeToo and the cancel culture exist to make these people competitive on the labor market.