This is the fifth installment of a series of posts on
lessons we progressives should take on the election. The overview is here.
As I mentioned in the original post, though there were many
factors that led to the Democrats not retaining the White House in 2017, one
major factor was losing the Rust Belt. The Democrats have not found a solution
to the problem of union manufacturing jobs disappearing, and candidate Trump
flipped the Republican script and went anti-free trade. Somebody was listening to the working class,
and it wasn’t the Democrats, and that was possibly the deciding factor. Ignoring this constituency and trying to
placate blue-collar factory workers with training grants was insulting, most
importantly because it simply doesn’t work.
They believe that NAFTA and free trade let foreigners steal their jobs.
Of course, the jobs didn’t go to Mexico or China, and it
wasn’t free trade that created the problems. Protectionism might create a small
uptick in manufacturing jobs for a short period, but it will cost more across
the economy.
What created the problem is all these dang robots. With such luminaries as Stephen Hawking and
Elon Musk (and many others) calling for a Universal Basic Income to deal with the existential
threat to capitalism caused by robots taking low-end jobs, and President Obama
correctly attributing this problem to the robots, we should take note.
To be clear, virtually every job is at risk, to some
degree. Self-driving vehicles call into
question taxi and Uber drivers, UPS and FedEx drivers, big-rig drivers, you
name it. Robots with scanners can pick
apples at the perfect time. We hardly need realtors and other direct sales
people anymore. But it doesn’t stop
there. Prognosticators of all types are
being supplanted by complex algorithms, from Wall Street to diagnostic
physicians. Teachers and professors are
much less necessary in the world of Khan Academic and Open Courseware.
And portions of most jobs are at risk. Maybe not all your
responsibilities can be removed. Maybe
it’s just 5-10%, but that turns into 5-10% of the jobs going away.
And they aren’t coming back.
They really aren’t. Some other
jobs may, like human-computer interaction jobs, or supervisor jobs, or that
sort of thing. But more work is being
replaced by computers than is being created, and that trend hardly seems likely
to change without a drastic revamping of our economy. (Yes, I know there were
drastic economic shifts in the past, such as the Industrial Revolution, and
that many technologies have disrupted many industries. But, IMHO, this is a
difference in kind, and it will be absolutely disruptive to our current
economic structures.)
There are two fundamental, related questions: Who gets paid
for the robots, and how do we transition to a new economy?
Right now, those that have the capital to create or purchase
the robots make the vast majority of the money because they are “responsible”
for the increasing amount of productivity from those robots. This creates a widening gap between the haves
and have-nots, and there is no reason to imagine it will stop. If we continue for much longer without
changes, we will have a large portion of unemployed lower socioeconomic voters
and a small group with more and more of the money and the capital. The American
dream’s notion of a good work ethic leading to stability and plenty is already
a half-step away from reality.
I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe those guys are right
and we need a Basic Income. Maybe we need a robot tax. Maybe we
need to put together a Manhattan Project devoted to capitalizing on the growing
amount of human resources that will be increasingly available. Maybe the
computers will come up with something for us humans to do.
I do know this: If
Democrats keep ignoring this problem, they deserve to lose. This is especially true when all the current
occupant has to offer are ideas that go against his own base and are economic
non-starters.
Thoughts?
Comments
Post a Comment