Why the young should shun government for business

The phrase “give back” has made it through the fine-mesh sieve of the FT style guide, I see. In an item about the worldwide spurt in public sector job applications, graduates cite a wish to make a social difference as the animating factor.

You need not believe them (I can suggest another reason why private employment has lost some sheen over the past year) to see that idealists should indeed favour one sector over the other. The wonder is that this cohort could have so badly misidentified it.

In the last century, a young person with an itch to change the world had to join some arm or other of the government. The central invention, the nuclear bomb, that scourge and guarantor of the peace, was the fruit of state research. Even a lower-stakes grand projet might throw up an Apollo 11 or a Concorde. As for the conflict of the day, it pitted spy against spy and diplomat against diplomat, if mercifully not general against general. Industrialists served the west against the Soviets, but as a source of underlying prosperity, not as frontline combatants. The state drove History. Business dealt in well-fed anonymity.

The people at Zoom can claim to have had more direct effect on life as it is lived than almost all heads of government

It is hard to say with precision when the reversal took place. It is much harder to ignore that one has. Elon Musk creeps ever closer to the grail of space rockets that are as reusable as aeroplanes. The people at Zoom can claim to have had more direct effect on life as it is lived than almost all heads of government. Parliaments and courts are striving to house-train Uber. They do so potently, at times, but what a tellingly reactive role for the state. From diviner of the subatomic to tidier-up of other people’s creations — I write “Leviathan” with a smirk now.

Even the pandemic, in so many ways the hour of government, fits the pattern. The breakthroughs in vaccination and remote labour are of private coinage.

If world-changing work is their thing, graduates and school-leavers should not be deceived by careers advisers even one generation older. Business has displaced government as history’s smithy in way that would be more recognisable to a Victorian than to someone from the 1990s. A candid politician would give the inverse of John F Kennedy’s inaugural speech: a call to private not public endeavour.

Even if the dream is exposure to events, not the making of them, business is the coming force. In the “second cold war”, such as it is, a robotics firm or social media app is plumb on the faultline. One reason to feel cheated by John le Carré’s death is that we will never know who he was going to conjure as his George Smiley of the Pacific age. A Bay Area chief technology officer, is my guess, or some Belt-and-Road contractor with that English lust for hard places. But not an out-and-out government drone. Not a creature of the state. The writer had too good a nose for the world’s mutable fields of conflict.

A friend invites you to dinner with a diplomat, a businessman and an artist. Who do you least savour talking to?

The advice in this column is not quite universal. In China, where the state pervades business like an ambient noise, the choice is different. Nor does it hold as much for middling performers as for the excellent. A journeyman civil servant will be around (if not do) interesting things. The 38th most important person at Amazon will flounder for memoir material.

These codicils aside, the old public-private trade-off — power or money? — has plainly broken down in my lifetime. The pay gap widened. Each great city has its Hampstead: a neighbourhood of public sector gentry that became unreachably super-prime. And the consolation, a certain centrality to events, has waned.

Government’s remaining edge is — what? — a sort of ineffable interesting-ness. Because it trafficks in things, rather than ideas or symbols, the private sector is still ox-tranquilisingly dull to many, not excluding those within it. A friend invites you to dinner with a diplomat, a businessman and an artist. Knowing nothing else about them, who do you least savour talking to?

Twice now, I have seen a room containing a billionaire switch its focus to an unelected, modestly paid young apparatchik in the time it takes to read this sentence. The spectacle is as brutal as it is cheeringly democratic. It is also, I fear, a lagging indicator.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

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