The article today on John Wanamaker further confirms my thinking that How They Succeeded is one of the best books that the Mises Institute has ever published, simply because it chronicles the lives of the most successful men and women from the Gilded Age – the actual “greatest generation.” These people have so much to teach us.
John Wanamaker is the pioneer of so much that is driving forward the Digital Age, such as free offerings as a marketing strategy, the no-haggling posted price, the money-back guarantee (his colleagues thought that this idea was suicide!), and much more. Why was he so successful? Because he saw commerce as social service – and especially profitable when the social service was done well and efficiently.
As you get to the end of the article – please read the whole thing – you will find some astonishing nuggets of wisdom. He explains that the workplace can and should function as a kind of university for learning. Yes, those are his words. And why? Because the commercial workplace teaches and reinforces every manner of learning: reading, communicating, math, analytical thinking, and all the other skills associated with a good education.
Amazing, isn’t it? Today the presumption is that all learning takes place before you enter the workplace. And when Washington cooks up a jobs program, it consists mostly in “training programs” – more sitting in desks and listening to a bureaucrat blah blah blah. Then these trained up people go out again and try but usually fail to get a job based on what they supposedly learned.
Wanamaker is more correct here. Working is part of learning. It might be the essential part of learning. It alarms me greatly to see how the cultural ethos has swung so fiercely against teenagers getting jobs as soon as possible. Many parents believe that a job distracts from school. Nonsense. Without a job, a kind can’t learn a work ethic, or come to understand the value of time and money. They sit in desks forever and then confront a world that they do not understand at all. Bad legislation is one reason for high unemployment among the young but it is not the only reason.
Further, Wanamaker has some great comments about monopoly at the end of this article too. He points out that high profits never last in the market because profits attract impersonators and inspire innovators who compete, driving down profits and thereby inspiring more innovation.
Reading more about Wanamaker on Wikipedia, we find that he was even great as Postmaster General – firing thousands of people in a spoils operation. Up with the spoils system, as Murray Rothbard used to say. And his solution to war is also genius. On the eve of World War I, he proposed buying Belgium rather than diving into war and bloodshed.
Wanaker was like many of his time. He believed that commerce was the most progressive, most creative, most civilization-building force in human society. He believed that commerce was our earthly salvation. He was right. We can learn from this man. Would that the Digital Age would become our new Gilded Age.
