Skip to main content

The return of the term "shovel ready."

Of Shovels, Spades, and Scoops - West Texas Organic Gardening


Former Vice President Joseph Biden, in a recent announcement of his economic plan, used the phrase "shovel ready." There are lots of shovel ready jobs in building infrastructure.

One might argue that this is a time in which all liberty loving folks should be directed all their/our fire at the Orange Dynast, not at Joe. Still, I have to have a go at this unfortunate phrase.

Politicians talk about "shovel ready" jobs because they want to convey the impression that it is easy for public spending to put people to work. "There are jobs to be done, we [the clique making this claim today] know what they are, and some of it is as simple as pointing a new hire to a shovel, then pointing him to the place where the hole needs to be dug."

Biden should remember the phrase "shovel ready," because he and former President Obama used that phrase in their own campaigning in 2008. They won. Those public investment jobs turned out to be tricky to create after all. Eventually, President Obama admitted he shouldn't have used the phrase, even saying there is no such thing as shovel ready.

The phrase seems to have originated as a fantasy reconstruction of the interstate highway gravy train of the '50s. Ike's administration brought in contractors, who brought in subcontractors and so on down the line. Somewhere, some sub-sub-contractor must actually have said to some new hire, "there is the shovel." And a cliche was born.

But should we really look back on that as a job-creating Eden to which return is desired?  We were essentially dedicating ourselves as a country to the cult of the single-user automobile. Not the "family" automobile, because in 'Murrica any household with more than one adult aspires to have more than one car. Ike's highways brought in massive carbon emissions, suburban sprawl, dependence on foreign sources of energy -- essentially everything that ails us. But it did teach us that job creation is easy! Boy howdy. 

Anyway, setting aside anarcho-capitalism and even thinking "inside the box," one should observe that the Federal Highway Administration says it no longer uses the phrase "shovel ready" as a project classification. And when those in charge of creating jobs are looking for something easy, something shovel ready, they are NOT concerning themselves with whether what they are doing is productive.

"Hey you! Short guy! take this shovel and dig a hole. And hey you! tall guy. Stand ready, when short guy takes a break, fill this hole back in again."
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more