The lawn franchises

A reader named Robert left a comment under the Medium copy of my essay, Nobody Told the Scribes. He is 71 and writes from Queensland. At 59 the state government outsourced its IT work to India and retrenched him, so he taught himself C#, restyled himself as a business analyst, and worked his way back to a developer role because he knew someone who needed developers. The IT people he knew who didn’t land that way moved interstate. Or they bought lawn-mowing franchises.

Then he bolded four words about what’s coming: at the same time.

Every collapse Robert survived was contained. Queensland outsourced, and he found somewhere nearby that still needed developers. Other people pivoted and bought lawn mowers. That lawncare pivot is intriguing because it’s a rent on a scarcity like everything else in the essay: proximity, a trailer of equipment, other people’s unwillingness to give up their Saturdays. A small window. But open, and near. The guys with the mowers adapted to the new economy by walking through the nearest exit that still existed.

My essay treated the closing windows one at a time. The scribes lose theirs, the single-earner household loses its own a few centuries later, the paid creator is losing one now, and in each case the consolation on offer is an explanation. Robert’s four words are about what happens when the windows stop taking turns. When one county’s rent collapses, the next county over is an answer. When the same rent collapses in every county in the same decade, everyone rushes the same exits, and the sorting mechanism at the door is the one Robert named in his own case: who you happened to know. He called his landing luck, which is right, and the scale is why it matters. A mechanism that rations landings by acquaintance works tolerably when a few thousand people need one. I don’t see how it can work at all when it’s a stampede.

He closed with the Industrial Revolution, which he thinks is the honest comparison for scope, and with what Britain did when its own exits jammed: for the people at the bottom, crime became the last rent available, and the state’s answer was to ship them to the far side of the world. Robert writes from the far side of the world. The comment carries its own receipt.

The essay argued that every livelihood is a rent on a scarcity and that the consolation is an explanation. I still think that’s true. What Robert adds is that the explanation now has a second variable, and it’s the one nobody’s window prepared them for: