George Packer's Prophetic 'The Unwinding' and Lessons for Access in America in 2024

I give talks at Codesmith on how to approach a job search in 2024. I say that every stage you must show not only your capacity to solve an organization’s problems, but that you’re going to care deeply about solving them even when they’re hard.

But how can you possibly express that in a few words - when an average application is viewed for under 2 seconds - if it’s seen by a person at all.

You can't just tell someone “Results oriented + hard working”. Without evidence it carries less than no weight.

At Codesmith, you show your capacity and care by contributing to open source projects (renowned for their difficulty).

But in society, there’s a signal more powerful than any open source project. In fact it might be worth millions of dollars (cf Operation Varsity Blues)

If you are one of the <4% that overcome the rigor of the admission process for Stanford (which has turned me down a few times), or similar schools, you have a signal for life of both your capacity and care!

Is this fair? The power of this status isn’t necessarily a problem in itself. The problem is when there aren’t rules-based routes to such elite outcomes from any place, at any stage in life - when there is no amount of work you can do at 25 that will get you into Stanford if your parents don't tee up a route for you from fourth grade.

That’s when you get what Biden has called a ‘river of power running through the Ivy league’ and the risk of societal alienation and even upheaval.

The point is not that everyone should be able to go to an elite institution and access all that comes with it, nor that if paths to do so were more meritocratic then everyone would. The point is that there should be widespread agreement that anyone could. The possibility is what’s essential.

Let me define my terms here.

• By access, I mean rules-based structures that allow for social and economic mobility.

• By rules-based, I mean truth in the simple idea that hard work brings rewards.

This isn’t a call for revolution but a call for incremental steps to be taken by individual people to build those paths. That’s the premise behind Codesmith – a (really quite) small effort.

Without these paths, without the belief that one could feasibly – not easily, but possibly – access that ‘river of power,’ the risks are dire. Individuals can lose faith in society, and fall into alienation and resentment. Society becomes imbalanced between the entrenched haves and the ever growing, resentful have-nots. History is littered with examples suggesting that without reform, the only way for such an imbalanced society to self-correct are a menu of bad options: collapse, revolution, war, and plague.

Some would say there’s a case to be made for a universal basic income, or some other kind of wealth transfer that ensures everyone has their needs met. The big problem with these kinds of solutions is they don’t quench the human desire for fulfillment from one’s own work.

I think it’s completely sensible to embrace the idea that humans are hardwired to pursue labels that signal . Individual wellbeing in society is in many ways a function of having autonomy over one’s destiny. A lot of a life well lived is having what feels like struggle ultimately being rewarded. But for that to work, the rewards must exist, and people must genuinely believe they exist.

The desire for status is like a river of its own, and just as water in the natural world carves a path, so does this desire press forward one way or another. If there is no path – no rules-based structure to climb – it will either flood over, or channel into emergent paths to status and elite outcomes. Populist leaders and the quasi-institutions they spin up, for example. But even those may only be a temporary release valve.

George Packer’s The Unwinding, published in 2013, is one of my favorite books. In a way I’ve not seen elsewhere, it captures the nuanced conflict of when the hardwired human drive for status collides with a system that doesn’t allow it to flow.

Packer’s implicit argument is that the American Dream is a contradiction: even with hard work and above-and-beyond effort, the Dream is definitionally impossible, since outsized outcomes are outsized precisely because they are accessed only by the few. What’s worse, Packer argues, is that this unattainable Dream is perpetuated by those experiencing its rarefied air, all while they pull up the ladder from beneath them.

The thing that’s particularly special about the book is how it emphasizes its broader point in a subtle yet powerful way. Packer writes the story of this “unwinding” as an omniscient narrator who slips into the minds of a collage of real people who span the economic ladder. There’s Ronale and Danny, a high school-dropout couple in Tampa stumbling to make ends meet amid the Great Recession and an endless string of bad-luck health issues; Tammi Thomas, the daughter of a drug addict who takes a buyout from her factory job in Rust Belt Ohio and becomes a community organizer; Jeff Connaughtan, an idealist Biden lifer who becomes a lobbyist and ends up writing a book called “Why Wall Street Always Wins”; Dean Price, a Carolinian who worships the self-help book “Think and Grow Rich” and hustles in vain for his piece of the energy transition; and Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley mogul increasingly focused on extending human lifespan.

Interspersed throughout are flash biographies of the modern era’s supernovas – Jay-Z, Sam Walton, Newt Gingrich, and Oprah, to name a few. Packer places blame on a handful of them, criticizing them for amplifying the dream they’ve achieved, and commercializing their having done so, even as attaining that dream grows increasingly out of reach to the masses beneath.

The narrator knows the structural blocks of these everyday people, all while allowing the reader to feel what they feel and dream what they dream. The tension magnifies the dramatic irony in Packer’s contradiction: we know the deck is stacked against them, and yet…

Where I disagree with Packer is where he places the blame (and the implied solutions). Putting the onus only on the top .001% is too pat. They’re outliers, and shouldn’t be expected to exemplify what’s possible for people to achieve, let alone held responsible for empowering them to do it.

There has to be some predictable amount of work anyone can do (it may be an extraordinary amount) that allows them outsized outcomes. There cannot be no amount of work one can do - but that’s often the nature of post-college pathways.

I think there are at least four groups that have the power and the responsibility to provide these paths, and improve the health of our society by encouraging the cycling of elites.

Leaders: Packer was right to point to individuals in power, but he cast his sights too narrow. The “elites” in the 10%, say, rather than the .001% that Packer goes after, are those who occupy the spaces that are more realistically attainable for people who wish to climb. The challenge is that there has to be an incentive for these leaders to take on the responsibility of caring enough to help lift and make way for others.

Institutions: Here I mean groups that allow for local outsized outcomes. Labor unions, for example, have given rise to their fair share of bad actors, but one under-appreciated thing about their demise is the loss of a relatively accessible path to higher status. By no means was this path easy to navigate; organized labor is a complex system of hierarchy that requires extreme dedication and capacity to climb – but nor did it require the kind of background that is far easier for the wealthy and powerful to obtain.

Government: I’ve already touched on what I see as the downsides of wealth transfers, but I do think there’s an interesting case to be made for things like professional licensing regimes. These have been criticized as a market inefficiency, but what’s missed in that critique is the rules-based rewards they confer.

Firms: Traditional F500 firms are often derided for being too slow or stuck in their ways, but after years of scrutiny many of the resulting bureaucratic systems they’ve built now enable social climbing. Management training programs are a good example. When you see folks in executive positions that have climbed from the shop floor getting rewarded for longevity and consistency, that seems to me like a good thing. In tech there’s been an alienation of users, who are something like a modern version of shop floor workers, from decision-making power.

Ultimately there’s no silver bullet to solve elite entrenchment. Each of these groups, and others, have layers of nuance worth wrestling with.

What’s needed is a blend, something like where you have people with a combination of capacities, care, and community that incentivizes and enables elite cycling.

• Capacity empowers people to climb

• Care inspires those who’ve done it to lift others up

• Community provides the means to build capacity and to reap the rewards of caring

When I started Codesmith, something in me was attracted to the idea of providing an inclusive path toward outsized outcomes that was accessible to anyone. Not only that, but building a place that inspires people who’ve reached those levels to help others do it, too – because they remember what it was like before, and they recognize not only the morality of empowering the next wave but also the fulfillment of building a healthier, fairer, and perhaps more cohesive society, one small effort at a time.

With thanks to Ciaran for illustrations - “Many hands being offered to help others climb. The 'ceiling' is more permeable. Hopeful goal"