The nation lost 524,000 jobs in December, reflecting a pervasive fear among employers that if they fail to shed workers quickly their companies may go under in a recession poised to become the worst since the 1930s.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, jumped to a 16-year-high of 7.2 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. The growing army of the unemployed, at 11.1 million, is nearly 50 percent bigger than at the start of the recession a year ago.

More recent reports suggest the unemployment rate will continue its grim rise when the new January figures are announced:

Orders of durable goods fell 2.6 percent last month, to $176.8 billion. It was the fifth consecutive month of declines, after a 3.7 percent drop in November as the country slipped deeper into a recession now nearly 13 months old. …

As businesses struggled, the problems of the housing market continued to multiply. The Commerce Department reported that sales of new single-family homes in December fell 14.7 percent to an annual rate of 331,000, a record low.

In all, 482,000 new homes were sold last year as housing prices tumbled and credit dried up. That figure was 37.8 percent lower than the 776,000 homes sold a year earlier.

Also on Thursday, the Labor Department reported that first-time unemployment claims rose to a seasonally adjusted 588,000 for the week that ended Jan. 24, up 3,000 from a revised 585,000 for the week before.

There are still a few good stories to be told about other interviews, jobs, and sidetracks that culminated in this job, so stay tuned for more posts in the coming days and weeks.

UPDATE

The New York Times reports that stocks were rallying late in the afternoon, around the time I found employment, in spite of bleak new economic reports. Coincidence?

Stocks Rally Sharply Despite Heavy Losses of Jobs:

Wall Street shook off the grim new unemployment numbers and its early losses on Friday afternoon, swinging sharply higher as bargain-hunting investors snapped up long-suffering financial and technology stocks.

Jobless Rate Soars to 6.7% in November:

With the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation’s employers shed 533,000 jobs in November, the 11th consecutive monthly decline, the government reported Friday morning, and the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent.

The decline, the largest one-month loss since December 1974, was fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression. The previous record was 16 months, in the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

Frank Sees ‘Disaster’ if Auto Industry Fails:

The chief executives of the Big Three automakers returned to Capitol Hill on Friday, hoping to convince House members already stunned by the latest national unemployment figures that they are prepared, at last, to make the changes necessary for their companies to survive.

“I hope we will do something,” said Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Financial Services Committee, shortly after the November employment report was released showing the biggest job losses in more than three decades.

Not to do something, with the November figures showing a loss of more than half a million jobs nationwide, would be “a disaster,” Mr. Frank warned, expressing concerns that dominated much of the session.

Workers Give Up:

How bad was today’s jobs report? The unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent, its highest level since 1993 — and that understated the weakness in the labor market.

According to the Labor Department, the number of unemployed workers rose by 251,000 in November. But the number of people who were outside of the labor force — that is, neither working nor looking for work — rose by much more: 637,000. These people aren’t counted as unemployed in the government’s statistics, because they are not looking for work. Many of them, presumably, have stopped looking for work because they didn’t think they could find a good job.

I find I am unable to concentrate on tasks that require my sustained and undivided attention. I spend most of my time reading things in snatches and trolling the Web to fuel this urge. Yesterday I read and re-read, then listened to the prepared audio recording of, Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, delivered in 1950. “There are no longer problems of the spirit,” Faulkner says. “There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” On the recording, Faulkner’s delivery is rushed. The cadences of his speech come tumbling haphazardly toward the listener with an urgency to be heard if not at once understood. “Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

I worry about my search. About my agony and my sweat and whether in the end I will find they have taken me where I wanted to go. Will I find what I was looking for? At the end of this, if I find a job, will my heart still be pure or will the baseness of my pursuit turn it black and cold? In defiance of annihilation Faulkner says we must learn the problems of the human heart again. I want to learn them. I want to try. To teach myself to love in the face of distraction, to embody “honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” in spite of this ugly dread. “Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

Here is something I found today in the Boston Globe, a vision of our lives should the financial crisis become a full-scale Depression:

Unlike the 1930s, when food and clothing were far more expensive, today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education, and we’d see uncomfortable changes in those parts of our lives. The lines wouldn’t be outside soup kitchens but at emergency rooms, and rather than itinerant farmers we could see waves of laid-off office workers leaving homes to foreclosure and heading for areas of the country where there’s more work – or just a relative with a free room over the garage. Already hollowed-out manufacturing cities could be all but deserted, and suburban neighborhoods left checkerboarded, with abandoned houses next to overcrowded ones.

And above all, a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience. With the diminishing price of televisions and the proliferation of channels, it’s getting easier and easier to kill time alone, and free time is one thing a 21st-century depression would create in abundance. Instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation’s unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available.

A striking and unbearable vision. Having read it again, I feel a sudden chill seize the room — my sweat has evaporated with the sun’s descent behind the clouds, and I must retreat to my closet for another layer of clothing.

“It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure,” Faulkner says, “that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

In a factory that abuts Interstate 90, two shifts of workers have been making Spam seven days a week since July, and they have been told that the relentless work schedule will continue indefinitely. … [I]t is not clear exactly how much sales are up. Hormel’s chief executive, Jeffrey M. Ettinger, said in September that they were growing by double digits.

Meanwhile, in case you were wondering what Spam is:

Invented during the Great Depression by Jay Hormel, the son of the company’s founder, Spam is a combination of ham, pork, sugar, salt, water, potato starch and a “hint” of sodium nitrate “to help Spam keep its gorgeous pink color,” according to Hormel’s Web site for the product.

Because it is vacuum-sealed in a can and does not require refrigeration, Spam can last for years. Hormel says “it’s like meat with a pause button.”

During World War II, Spam became a staple for Allied troops overseas. They introduced it to local residents, and it remains popular in many parts of the world where the troops were stationed.

The report also cites increased sales of “value-oriented products” like macaronni and cheese, pancake mix, instant potatoes, and Jell-O. Also: rice and beans, vitamins, and beer.

(Note to self: for dinner tonight: rice and beans, vitamins, and beer.)

From The New York Times, regarding the cuts at Time Inc.:

Editors on Monday asked for about 100 volunteers to give up editorial staff jobs at Time, People, Sports Illustrated and a few other Time Inc. magazines, and the company announced the elimination of a similar number of jobs in its business operations.

The cuts are the first steps toward what Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, has said will be the elimination of about 600 jobs worldwide, most of them at its 24 magazines in the United States. They apply to some of the biggest and most prominent publications in the business, underscoring the magazine industry’s steep financial decline this year.

More layoffs are expected in the next few days.

From The New York Observer, regarding the cuts at Condé Nast:

The Observer has learned that all Condé Nast publishers and editors have been told they have to cut their staffs by 5 percent and their budgets by 5 percent within weeks, according to five Condé Nast sources.

It will affect every title, including the company’s most successful: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, Glamour and down the line.

The plan is not just a 5 percent overall spending reduction but rather two distinct 5 percent cuts for each title, guaranteeing that titles cannot meet the goal without cutting staff.

First, each book will have to cut 5 percent of its payroll. They can do this through laying off staff or eliminating open and unfilled positions or a combination of the two.

Second, each book will have to cut 5 percent from its non-payroll budget lines: travel and expenses, meals, freelancers, etc.

This will be performed for each title twice over: once for the business side of each title and once for the editorial side.

The cuts at Condé Nast will result in the ostensible end of Men’s Vogue, which will be absorbed into Vogue. “This business decision is a byproduct of the economy and we’re adjusting our operating expenses accordingly,” a spokesperson told CNN.

So far I have at least one friend who has been laid off by Condé Nast. News of these cuts arrived just as The Christian Science Monitor was making the industry-shaking announcement that it will abandon print.

The American economy lost another 240,000 jobs in October, the government reported Friday, as cash-strapped consumers pulled back and businesses hunkered down, intensifying the distress gripping much of the country.

The unemployment rate spiked to 6.5 percent from 6.1 percent, the highest level since 1994. Many analysts now expect unemployment will reach 8 percent by the middle of next year.

Coupled with revisions to September’s data — which now show a loss of 284,000 jobs, down from an initial estimate of 159,000 — the economy has shed 1.2 million jobs since the beginning of the year. More than half the job losses have been in the last three months.

“The economy is slipping deeper into a recessionary sinkhole that is getting broader,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The layoffs are getting larger, and coming faster. We’re likely to see at least another six months of more jobs reports like this.”

Here is my favorite one:

Bush Makes Final Push to Worsen Warming, Make Our Children Dumber, and Sicken All Americans

A number of deregulation rules are in the works that would ease controls on dangerous emissions, coal mining, commercial fishing, and drinking-water standards. “Once such rules take effect, they typically can be undone only through a laborious new regulatory proceeding, including lengthy periods of public comment, drafting and mandated reanalysis.”

Runner-Up:

Is There Anything Palin Doesn’t Like ‘Tapping Into’?

Includes video of a speech on energy policy in which Sarah Palin says “tap into” nine times. “Palin’s use of an oil industry metaphor to describe all forms of energy and innovation is consistent with the mindset of supply-side exploitation, a dangerously simplistic approach to energy policy that only considers the short-term profit interests of energy corporations.”

Two More (unexciting headlines, interesting articles):

The Prepared Text for Sarah Palin’s Love Letter to Big Oil [Updated]

Compares the prepared text of the campaign speech referred to above with what Palin actually said. (She has a tendency to go off-script.) Improvisations are in red.

6 Villains of the Economic Crisis

Brief profiles of former Sen. Phil Gramm (McCain economic adviser who called America “a nation of whiners”), Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, etc.

Although the Monitor will be supplementing its Web site with a weekly, subscription-based print edition (and an e-newsletter), for all intents and purposes this is the end of the Monitor as a newspaper, as such. According to CSMonitor.com, the new daily electronic edition will be offered by subscription. I’m not sure if this means there will be a charge to look at any of the Web site (which is presently free) or just to read certain sections of it.

Monitor editor, John Yemma, describes the shift as “a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years.” From The New York Times:

Longtime readers “love coffee and a newspaper. So do I,” Mr. Yemma said. “There’s nothing like it. But everyone, sooner or later, is going to have to make the transition, and that’s recognized.”

Curious whether Times readers were suspicious of Yemma’s insinuation — that the paper they were reading would be entirely electronic by 2014 — I scrolled through the comments at the end of the article, online, and noticed the reaction of “David,” from Detroit, who wrote:

There’s more reasons for newspapers to produce a paper product than simply giving someone an accessory to their morning coffee, as Mr. Yemma implies. People like to do the crosswords and Sudoko puzzles and cut coupons without having to buy a printer, for one.

This gave me a chuckle. Coffee, the crossword, Sudoko. What ever will take the paper’s hallowed place among the quasi-intellectual leisure accessories of the bourgeoisie?!

In the press, anxiety about the longevity of print is phrased in terms of “new models.” Has the Monitor discovered a revolutionary new model for the industry? What will the new model be? I have a feeling the Monitor‘s subscription strategy wouldn’t work for other newspapers. Since the Monitor isn’t based out of a particular locality, and is delivered by subscription through the mail, its readers may actually follow it into the realm of online subscriptions. Most people, however, regard the Web as a source of free content. I don’t expect them to start paying for a newspaper when they have the alternative of reading any dozen of the billion free blogs being constantly updated, every day.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that the content of a newspaper is:

… “subject matter” that denies itself any other form of organization than that imposed on it by the reader’s impatience. For impatience is the state of mind of the newspaper reader. And this impatience is not just that of the politician expecting information, or of the speculator looking for a stock tip; behind it smolders the impatience of people who are excluded and who think they have the right to see their own interests expressed.

The web log, of course, with its recurring, instant updates, easy opinions, and frenzied comment boards, is more effective than the newspaper at gratifying the impulse Benjamin identifies as the newspaper’s organizing principle. Meanwhile I have no reason to think that high-speed communication hasn’t exacerbated a thousandfold the “impatience of people who are excluded and who think they have the right to see their own interests expressed.” That is why in the last couple years the better newspapers have added so many blogs to their Web sites it has become difficult to distinguish between the print and electronic reporting.

We already know what the new model will look like, then. What remains to be seen is how — and for who — it will pay off.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Technically these charts don’t mean much to me. I glance at them and think that doesn’t look good or someone’s having a bad day or I’m glad I’m not rich. When this grab was taken, stocks looked to be making a rally, although the Dow would still close below 10,000. The sub-headline about Europe hints nicely at the wider implications of what would soon be a global economic meltdown.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Notice that stocks tend to fall “on” something. Credit concerns, gloom. How does something fall on gloom? … seems a little abstract. No wonder they haven’t hit bottom yet!

Friday, October 24, 2008 (Today)

Now we see how well Europe and the rest fared on the financial crisis “test” taken on October 6. At about 9:30 am it looks like the stock market fell down a well. Now it’s regaining ground, although who knows where it’ll wind up. … My (totally uninformed) guess is on Monday stocks will climb before another plummet later in the week.

***

More from the blog of New York Times’ chief financial corespondent, Floyd Norris, who at 8:55 am announced, “The world’s markets are quaking more than I have ever seen today.” An hour later, he was breathing a little easier and wrote “world not over.” At 10 am, he wagered a couple guesses as to “what is happening.” They are:

1. The world is finally waking up to just how bad it is, and that earnings are going to fall everywhere. Only a couple of weeks ago, some people were claiming the S.&P. 500 was trading at 12 times the next year’s earnings, even if it was around 18 times trailing earnings.

If that is the problem, then this could be nearing an end, and this panic could really mark the bottom. (Fair warning: I’ve spotted bottoms before during this bust, and been ever so wrong.)

2. This is the hedge fund devastation, as overleveraged hedge funds are forced to sell by falling prices, and then are forced to sell more because they drive prices even lower.

There are rumors around that the Fed is liquidating one hedge fund. There are also denials, so I won’t name the fund. But even if the rumor is false, it encapsulates one big worry.

If that is the explanation, this will end when the hedge funds have finally been forced out. Then the rise could be explosive.

Meanwhile, share prices are up from a few minutes ago. Down 324 on the Dow seems like good news.

Later, Norris cited a new forecast from The Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, “among the most worried — and therefore, most accurate — forecasters over the past several years.” Here are his excerpts:

Our view of the next 12 months no longer appears to be unconventional, at least not on the surface. Now everybody thinks the economy is in a recession, and many think it will be long and severe. People make comparisons to the 1930s all the time. Everyone thinks consumer spending is in big trouble. Lots of people think the Fed will ease. Financial instability, a theme we harped on ad nauseam during the past three years, is now the primary economic topic of discussion.

Still, conventional wisdom leaves out much that is important about the economic situation, and it encompasses much that is wrong. . . .

Most investors, businesses, and analysts, despite their deep pessimism about the consumer outlook, will be surprised by the length and severity of the consumer pullback.

The public is starting to discover the seriousness of the state and local fiscal position, but the magnitude and fallout of the developing nonfederal government crisis will prove shocking.

Many fear that the present financial mess is setting the stage for surging Treasury yields, and most will be surprised by how low yields will fall. . . .

House prices will probably fall another 20%. . . .

The emerging market sector of the global economy is facing more than a financial crisis; it is facing a depression, which unfortunately is likely to be uncontained and severe in many countries. . . .

Lending is not going to be fixed by recapitalizing banks. The underlying problem is not just that aggregate private loans are too large relative to bank capital; it is that they are too large relative to aggregate private income. Thus, the problem is with the borrowers, not just the lenders, and households need to lower their debt relative to income while corporations need to lower their debt relative to revenue. . .

Even if the recession does end before 2010, employment will continue to decline. It is likely to fall for another year or two as downsizing and restructuring persist. The unemployment rate is likely to reach 8.5% by the end of 2009 and will be near 10% before it reverses.

Few people actually work in the clothes they are expected to wear to a job interview — common sense says to dress more formally than you would on the job — yet this discrepancy has always bothered me. Indeed, trying to dress appropriately for an interview is one of the rites of gainful employment that leaves me a little befuddled. For instance. Conventional wisdom would conflate dressed “up” with dressed conservatively, which may be a mistake, depending on the organization where one is interviewing. I had an interview in September for a publicity position with a company in the art world. I wore a pair of grey dress slacks and a dress shirt with vertical pink stripes and a purple and blue diagonal-striped tie, figuring this was safely professional with an unusual enough color and line scheme to be not completely without style (it was an art job, after all). But the moment I walked into the office I felt out of place and uncomfortable in my conservative clothes. During the interview I learned part of the job would include daily contact with fashion magazines and regular attendance of art gallery openings and fashion industry functions. I asked myself: Would I wear these clothes to an art gallery opening? Does it look like I know how to convey the right image to the company’s business associates?

No. And no.

No universal belief set can be applied to the atomized world of secular commerce. The only rule is that there are no rules. Make money by whatever means, no matter what the cost — this is how the free market works. (It’s also how the financial crisis happened.) The idea of an agreed-upon dress code for interviews is a vestigial totem to a nonexistent “code” of business decorum. Most of us realize this, even if the popular imagination nurtures nostalgia for a time when, we suppose, the code was still largely in place. I am reminded for some reason of Homer’s nostalgia for the elegant rituals of an impossibly noble, and for him bygone, warrior class:

…With my blade drawn
I spaded up the votive pit, and poured
libations round it to the unnumbered dead:
sweet milk and honey, then sweet wine, and last
clear water; and I scattered barley down.
Then I addressed the blurred and breathless dead,
vowing to slaughter my best heifer for them
before she calfed, at home in Ithaka,
and burn the choice bits on the altar fire;
as for Teiresias, I swore to sacrifice
a black lamb, handsomest of all our flock.
Thus to assuage the nations of the dead
I pledged these rites, then slashed the lamb and ewe,
letting their black blood stream into the wellpit.

-The Odyssey, Book XI, Lines 23-39

Odysseus is a man of propriety whose survival and material success often depend on his rigid observance of custom. He is also a “strategist,” self-possessed, and “skilled in all ways of contending” — someone who in the contemporary business world would be called goal-oriented. To slaughter four large, healthy animals and abandon their carcasses, to spill a bottle of good wine and the water he and his crew were going to drink as they crossed the arid eastern Mediterranean — this is a small sacrifice for what Odysseus believes he will be offered in exchange: unprecedented entry to the Underworld, and access to all its benefits. These include a Vision of the future and detailed advice on how to complete his journey home.

The typical job seeker may feel just as at sea as Odysseus, and is subject to similarly confounding, awe-inspiring forces. Yet our goals are modest (a living wage), and the only alternative is to drown. We ride the waves and take their blows with the benefits of employment in mind: insurance, health coverage — though even a basic Vision plan is often too much to ask for these days. I suppose in the age of silent skies and free enterprise, our interview suits are about the only offering we have left to appease — not the the breathless dead or an all-powerful deity, exactly, but the no less mysterious, and whimsical, spirit of capital.

How careless, then, to have flaunted these rites on Monday by wearing my shabby coat and a recently-worn and not yet laundered dress shirt — with a pair of jeans!

…Yet as I continue to deliberate the relevance of dress rites, I realize Monday’s interview was the first to result in a job offer, albeit a tentative one. It was also the first time a prospective employer seemed to be considering and evaluating me as a person, rather than a measurable unit of labor. I wasn’t, I sensed, being judged by my appearance or my resume — by how well my qualifications and answers to interview questions matched up with some pre-established rubric — but by (for these were the words of my interviewer) how my mind works.

And so we have the New York Times story, “Alternative Energy Suddenly Faces Headwinds,” which is supposed to be a clever headline, but the NYT, which accompanies the story with a picture of wind turbines, seems to have missed the irony that wind turbines like strong winds.

And we have the Washington Post Page 1 story, “As Fuel Prices Fall, Will Push For Alternatives Lose Steam?” You might notice the Post has chosen to show a picture of the Saturn plug in hybrid with the caption “Demand for electric cars like this Saturn hybrid may flag if gas prices keep sliding.” Currently demand is zero, since the car isn’t expected to go on sale for two years, so I’m not quite sure how demand can flag. More on this lame story below.

We also have a bunch of posts in the WSJ’s blog: “Green Ink: Crunch Time For Clean Everything” and “Financial Fallout: Why Renewable Energy Has the Blues” and “Clean Energy Meltdown: Now GE’s Bailing.”

Yes, renewables are capital-intensive. So is nuclear. Where are all the front-page stories on how difficult it’s going to be to raise capital for multibillion dollar nuclear plants? … In fact, a global economic slowdown inevitably coupled with a credit crunch means a big drop in all major construction — as GE itself explained to the WSJ. And that same slow down reduces projected electricity demand growth rates in the near term, so you would expect an across-the-board slowing of all big electricity projects, including coal.

… The fundamentals that guarantee clean tech will be the biggest job-creating and wealth-creating industry haven’t changed. We still need to replace most of the energy infrastructure of the developed world in the next four decades with clean energy, while at the same time building from scratch a clean energy infrastructure for the developing world [see “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 2: The Solution“].

A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now. …

A little history here: During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.

Of course, to buy stocks, one must have money, and to reap the rewards of their appreciation, one must have patience — and time. This means that the potential benefits of the crisis will be limited to those who are young and wealthy enough to buy their slice of America’s future now and wait ten or twenty years for it to be delivered.

This isn’t necessarily bad advice, but the analogy doesn’t hold. The reason an audience wants to like its actor is because their enjoyment of the performance depends on it. They have no choice but to like or dislike the actor — and the performance — they are presented with. They prefer to like the actor and to enjoy her performance because it makes them feel they haven’t wasted their time and money. Unlike the audience, who is stuck with the actor on stage, the employer presumably has a choice of candidates to fill a given position. The employer is therefore not like the audience of a performance but like the director conducting an audition, which is to say someone whose obligation is to judge ruthlessly so as to narrow down a pool of candidates. In fact, an employer already has a precise image of what an ideal candidate looks like and will dissect you inside and out for any deviation from his or her expectations. (I base this not only on my interview this Tuesday, but on my own experience hiring freelancers for Thirteen, and as a former musician who has had many auditions).

A thorough interview, I’ve realized, is a maze path lined with carefully laid traps. It is long and disorienting and impossible to escape from unscathed. The traps come in the form of questions. Many of the questions will inquire about previous work experience and how specifically that experience relates to the given position. These can be prepared for to some extent by analyzing the candidate requirements listed in the job posting, researching the organization, and developing an adaptable argument for why one is well-qualified for the position. Yet there are other questions — trick or trap questions — designed to catch the candidate unaware so as to force him or her off message, to borrow a political expression. Look around and one can find examples of trap questions online, and advice on how to answer them, though it seems to me that there are too many of these to sufficiently prepare for them all:

What is your idea of a good boss? (Think about this question for a minute. You are being asked by the person who would potentially be your new boss.)

What is your idea of a good office environment?

What did you most like about your last job? What did you like least?

What is your greatest strength?

What is your greatest weakness?

What would your last boss say about you?

What would your previous co-workers say about you?

What kind of person would you refuse to work with?

Where do you see yourself five years from now?

Tell me about your dream job.

Describe yourself in three words.

Etc.

These questions are different than the “tell me about a time when you overcame a challenge” questions, which ask you to present your qualifications by means of a thoughtful, and specific, reflection. Instead, they deliberately put the candidate in an awkward position as a test of his or her ability to handle adverse circumstances. Questions like these can’t be answered in all honestly — they must be answered in a manner that considers how one’s response will reflect his or her ability to perform in the given position. As the candidate will likely struggle to do so, the underlying logic is that the candidate’s true colors, so to speak, will shine through during these vulnerable moments.

Whether or not such is the case, what these questions ultimately ask for are contrived, even disingenuous, answers. For example. What is the appropriate response to this line of inquiry:

Are you willing to put the interests of the organization ahead of your own?

According to one web site, “This is a straight loyalty and dedication question. Do not worry about the deep ethical and philosophical implications. Just say yes.” Fair enough. But even if, for the practical purpose of finding work, one temporarily puts aside the suspicion that a job interview is not free from ethical or philosophical implications, shouldn’t one wonder about an employer who would put him or her in the position (by asking a question like this) of having to lie?

I’ve never been asked that question, but on Tuesday trying to answer questions directly and honestly did get me in trouble. It began when I was asked to speak about my writing experience. I did so in some detail, under the impression that since I was interviewing for an editorial position, my experience with words would be valued. Later, however, when I was asked why I left my Web production job at Thirteen to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing, I grew wary. My interviewers had been emphasizing the importance of project management experience, several times offering the word manager and expressions like manager instincts and a manager’s head as examples of what they were looking for. They wanted to know if I had what they called a manager’s brain. I did my best in response to describe the kind of projects I worked on at Thirteen and my role in managing and overseeing these projects to completion. I also spoke of my experience as a teacher, managing a classroom. Still they seemed intent on determining just what kind of brain I had. I began to suspect that their fear was I have an artist’s brain, which I soon confirmed when they asked me directly: which did I identify as, a writer or a Web producer.

The only honest answer to this question is that I am a writer. I told them this: I am a writer. But I also realized this was not the answer that would get me the job, and hastened to tell them about the aspects of Web producing that I liked — the devising, organizing, and guiding of an idea into a tangible and completed product. They appeared to like this last bit, which is true but nevertheless may have sounded contrived, because, of course, I had already told them that I identified as a writer. And so I left them, puzzled as to how a skill I possess and consider relevant to the given position became a liability used to characterize me as not right for the job.

If you are wondering how a total of $8,200,000,000 could be paid in bonuses over two years to the great minds whose company went bankrupt, well, what can I tell you? The bonus question is often seen as a tragicomic footnote to the business of banking, but it may be that it goes close to the heart of the problem of how we got to be in this place. Through history, the great fortunes have been made by people directly taking risks on their own account. Today, great fortunes are made by employees, doing nothing other than their jobs: jobs which, in the case of bankers, involve taking on risks, usually with other people’s borrowed money. To make more money, and earn more bonuses (which are usually 60 per cent of an investment banker’s pay), it’s simple: you just take on more risk. The upside is the upside, and the downside – well, it increasingly seems that for the bankers themselves, certainly in the case of Lehman New York, there isn’t one. This undermines the whole principle of ‘moral hazard’, which was the idea behind letting Lehman go under in the first place – the need for companies to face the consequences of their decisions. This principle obviously collapses if the individuals involved don’t face any consequences.

Also, 3 Quarks Daily asks: “What Caused the Crisis? Financial Deregulation and Exotic Products vs. CRA-driven Homeownership to Poor Americans.”