Privilege and unemployment (Yes, you CAN have one with the other)

So far this blog has been me reflecting (or perhaps in a moment of weakness, whining) about the difficulties I have faced as a newly minted member of the unemployed army of Americans. One of my goals with this site is to give a bit of insight into some of the challenges that unemployed people face. 

Here's the thing though: I'm unemployed, but I'm shielded from some of the worst aspects of it. I've got a lot of angst, diminished future career prospects, some short-term cash-flow problems, a possible gap in my health insurance (and annoying increased costs in any case) and social isolation.

You see, my Fiance's an MD.  She has a job, which pays quite well. In fact, we're above the median household income for Americans. We can afford good food, rent on a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood in Houston. We drive modest used cars, but we can put gas in them and travel around town without undue worry (repair bills have moved from minor to major annoyances, but they aren't savings account killers for us, or even for me-- yet)

Oh, and neither of us are struggling under a dime of student loans -- that's another trifling matter of $200,000 that's off our backs. Part of that is our own careful financial management; part of it was the luck to be born to loving, stably employed, upwardly mobile, generous parents who believed strongly in funding their children's education. Part of it is a strong public school system funded by taxpayers in Ohio and Michigan. It's wrenching watching my carefully hoarded emergency savings diminish, but I'm not staring at a mountain of debt to pay back.

The fact that we're both white and look a lot like an idealized successful American couple portrayed on TV (minus considerable muscle tone, make-up and eating disorders) doesn't hurt either.




The whole thing is kind of like being Dante traveling through the Inferno: I'm getting a taste of how bad everything is. It's depressing. It's terrifying. It's painful. It's isolating And that depression, terror, pain and isolation are REAL. But I'm just visiting Hell and I'm shielded from the worst of the suffering. Perhaps as I peer out from around Virgil's skirts, I can gain some wisdom and insight in to what the true suffering is; the hope is I can put it to use when I get out of this dreadful pit and can behold the stars again.

But here the metaphor breaks down; most of the unemployed end up so through no fault of their own. They get cast into this particular hell because they happened to graduate during a nasty recession, or happened to have a job in a struggling industry, or became a target for the budget ax in the public sector. No, most of the unemployed are innocent of the malice and sloth they routinely get accused of by some elements of our political system. And most of use feel like failures and want to work. We want to provide, we want to serve society -- it just seems that society doesn't have a place for us.

The final judgement is reserved for those with power who could help the unemployed (and the poor, oppressed, ill etc) ease their suffering, but fail to do so. Sadly, my new home state seems to have quite a few policymakers who fit the bill.

So as you read my musings, please keep in mind that I know paradoxically that I am incredibly lucky in my particular unfortunate situation.

On an Island -- unemployment and social contacts

Yesterday I wrote a brief note about how our jobs become a large part of our identity. The focus was on how a profession gives us identifying markers that underline our social status and mark us as interesting people.

But having a job or profession also builds our identities through giving us social contact as well. One of the toughest things I've found about living in Houston is that not only do I have few social contacts, but the fact that I'm unemployed makes developing social contacts an order of magnitude more difficult.

Below the jump, I discuss these dynamics in more detail.

Identity theft

In many unspoken ways, your job is a large part of your identity.

When you meet some one for the first time in a social setting, one of the first questions that often comes up is what you both do for a living. You might answer with the profession you're in ("I'm an engineer") or you might talk about where you work ("Oh, I work over at Dell"). Either answer stakes out in a simple sentence a large part of the story of who you are. After all, your job generally is the single thing you spend the largest amount of your waking hours doing. Your job also gives hints to a number of other aspects of who you are as a person: your schedule, your values, your politics, your social class, your higher vocation in life ("I'm a doctor -- I save people's lives")

 When you're unemployed though,  you lose that part of your identity, or at least the ability to easily convey it. That's tough personally. As I type this, I can say I'm a "scholar," but no one really knows what that means in a way that "I'm a professor at X university" does. The latter is translatable, while the former is opaque. I'm still the same (reasonably) intelligent, (hopefully) engaging, (occasionally) witty and (arguably) responsible person I was before. I still have the same experiences that make up much of who I am, but I've lost the ability to convey a lot of those experiences in an easy way. And the things that being "unemployed" do announce about me tends to set me on a lower level in the conversation.

It's not that your job is your whole identity -- nor should it be. However, your job not only signifies a lot about who you are, but also sets a foundation for who you might aspire to be -even if its diametrically opposed to what you currently do.

But right now, I'm not quite sure how to think about what I might want to do, because I'm not officially doing anything for a living. I'm stuck in a holding pattern while I wait for the phone to ring. 

And while you wait, you begin to question your place in the world, because without the identity and purpose a job often provides, you don't know how you fit in.

Without a job, not only is it more difficult to share who I am with everyone else, it's that much more difficult to understand who I am myself.

The joys of having health insurance

  
The title to this post might seem a bit snarky.  But it's actually serious.  Health insurance (and its close cousins, vision and dental insurance) are great things to have.

And I'm about to lose mine -- yet another of the perks of being unemployed.

Take what happened to me two weeks ago: I was flossing my teeth and minding my own business when I felt something grind at the base of one of my molars. Then, to my dismay, a large filling popped out in my hand.  After a few hours of panic, I found a local dentist who kindly fit me in her schedule and filled the tooth for me without incident (Thanks Dr. Johnson). I am currently covered by a basic dental plan that only covers the cost of preventative care, but also ensures that I only get charged the insurance company's negotiated price for a filling instead of the list price. The upshot for my wallet was that I spent $89 instead of $129 on a filling -- a cool 31 percent discount-- because large insurance companies have bargaining power that individuals do not.

The same goes for the prices for other health care services as well. Obviously, the larger the insurance company, often the better the price, which is why Medicare and the Veterans'  Health Administration (VA) tend to negotiate much better prices for services than private insurance companies.

Having insurance generally  means that you get a better rate, but more importantly it generally means that you get reimbursed for large medical expenses. If you suddenly have a heart attack, contract TB, get cancer, or get turned into a hood ornament by an SUV driver who thinks stop signs are optional, insurance picks up most of the costs by drawing on the premiums paid by healthy people around you. Hey -- you'd do the same for them; in fact you do all the time.

I'm still covered through my university health insurance for the summer  because I taught both terms last year (Thanks again Graduate Employees' Organization). That's about to run out. I'll be eligible to continue coverage through the Consolidated Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1986 (COBRA). I'll have to pay the full cost of the premium, but that will be much cheaper than going on the individual market, where insurance companies will look at my history of asthma and depression and jack my rates up accordingly -- if they'd cover me at all.

Now, I'll eventually be covered under my spouse's plan, but her insurance won't cover me until we get hitched. So COBRA it is. It's a heck of a lot better than nothing, but the $250 I'll be shelling out every month come at a time when money is, shall we say, tighter than it has been.

The reason I'm in this state, along with many other problems that plagues civilization, is crappy public policy. Follow me below the jump for more details...

The Trauma of Going to a Coffee Shop

When you have routine money coming in, there are a considerable number of things that you take for granted -- like being able to stop in to get a coffee at the local cafe, or eating dinner out at a cheap restaurant.  That calculus quickly changes when the paychecks stop.

I've never had much money in my adult life. For my first three years after college, I worked as a journalist running a tiny print paper. After that, I went to graduate school, where the money wasn't great either (though the fringe benefits were quite good -- thanks to the graduate employees' labor union). But in both cases, I had enough to think nothing of dropping $5 on a drink and a delicious concoction containing appropriate amounts of sugar and saturated fatty goodness a few times a week. Grabbing a sandwich for lunch or even an occasional splurge for dinner was no problem either, as long as I kept an eye on the overall budget. And with all these things, I was able to save a modest amount every month for the things that responsible people ought to save for. (Yes, I am extraordinarily lucky NOT to have any student loans.)

That changed about a six weeks ago. I haven't been to a coffee shop since the beginning of July. I only work at home and in libraries. I've paid for one very modest dinner out. I live within walking distance of several interesting museums, but unless they are free (fortunately, several are) I need to think long and hard before plunking down $15 to go inside.

I never spent much on myself, but now I have lost the ability to spend most of that.

 And it's not just spending money on myself -- you can't do nearly as many nice things for other people, either. You can't put as much money as you'd like down in the collection plate at Church. You can't surprise your fiance with a nice dinner out. You have to cut down on gifts for family members.

Two years ago, I budgeted for and sent $200 in donations to Partners in Health, a first-rate charitable and social justice outlet that has brought first-world health care to millions of people in developing countries. Recently, they called and asked if I'd be willing to make a small automatic monthly donation. I wanted to really badly, but I sadly had to tell them "no." I felt like a complete heel.

I want to think of myself as an open-handed person who doesn't have to think about money when important things are on the line. Now I'm realizing that the only people who have that luxury are the ones who already have money.

These are just a few of  the small ways in which unemployment saps your autonomy and your self worth. I'll be talking about more of those in the coming entries. And I'll be talking about the myriad ways that I'm shielded from most of the worst ones thanks to my relatively privileged position.

To blog or not to blog

So why start a blog?

All my friends did it years ago. It seemed a good way to survive medical school and residency. Sometimes its an attempt to justify the usefulness of being a lawyer, though perhaps that's a bit strongly worded (and might get me sued for libel). Of course, now blogs are decidedly uncool and all the cool kids have joined Twitter, so I figure it's safe for me to start one. I'm no early adopter like Atrios, or Yglesias or even John Cole And don't even get me started about that guy named Ezra Klein, who's done quite a bit to help out the state of journalism-- along with a stable of really talented reporters like Sarah Kliff, Suzy Kimm and Brad Plummer. After all, I didn't get a cell phone until 2004 -- and my phone is still decidedly dumb. An extra $30 a month for a data plan is not in the cards for a grad student's salary or the low income of unemployment.

But I think that the thing that appeals to me the most about a blog is that I can write as long or as short as I want. There's no artificial 600-word limit like on most op-ed pages (and let's face it, it's impossible to get space anyway.) And being concise is great, but it's often difficult to get a coherent point across in 180 characters, let alone any analysis.

This is also a form of dignity. I've likely missed the boat on the ability to change the world through a blog, but there's more than that in it for me right now. This is a way of justifying my existence and maintaining a small corner of autonomy during a time that I have very little control over my life. Whether you choose to read this or not is your business. Whether you like what I write or not is your taste. But I will continue to write nonetheless.

Arrival in exile

This is a beginning of sorts. It is an ending of sorts. It's also sort of like hitting the "pause" button on your DVR.

Last May, I graduated with Ph.D. in political science from a rather high-end program in the Midwest. After two years of searching and sending out roughly 100 applications, I have failed to find a job. Out of options, without a prospect of feeding myself for the short term and no clear career path for the long term, I moved to Houston three weeks ago to live with my fiance. She is a lovely, smart woman who has an MD from a high-end program at the same Midwestern school and a year-long gig at a major hospital in town here. I'm extraordinarily grateful to be with her, but as a child of the Midwest, I am in an unexplored country -- and this place that is most certainly not home in any sense of the word.

The politics, city planning, the weather and the attitude of this state are all foreign to me. This fall will be the first time I have not been teaching undergraduates in eight years, and coincidentally, the first time I haven't had a paycheck for an extended period of time. I'm still working on research, but I'm cut off from easy access to much of the academic community I've grown to rely on over the last decade. In multiple states of being, I am in exile from much of what I know and love.  

This blog is my commentary on my predicament, and reflections of how it fits in with the bigger picture of the world around us.