Todd Hirsch hits a homer

Todd Hirsch used to be the top economist at the Alberta Treasury Board. That gave him the cred to float some of the dumbest ideas I ever heard of in the pages of The Globe and Mail on a regular basis. Celebrity chefs could revitalize rust-belt communities with destination dining? Yup, open up a trendy eatery in some down-and-out locale and wham! They’ll be flying in from all over… I don’t recall if that was the dumbest one, but he had lots. I wrote him off as an out-ot-touch wanker who didn’t know much about the real world. So imagine my surprise when I ran into him in the pages of the Globe today, and found myself agreeing with almost everything he said in “We lied to millenials and Gen Z when we said they could be anything they wanted.” Did we ever! Just try really hard and don’t ever let go of your dreams and they’ll all come true, because everybody’s a winner in this brave new world. Trouble is, thanks to our ultra-shallow fame-focused cultlure, way too many kids want to become NBA stars or rappers or social media influencers. As Hirsch points out, 99.999% of the time, that ain’t gonna happen. Instead, too many of our millenials find they’re gonna have to pay their own way in this cruel world with a mere “job” they’re indifferent to. Oh, the horror! That’s what we used to call reality. Nobody worked on a Big Four assembly line in our era because it allowed our human potential to blossom. But that Ford or GM pay packet the UAW negotiated made a lot of other stuff come true, like the house and the car and the education for our kids The kids we lied to. As Todd points out, nobody grows up dreaming of a life as an HVAC technician, but it’ll pay the bills while you dream your dreams.