In 2008, we rescued the banks. It 2009, we pledged $900 billion to rescue the rest of the economy. Last month, we extended jobless benefits to 99 weeks to rescue the unemployed. Call it bailouts. Call it stimulus. Call it emergency aid. America seems to be losing its stomach for failure, and that’s very bad news if we have any hope for a robust economic recovery.
Not that we should be surprised by our growing aversion to failure. After all, the richer we get, the more we have to lose. Almost every wealthy nation tries to guarantee a high standard of living for its people through extensive wealth redistribution and welfare. That America has been slower to follow suit may have something to do with our history. Our immigrant ancestors knew much of failure. Hardship was the beginning of their opportunity, and it’s taken us a while to forget that.
I am not saying people used to like failure more than we do today. Winston Churchill probably hated every one of the bumps that made his life’s road so inspiring. But he also knew that winning and losing are inseparable. “Success,” he said, “is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” It’s not fun to fail, but it’s inevitable. Try as we might, we can’t get rid of failure in our lives unless we all agree to never get out of bed (and even that’s not without risk). The sooner you get used to dealing with things going wrong, the sooner you can get on with the business of finding ways to make things go right.
But is failure just a necessary evil? A way to build character and that’s it? One reason I think we’re so eager to remove failure from our lives is that we miss its biggest benefit.
What do Warren Buffett, Tom Brokaw, and Dr. Harold Varmus, winner of a Nobel Prize in medicine, have in common? As Sue Shellenbarger points out, each was turned away by his top choice for college or graduate school. Buffet’s rejection at Harvard Business School led him to Columbia, where he met two professors who shaped his investing philosophy. Brokaw’s rejection from Harvard College was a wake-up call that helped him get more serious about his studies and career. After two rejections from Harvard’s medical school, Dr. Varmus took a detour to pursue graduate studies in literature before finally settling in at Columbia’s medical school. All agree that their early failures were essential to their later success. Why? Because failure opened their eyes to things they couldn’t otherwise see.
Learning is the big, underrated benefit of failure. And learning is what all of us need to be doing a lot of, especially now. Nobody is born with an instruction manual attached to his ear. Whether we’re fit to be teachers or preachers or chemists or salesmen requires discovery, and discovery is possible only when we try things with an uncertain result. Success is fun, but failure is a better teacher because the pain sharpens our focus. My dream school turned me down. Why? What does this mean? Where do I go from here?
Right now, nearly 15 million unemployed Americans need to figure out what’s next. A great place to start would be to think about what went wrong last time. Do I need a new set of more marketable skills? Do I need to look for a new industry or field? The problem with our current economic policy is that we’re anesthetizing our failures with bailouts and stimulus and emergency aid, all of which leave us insensible to what’s really gone wrong. Solving a problem begins with recognizing that one exists. For many of us, that means feeling a bit more discomfort than our bailouts and stimulus and emergency aid have allowed.
Abraham Lincoln, a man well-acquainted with failure, once said, “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” Our problem today isn’t that we are content with our failures, but that we are trying to ignore them. That’s a sure way to get a world without Buffetts and Brokaws and Lincolns. A worse place than America has been, and a worse place than it could be.
Brian Brenberg is assistant professor of business and economics at The King’s College in New York City.
August 2nd, 2010 | 5:10 pm
The audacity of this kid (I googled him) to tell someone who worked all of his/her career in a job that was suddenly outsourced to God knows where that he/she did something wrong. What this guy did wrong was to get hoodwinked by right wingers that social problems have simplistic solutions. He/she would have been better off supporting muscular unions which would have guaranteed life time jobs and benefits. One percent growth evenly distributed would have been a lot better than three percent growth with skewed distribution.
August 2nd, 2010 | 5:28 pm
Wow. our entire financial structure teetered on the edge of collapse in 2008. If it had failed, most people would have found themselves unemployed and their life savings wiped out.
Yeah. They would have leaned a lot about failure–it sucks.
There’s a slight difference between not getting into the school of your choice and losing your life savings, your job, your health or the breadwinner in your family.
August 2nd, 2010 | 6:26 pm
If we want simplistic solutions, look to the Left. How to fix poverty, the health care system, education, the banking system? Why, regulate the hell out of it, and throw federal money at it. When that “solution” fails, throw more money.
And where does the notion come from that 1% evenly distributed is better than 3% average, with those who are more successful at driving the growth get more of the income? What a toxic idea. One forgets that in the life-cycle of a family, in our system most of those who begin in the bottom quintile end up moving through most of the other quintiles within their lifetimes.
The point about failure is a good one. There must be that potential for a free people to continue free and to continue to have a thriving economy. (At 65, I am old enough to say it!) It’s very American, too. I recommend the miniseries on John Adams, starring Paul Giamatti, as a case in point. It depicts him going from one failure to the next, from one frustration to another, never quite satisfied with his results. Other Founders had similar experiences. Yet at the end of the day, you have a remarkably successful life, with the privilege of helping birth the greatest nation on God’s green earth!
August 2nd, 2010 | 10:44 pm
Part of the blame for complacency shoulf be placed on the Left for failing to support unions and instead favoring state-run solutions and the accompanying bureaucratic morass. People seem to not know about the massive struggles in the first part of the 20th century to fight for fair representation of labor and the right to organize. Today people are too afraid to do that. They want the state to fight for them.
August 2nd, 2010 | 11:28 pm
Joe — We would never know about John Adams if he failed. Failure does not mean being rejected from Harvard. Failure means family collapse, social dissolution, alcoholism, divorce, abuse and suicide.
I think we are both the same age, sixty-five. What I know is that we participated in, and were the beneficiaries of the greatest economic boom in history. We came of age after WWII which we came through unscathed. We benefited from the greatest social improvement program in history, the GI bill, which single handedly created what we know of as the middle class. It supplied education and home ownership. These times are gone, not likely to come back.
What exactly is wrong about creating conditions for full employment? Let’s do Public works, rapid transit, massive energy programs. The argument that it is too expensive is not valid. We have already spent close to a trillion dollars playing cowboys and Indians. If you want to cut something, try cutting something like agricultural price supports. Good luck.
August 3rd, 2010 | 3:15 am
Right now, nearly 15 million unemployed Americans need to figure out what’s next. A great place to start would be to think about what went wrong last time. Do I need a new set of more marketable skills? Do I need to look for a new industry or field?
What went wrong is the financial system collapsed, causing a massive reduction in aggregate demand which led to large-scale unemployment.
Workers cannot fix the macroeconomy by themselves. And it makes no sense to talk of workers acquiring a new set of marketable skills if they don’t have the financial resources to pay for that training and put food on the table in the meantime. That’s the idea behind unemployment insurance: it helps people to survive unemployment as they work toward the next step.
Among other things, unemployment insurance helps people to pay their bills on time. One of the first things potential employers do is to run a credit check on an applicant. If someone falls behind in their bills and gets labeled a deadbeat, that person is going to have a tough time finding any job in a recession, let alone one that uses their newly acquired job skills.
August 3rd, 2010 | 7:41 am
I AM for cutting agricultural price supports! This starts with cutting entirely the “massive energy program” called corn-ethanol-to-gasoline. Renewable energy indeed! The energy yield from each year’s harvest almost provides enough energy till, plant, and process the next year’s crop. Meanwhile, the world’s poor suffer. Of course, farm subsidies like this and many others will never go away as long as Iowa is the opening act in the theater of presidential election politics.
I AM for government establishing the ground for economic prosperity. That’s why I say it should back off on over-regulation, stop bailing out everything in sight, quit running up deficits of ten percent of each year’s GDP, quit giving us false solutions to the health-care system, stop subsidizing energy programs which can’t compete in the real market, and quit taking over industries like autos. It has been proven that government does not do well running industrial enterprises. Each interference of this sort reduces our prospects for economic flourishing.
August 6th, 2010 | 12:01 am
A social system that has apparently turned a good portion of its population into a sort of human industrial waste that no one knows what to do with is a system that has failed, only it has failed on such a deep level that it thinks of itself as brilliantly successful.
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