The myth was that Henry Ford decided to pay his workers $5 a day when he realized that if they couldn’t afford to buy the cars he was building, he wouldn’t be able to sell cars. It’s not true, but the allure of the myth was undeniable. Without a sufficient population of buyers, sellers can’t sell. The shine of technology has blinded its sycophants to this concept.
At Room for Debate, the New York Times (in its Trump-obsessed way) sought to disprove the claim that the suffering of the middle class had to do with jobs and companies fleeing the nation by noting that the greater threat to middle class existence was automation.
Globalization and trade agreements have been blamed for costing millions of Americans well-paying jobs. But a far greater force in the gutting of middle-class life in the United States has been automation, which has replaced well-paid workers with robots and digital platforms. The greater efficiency fuels economic growth, produces cheaper products and makes life’s task easier. But in the process, many are left poorer and less secure.
Five people participated in the debate. Their solutions were:
Invest in Technology With Social Benefits
Increase Top Tax Rates to Cut Middle-Class Taxes
A Universal Basic Income Would Insure Against Job Loss
Incentives for Entrepreneurs and Subsidies for Low Wages
Companies Need to Pay to Train Potential Workers
There are some themes running through each of these proposals, all of which come down to the belief that there is some sugar daddy out there who can magically dig into their pocket and fix the problem for everyone.
Technology is rendering physical labor unnecessary. We applaud the coming of self-driving cars because they’re cool (no, they’re slow and no fun) and will save lives (maybe, or they’ll kill you on purpose to save someone else’s life). But an industry that provides jobs for millions will disappear. Just as technology has sucked jobs out of the economy before. When robots work assembly lines, displacing high (maybe too high) paying jobs, we pretend some other vast pool of great jobs exist somewhere else, in the mist. They don’t.
The question isn’t whether technology can accomplish the goal of replacing human labor, or whether shifting needs will render old industries and jobs obsolete, which has certainly proven to be the case, but what we’re going to do with all the bodies left behind. They can sit home and watch the world on their computers, waiting for the welfare check to be paid by a government whose only source of taxes is the increasingly small percentage of the population working plus the tax the rich myth.
You know the one, where there are 100 people so fabulously wealthy that we can fund free everything for America off their backs. These 100 people will keep amassing yuge, undeserved fortunes, which the rest of us will suck out of them to feed our families. And they will continue to do so forever, like an energy source that never dies.
There is no solution in the debate that involves either personal responsibility or a sustainable future. Someone else will fix our problems. Someone else will give us money. Someone else will make it all better. We’ve long believed in American Exceptionalism, that we possess some voodoo that will magically save us from, well, anything. Years ago, following the 2007 recession, I suggested that the well may have already run dry and there will no birth of an industry that will pull us out of the hole and shove piles of cash in our pockets.
We blame President Obama for not bringing back the jobs we enjoyed before the economy imploded. He hasn’t, but it’s not entirely his fault. They’re gone. Poof. He can no more make jobs that are no longer needed appear than the debaters can make the government flush with case to pay us to sit home and watch Youtubes for the rest of our lives.
Great thinkers in the past have warned us where paths would ultimately lead. Vonnegut gave us Harrison Bergeron. Orwell gave us 1984. Heinlein gave us TANSTAAFL. The list goes on. And yet, we neither know nor accept their warnings, as if our denial and ignorance will magically result in some savior as yet unknown fixing everything. Maybe Malthus’ vision will prove right, and we will kill ourselves off to the point where we’re sustainable again. Maybe we’ll take up Swift’s modest proposal.
What we are doing at the moment is sinking ourselves deeper into a hole from which there is no apparent escape. Much as we adore AI and our shiny iToys, we’ll get bored sitting home, doing nothing, pretending that somewhere, somehow, someone will rise up to give us wealth and purpose so that we can continue to enjoy the lifestyle we’ve come to believe we are due.*
We will order our burgers at McDonalds at kiosks, because they can’t sell them to us for 99¢ while paying workers $15 an hour, and still be sufficiently profitable to make it worthwhile to keep the company in business (yes, I know that you think companies magically rake in fabulous wealth from the invisible hand, but it actually comes out of our pockets). All those people who would have worked for McDonalds won’t enjoy the vast benefits of a livable wage, because they won’t have jobs. And eventually, they won’t be able to buy their burgers.
No, there is no easy answer, but the answers we want to believe are the ones that will doom us. Each of the debaters at the New York Times believes that a unicorn will leap from its rainbow to save us. Henry Ford sold cars because people worked, earned a living, and had the money to spend on Model Ts. Unicorns don’t need cars.
There were plenty of tweaks around the edges of this scenario, but the bottom line is that if there is no need for people to work in the future, then the only source of support left will be the government. Where do you think the government gets the money from to make your life fabulous? Okay, maybe not fabulous, but good enough to buy the next shiny iToy. Do the math.
*I’ve avoided using lawyers as an example, as you’re already sad enough. We keep hearing about the A2J gap, that people can’t afford lawyers and so we, noblesse oblige, should be giving our services for free (or low bono, a cutesy phrase created by people earning a paycheck from some law school sucking the next generation dry that promotes the idiotic concept that a client paying you the equivalent of what it costs for your operate is almost as good as actually earning a living) for the good of others. Except lawyers are sucking wind for lack of paying clients.
So the poor are asked to give to the poor because economics-challenged thought leaders cry sad tears. And young lawyers practicing door law are told that this is a vast opportunity, to work 100 hours a week and earn what they could make at McDonalds, to serve the unfortunate because they aren’t unfortunate enough themselves.
And before you get all jealous of the sliver of the profession that’s being paid $180k despite being clueless, that too will fall when the corporations find out that there is no one left to buy the crap they sell. Eventually, their savings will run dry, just like your mommy’s and daddy’s, and they won’t have the money to put gas in their Ferraris, which will be worthless when no one has the money to buy a used supercar, which will be illegal anyway because it requires an unsafe driver to operate it.
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