The New Jobs of New York

Happy New Year? This is the February issue of the magazine, you might well be thinking. It’s mailed during the third week in January, when the holiday decorations have been put away and resolutions made so rashly at the end of 2009 are already long ago broken. And this guy is spouting Happy New Year?

It’s new to my associates and me. February is the first issue of our 2010 fiscal year.

Last year? Not so great. Oh, sure, a lot of things went right: We were named the best regional business magazine in the country for the third year in a row and won a passel of other awards. During the worst recession of our lives, we attracted some new clients and made a profit. But sales? If you’ve asked me in person, I’ve already told you: They were down a tad more than 20 percent—better results than at a majority of our peer publications around the country, but not nearly what we wanted. We are glad 2009 is over, and we’re sure you are, too.

Heck, we’re glad the whole decade is over. Did you see that the editors at Time called it “The Decade From Hell?”

They did. One of their writers said it was “the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era.” And why not? The decade started with the 9/11 attack and ended with a financial wipeout. In between, we had anthrax letters, two wars, the near-destruction of New Orleans, the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the Bernie Madoff and Tom Petters schemes, a collapse of house prices, the bankruptcies of Kmart, Circuit City, General Motors, and Chrysler, and the eventual unemployment of 16 million Americans—including some of the people with whom I (and perhaps you) used to work.

You and I probably both know people who believe that taxi drivers often give out trenchant wisdom, but I have never been one of them. Yes, there are insightful people in all fields, but I have never thought it was any easier for drivers to derive insight from a series of meter-watching passengers than for teenagers to figure out a path through life by listening to songs on the radio.

Nevertheless, an emblematic moment—a short discussion that for me captured the quintessence of 2009—occurred in a New York taxi on the day after Thanksgiving. The driver, Pakistani by birth but a U.S. resident for 35 years, told me that he had been driving for four months. Before that, he had developed small homes, “but I messed up on the last three, and I am doing this because I have to survive.”