People Get Ready, by Robert W McChesney and John Nichols. References are to the kindle version.
The point is to shape progress, not as customers or consumers, not as clicks to be counted or employees struggling to synch ourselves into automated workplaces, but as citizens engaged in a democratic process of organizing a new economy that reflects our values and our needs.166
More and more middle-class workers were going to lose their jobs and there was little on the horizon to suggest there would be new jobs for them. This would be, according to Schmidt, the “defining” issue of the next two to three decades.1254 New York Times columnist Bob Herbert put it, where “millions of hardworking men and women who had believed they were solidly anchored economically found themselves cast into a financial abyss, struggling with joblessness, home foreclosures, and personal bankruptcy.” It wasn’t just the result of the 2008 Great Recession. “From 1990 to 2008 the life-expectancy for the poorest, least well-educated white Americans fell by a stunning four years,” notes Herbert. “For white women without a high school diploma, it fell by five years.”5281 Americans, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi tells us, have “become numb to the idea that rights aren’t absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale [and] we’ve also learned to accept the implicit idea that some people have simply more rights than others. Some people go to jail, and others just don’t.”7290
Political science research by Stanford’s David Broockman and the University of Michigan’s Christopher Skovron concludes that on core policy issues legislators routinely think their own constituents are considerably more conservative than the polling data shows they actually are. This is true across the board but especially pronounced among conservative legislators. “The typical conservative legislator overestimates his or her district’s conservatism by a whopping 20 percentage points. Indeed, he or she believes the district is even more conservative than the most right-leaning district in the entire country.” Why? “Politicians feel much more accountable to the wealthy, party leaders, or interest groups than to rank and file voters’ preferences,” and “politically active citizens tend to be wealthier and more conservative than others.”10 304
Most reform proposals are dismissed as impractical and relegated to the netherworld of the loony-Left before they can even see the light of day. The reason for this is clear: the United States is not a democracy, if by democracy we mean a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That is the Big Lie of the official discourse. If anything, it is a “citizenless” democracy, an oxymoron if there ever was one. The only voice that matters in American politics, the voice that shouts down every other, is that of the wealthy few.311 Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin I. Page have conducted exhaustive research on American politics. Their conclusion: “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” If that is not clear enough, they add: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or business interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”12 316 “Indeed, under most circumstance,” Gilens writes in another recent study he conducted, “the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.”13 The problem here is not just that government policies are indifferent or hostile to those without great wealth. The two great and immediate existential threats to human existence—militarism and environmental catastrophe—proceed largely unchecked by public policy, regardless of popular concerns, and despite the fact that they affect rich and poor alike322
This is because very powerful interests see demilitarization and shifting away from fossil fuels as existential threats to their present lucrative positions, and no powerful interests have a direct stake in seeing the problems forcefully addressed. In the calculus of citizenless democracies.328
This is what one would rationally expect in what political scientist Sheldon Wolin characterized as a “politically demobilized society, that is, a society in which the citizens, far from being whipped into a continuous frenzy by the regime’s operatives, are encouraged at virtually every turn to be politically lethargic.” It is a society in which people get precious little from the government, where austerity and rollbacks are the order of the day. Citizens are constantly reminded of the “political futility” of popular involvement in politics.15 “There is a widespread sense,” the scholar Tony Judt wrote in 2010, “that since ‘they’ will do what they want in any case—while feathering their own nests—why should ‘we’ waste time trying to influence the outcome of their actions?”16 As the journalist Bob Herbert observed in his 2014 chronicle of contemporary America, “Something fundamental in the very character of the United States had shifted. There was a sense of powerlessness and resignation among ordinary people that I hadn’t been used to seeing. The country seemed demoralized.”17 In this context, it is rational that one abandon an interest in politics, or social life broadly construed, and concentrate on looking out for number one.335 John Dewey said, once an organism loses the sense that it can affect its environment, it starts to weaken and die.18348
The state of present-day capitalism and what appears to be its likely future is one of stagnation—meaning ever-increasing inequality, poverty, austerity, and social insecurity. There is a crisis of unemployment and underemployment. Full employment, meaning, as economist Robert Pollin puts it, “an abundance of decent jobs,” is “fundamental to building a decent society.”19 A healthy economy that generates benefits for the bulk of the population, and not just society’s owning class, depends upon it.20 And this is more than an economic issue. As technology writer Nicholas Carr puts it, people are “happiest when we’re absorbed in a difficult task, a task that has clear goals and that challenges us not only to exercise our talents, but stretch them.” And that is something most often found in work.21 “When joblessness is high in America,” Herbert writes, “the nation’s spirits inevitably are low.”22 Full employment for more than a brief period has never been enthusiastically received by Wall Street, as it raises wages and shifts economic and political power to employees. To some extent the decrepit state of the contemporary labor market reflects the total control over government economic policymaking by the wealthy. The emerging automation wave that Eric Schmidt called attention to at Davos is going to replace millions of jobs and alter the nature of many of those jobs that remain. Some technology experts like Ben Way expect a loss of 70 percent of existing jobs in the next three decades, with little hope that very many new jobs will emerge to replace what is lost.23 University of Pennsylvania sociologist Randall Collins expects an unemployment rate in the neighborhood of 50 percent.24 One need not accept these predictions—they strike us as speculative if not extreme—to see that at the very least what is about to transpire is going to put severe downward pressure on wages and working conditions, which already are deplorable.368
Technology could exert a slow but continual downward pressure on the value and availability of work—that is, on wages and on the share of prime-age workers with full-time jobs.”25 Judt saw this coming in 2010: “Mass unemployment—once regarded as a pathology of badly managed economies—is beginning to look like an endemic characteristic of advanced societies. At best, we can hope for ‘under-employment’—where men and women work part-time; accept jobs far below their skill level; or else undertake skilled work of the sort traditionally assigned to immigrants and the young.”26 387 Artificial intelligence expert Neil Jacobstein notes that “exponential technologies may eventually permit people to not need jobs to have a high standard of living.” He enthuses that “the emphasis will be less on making money and more on making contributions, or at least creating an interesting life.”30 Nor is this very far off in the future.403
The barrier to this brighter future, of course, is capitalism itself.408 Capitalism is going to be in the crosshairs of history. “Today, the ability of freemarket democracies to deliver widely shared increases in prosperity is in question as never before,” a 2015 report by a commission co-chaired by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers announced. “This is an economic problem that threatens to become a problem for the political systems of these nations.”36 The natives are going to get restless. As the Economist notes, “squeezing out” the middle class “could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.”37 Cato Institute researcher Brink Lindsey writes that “there is the threat that widening disparities between the elite and everybody else will prompt a political backlash against the whole system.”38 The problem of a political system that is defined as a market, where issues can be made “important” or “unimportant” via the influence of campaign donations, lobbying, spin, and media manipulation, is that discussions of those disparities—and of their causes—are taken off the table.431
“Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers,” Aristotle noted at its birth.41462 One revolutionary change capitalism has brought to modern democratic governance was to split the elected control over the government from direct control over the economy, which is now in the hands of those with capital.469 As Friedman put it in his classic 1962 work, Capitalism and Freedom, the legitimate role of government is largely “to protect our freedom both from enemies outside our gates and from our fellow citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.”486 The main job of governance is to make sure the profit system works smoothly, contracts and private property are respected and enforced, the dispossessed are kept in line, and, if there is an economic crisis, the government intervenes as necessary to make it lucrative for businesses and wealthy individuals to invest again. Big government is A-OK when it advances the interests of capital—though this point best not be emphasized to a general audience; for everyone else, “small” government is the order of the day. Governance is best when it is left to those who fully appreciate that the needs of investors come first and foremost. And that is most likely to happen if most everyone else tunes out politics and focuses on other matters. The problem, of course, is that we are entering into a period where change will come so rapidly that, when citizens tune back in, tens of millions of them could be left with nothing.497
As political scientist Robert A. Dahl puts it, citizens in a democracy must “possess the political resources they would require in order to participate in political life pretty much as equals.”47 The playing field should be leveled so those without means can effectively govern as equals of those with substantial means. To conservatives, such an approach is foolhardy if not downright corrosive of freedom, for effective popular participation in politics, just as much as an “activist” government, is to be discouraged.
DEMOCRATIC INFRASTRUCTURE
A debate persists over what we term democratic infrastructure. As Dahl writes, “Political equality requires democratic political institutions.”48 The term infrastructure comes from economics. An advanced economy does not exist because entrepreneurs or businesses have the right to invest and can do whatever they please. It exists because elaborate communication, transportation, sanitation, energy, and legal infrastructures provide a foundation that makes commerce possible. Establishing this infrastructure is largely the province of the government, even if the state’s job is to coordinate private interests to get it done effectively. The beauty of infrastructure projects is that they are accessible to everyone and have tremendous “spillovers,” or “positive externalities,” meaning they generate considerable value for others and for society as a whole.49 Without such an infrastructure, an advanced economy cannot exist. So it is with democracy.
The right to vote means little without • the infrastructure of effective elections, such that one-person, one-vote is the order of the day, and races allow genuine competition • the rule of law • stringent limits on money in politics • limits on the power of the judiciary to act in an arbitrary and unaccountable manner • the effective ability to launch effective new parties or associations • free trade unions with effective collective bargaining • open, transparent governance • a credible, independent, and uncensored free press/news media • universal free schools with civic education • a basic level of economic and social security, which is only limited by the overall productive capacity of the society • an environment that can sustain and nurture life. In short, a credible democratic infrastructure requires ground rules and institutions that empower the weakest in society so they can effectively be the political equals of the wealthiest members of society, and that prevent the wealthy few from having excessive influence. It also includes “breakers” to prevent the establishment of such proven enemies of democracy as • corruption • private monopolistic control over the economy • significant economic inequality • government secrecy and surveillance • government propaganda • militarism These six tend to go hand-in-hand.50 The civil liberties that most Americans cherish—the freedoms of speech, press, and religion; the right to assemble; the right to privacy—thrive when there is a strong democratic infrastructure. Without one, these freedoms tend to be on insecure ground, at least to the extent their exercise threatens those in power. We agree with the writer and lawyer Elliot Sperber, who argues that “this infrastructure of democracy” must be as “inalienable” as the political rights we cherish.51 Hungarian scholar Zoltan Tibor Pallinger, who has direct experience in building democracies in formerly communist nations, defines “democratic infrastructure” as the “institutions, instruments and procedures provided by the state that render the use of democratic rights possible.”52 516
Wendell Willkie, corporate president and free enterprise champion turned 1940 Republican presidential candidate, explained the need for unions and collective bargaining by noting that “for labor the essential content of freedom is different in today’s society from what it was in the agricultural society of an earlier age. Men no longer able to own, or aspire to own, small businesses and farms have sought new solutions for a need which all Americans must respect—the need to control for themselves the circumstances which dictate their working lives.”53 According to Willkie, labor unions deserved to be accorded permanence because they were a necessary foundation of modern democracy. He was right: the evidence is clear that unions, in addition to the value they generate for their own members, reduce overall economic inequality and also provide people without property a means for more effectively participating in the political process.54 So strong unions produce a double win in terms of democratic infrastructure. This is well understood and accepted in most advanced democracies, including the United States from the 1930s until recently.572
When the democratic infrastructure is weak or in decline, the political culture shrivels, self-interest reigns, and demoralization and pessimism ascend. Then the only rational reason to enter public life is to use it as a way station to an eventual job in the private sector where you can cash in your public-sector chips, or just for purposes of flat-out corruption.587
Polling shows that the vast majority of Americans believe big business has too much control over their lives and way too much influence over government.57 “The inability of traditional politics and policies to address fundamental challenges has fueled an extraordinary amount of experimentation in communities across the United States,” a 2015 report by the Next System Project noted. “Unbeknownst to many, literally thousands of on-the-ground efforts have been developing.”618
When fundamental social change comes, as Klein writes, “it’s generally not in legislative dribs and drabs spread out evenly over decades. Rather it comes in spasms of rapid-fire lawmaking, with one breakthrough after another.” These are periods in which the democratic infrastructure is built up and the weltanschauung has shifted dramatically. Klein captures this well: When major shifts in the economic balance of power take place, they are invariably the result of extraordinary levels of social mobilization. . . . During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing “activists” and “regular people” became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone.59 This is the sort of moment we are entering. We have no idea when exactly or under what terms. But what we can do is prepare and get ready. In short, we agree with Chris Hedges that in historical terms, the United States is entering a period where the status quo cannot remain as it is, and radical, even revolutionary, change is almost certain to come.60 What we do know, and what will be the best indicator of a new moment, is the weltanschauung will shift. Crises that had appeared insurmountable will now appear like opportunities to make a much better world than had ever existed before.632 The great issue of the coming generation will be expanding democratic values and principles—building out the democratic infrastructure if you will—into economic institutions and practices.61647
President Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasized this point at every turn. “Democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.”64 “Democracy has disappeared in several great nations,” FDR said on another occasion, “not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness.”65 What mass unemployment means in the coming years, Judt writes, is a “return to dependency upon the state.”66 This is not only because millions are out of work, but because in such a depressed environment capitalism does not generate profits anywhere near satisfactory for investors and businesses. The state needs to intervene much more aggressively not only to create jobs but also to create the conditions, including the markets, for profitable investment. The government needs to make the system work with bold action because obviously the traditional mechanisms to stimulate the economy have failed, or else the economy would not be in a depression. The private economy is dead in the water. As Thompson put it in his sober assessment of automation, for Americans to effectively address the coming waves of unemployment and underemployment, “it is almost certain that the country would have to embrace a radical new role for government.”67 The only issue is what the nature of the radical new role will be.672
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself,” Roosevelt said in 1938. “That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”81 To FDR and Wallace, the domestic fascist threat in the United States was a grave concern and it came primarily from “monopolists” and “cartelists,” who to protect their privileges “would sacrifice democracy itself.” “If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States,” Wallace wrote. He explained that “the American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.”82 In the view of FDR and Wallace, a fascist power grab would not require a violent rupture so much as a quiet takeover orchestrated by elements of the capitalist class. The United States would experience its own home-grown All-American fascism. “They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the constitution,” Wallace wrote. “Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”83 748
Developments associated with fascism have become commonplace in the United States since 1945: massive government spending on armaments and militarism; seemingly endless wars barely understood by most Americans; growing inequality; massive monopolistic firms that dominate the economy far more than in FDR’s era; weak and feeble news media that largely propagate elite opinion; a governing system that is mostly if not entirely in the pocket of the wealthy; the disappearing rule of law; and what seems like near ubiquitous and unaccountable surveillance of private citizens.86 That’s a sobering list.87 767
Second, and more daunting, one of the core aspects of fascism everywhere was to destroy democratic infrastructure.772 Contemporary Republicans should pause and consider the agenda they have embraced in their fight to eliminate labor unions and collective bargaining; undermine public education; scrap progressive taxation; mangle Social Security and Medicare; make voting more difficult for poor people; increase government secrecy; allow unlimited corporate and billionaire spending on politics; privatize government activities so that public monies flow increasingly to private business; disregard all concerns for the environment; and reject Dwight Eisenhower’s wise counsel about the threat posed by a military-industrial complex.773
America is infected with what Taibbi diagnoses as “a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful.”90 793
We cannot settle for anything less than political and economic democracy because nothing less will create and sustain the America—and the world—that we have a right and a responsibility to demand.809
Unless there is a large increase in government spending to compensate for the decline—which is a controversial policy option in a capitalist economy—everything else being equal, slower growth rates and higher levels of unemployment result. Indeed, even more striking is the massive and increasing amount of cash that corporations are holding,846 This “unemployed” capital is a sign of a stagnating economy, with profitable investment opportunities growing so scarce that firms would rather sit on their cash than risk it in real investments. Why exactly US capitalism—and world capitalism, for that matter—has been and is stagnant with no end in sight is a crucial issue that can be traced in part to the way in which monopoly-finance capital produces stagnation. That’s another discussion, however.3 Our concern at this point is with the jobs picture, and Chart 4 demonstrates that unemployment has been increasing in general while capitalism has been tending toward stagnation. We provide here not only the total amount of “official” unemployment, but a broader assessment that includes people who have dropped out of the labor market and are no longer actively seeking employment—that is, people who constitute the “hidden unemployed.”849
Consider the situation facing young workers. Chart 6 demonstrates that the economy is generating fewer middle-class jobs, and an increasing proportion of the jobs provide incomes at poverty levels. This is what economists call “labor market polarization”—great jobs for those at the top, a mountain of crappy jobs at the bottom, and fewer and fewer jobs in between.4 Studies reveal that this is a phenomenon across all sixteen European Union nations as well.5 This growth in dismal jobs is not because workers are less productive. Chart 7 shows the growing split between the growth in Gross Domestic Product and household income since the 1970s. Put another way, from 1945 to the early 1970s, as workers’ productivity increased, so did their wages by a comparable percentage. Since the 1970s, worker output has grown, in some cases sharply, but wages have stagnated.876
Economic observers note that the official labor force participation rate has been declining continually, from an annual average of 67.1 percent in 2000 to 62.5 percent in 2015. This translates to the disappearance of close to 7.2 million workers from the official labor force in 2015 (see Chart 11 sources in the Statistical Appendix). However, in this case (as in so many others), the official labor statistics are inadequate. Indeed, if we estimate how many more jobs would be needed to maintain the level of civilian employment that existed in 2000, the picture changes dramatically.11 Chart 11 does just this, revealing that the economy would need to generate nearly 14 million more jobs in 2015 if all those workers who have left the labor market since 2000 had remained in it and had jobs.910
Back in 1979 over half of American workers—often union workers—had pensions connected to their jobs; today it is around one-third.25 In a nutshell, income that once went to workers is now going to owners and bosses.26 Whereas the CEO of a large company made around twenty times more than the average worker in 1965, by 2013 the ratio had grown to nearly three hundred to one.27 To put it another way, if the United States had the same income distribution in 2015 that it had in 1979, $1 trillion in income going to the top 1 percent would instead go to the bottom 80 percent.28 A study by economists Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney concludes that “most men were earning substantially less in 2009 than men of similar ages and education did in 1969, adjusted for inflation.”29 988 By 2013 an Associated Press study concluded that four out of five American adults “struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.”30 997
Although people of color remain disproportionately among the ranks of the poor, they are being joined by a wave of working-class and middle-class whites moving down the economic ladder.31 The flip side of this coin is that upward economic mobility—people’s ability to improve their lot compared to that of their parents—has all but disappeared.32 The United States that was once broadly viewed as “the land of opportunity” today ranks near the bottom of advanced economies for social mobility.33 1002 The vast majority of the jobs lost in the recession were considered “mid-wage,” while the majority of the new jobs created in the recovery were “low-wage.”35 The stock market skyrocketed and fortunes were made on Wall Street, but as New York Times financial reporter Felix Salmon put it, “These days a healthy stock market doesn’t mean a healthy economy, as a glance at the high unemployment rate or low labor-market participation rate will show.”36 In fact, when corporations announce plant closings and layoffs in the United States, media outlets report that the news does “wonders” for stock prices.37 1020 American capitalism seems to have turned a corner: increases in private investment and worker productivity no longer necessarily lead to commensurate increases in employment or real incomes.39 1038
Part of this is pure automation. Another important part is disintermediation—the elimination of intermediaries in banking, online retail, and a host of government services, to name just a few affected areas.41 1047 The one hundred largest US companies (in terms of total annual revenue) are able to generate more US revenues and earn more US profits with fewer American workers, and the process appears to be accelerating.* These one hundred firms accounted for 43 percent of US GDP in 2013, up from 26 percent in 1950, so this trend is hardly on the periphery of the economy.43 There is the palpable sense that technology is destroying more jobs than it is creating,1054
Even before the Great Recession of 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast that two-thirds of the jobs available between 2008 and 2018 would not require any post-secondary education.46 As the journalist Derek Thompson concludes, “The job market appears to be requiring more and more preparation for a lower and lower starting wage.”47 The Economist announces that young people are experiencing an “epidemic of joblessness.”48 Newsweek characterizes young Americans as constituting “Generation Screwed.”49 There are nowhere near enough jobs, and the jobs that do exist, to employ the vernacular, suck. By 2025 experts anticipate that one of every three global labor “transactions” will be conducted online as part of the “on-demand” or “crowd labor” economy, with a few gigantic digital hiring hall corporations using their networks and apps to get temp labor for employers.53 Informal work, or freelancing, already accounts for around one-third of the US workforce, fully 53 million workers, according to an Edelman Berland report prepared for the Freelancers Union.54 A Christian Science Monitor report stated that up to 50% of the new jobs in the recovery were freelance positions.55 Economic Modeling Specialists Intl., a labor market analytics firm, calculated that by 2014 some 18% of all US jobs were performed by part-time freelancers or part-time independent contractors. There was a 60% increase in the number of these part-time gig jobs from 2001.56 1081
As one New York Times examination concludes, many of these workers are “less microentrepreneurs than microearners. They often work seven-day weeks, trying to assemble a living wage from a series of one-off gigs.”57 According to the Government Accounting Office, these freelance workers are twice as likely as traditional full-time employees to have an annual income under $15,000.581091
Data reveals that the percentage of male workers who have worked with the same firm for at least ten years has dropped sharply over the past two decades, especially for younger workers.60 “What once was a relationship” between firms and their employees, one reporter explains, “is now a transaction.”61 Businesses “have found that having a large nontraditional workforce makes them more competitive.”62 While the Economist has no illusion that this new freelance-based “on-demand” economy is a good thing for workers, it nonetheless regards the process as unstoppable.631101
It is left to the acclaimed pro-market economist Tyler Cowen to capture the logic of where all of this is going: “We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now. I imagine a world where, say, 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires, albeit with better health care.”65 The other 85 to 90 percent of us? Not so much.1108
“The logic of capitalism, when combined with the history of scientific and technological progress, would seem to be a recipe for the eventual removal of labor from the processes of production,” Nicholas Carr writes. “Machines, unlike workers, don’t demand a share of the returns on capitalists’ investments. They don’t get sick or expect paid vacations or demand yearly wages. For the capitalist, labor is a problem that progress solves.”67 1122
Their whole propaganda is to the effect that it must not be considered as the business of the government but must be left open to whatever entrepreneurs wish to invest money in it. We also know that they have very few inhibitions when it comes to taking all the profit out of an industry that is there to be taken, and then letting the public pick up the pieces. “The automatic machine,” he concluded, “is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession or even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.”75 1166
On March 22, 1964, the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution” submitted a fourteen-page memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson, where the “cybernation revolution” was positioned alongside human rights and militarism as the main challenges to modern societies. The memo, which was signed by current and future Nobel Prize winners Linus Pauling and Gunnar Myrdal as well as the publisher of Scientific American, warned the president that as machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: that a growing proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the United States.96 The memo called for a guaranteed basic income—not based upon one’s labor—for all Americans to solve the problem. Although this memorandum has largely been forgotten, it had considerable influence at the time. Indeed, in his final sermon, delivered on March 31, 1968, before an audience in the thousands at Washington DC’s National Cathedral, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the “triple revolution” and the importance of automation and cybernation at the beginning of his presentation. “Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood,” King observed in words few others could muster. “But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.”971253
They called for socializing the economy so that the surplus generated by automation was controlled by society as a whole, not by the owners of a handful of large corporations.100 Organized labor, having suffered through relatively high levels of unemployment in the late 1950s and early 1960s, no longer saw, nor welcomed, the promise of automation. The Department of Labor estimated that two hundred thousand jobs were being lost to automation each year in the early 1960s; and in industry after industry output was up while employment levels were down.101 1281 In August 1964 President Johnson formally created the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress to examine the issues and file a report, first and foremost “on whether technological change is a major source of unemployment.” The ultimate report, published in 1966, extended its mandate to consider “the fear” that eventually technology “would eliminate all but a few jobs, with the major portion of what we now call work being performed automatically by machine.” It was a prestigious fifteen-member commission, including UAW head Reuther, IBM chair Thomas Watson, five other corporate leaders, and the intellectuals Daniel Bell and Robert Solow. The 1966 report concluded optimistically that government policies could successfully address unemployment arising from automation. It asserted that automation was a progressive development, and that “the vast majority of people quite rightly have accepted technological change as beneficial.”106 1297
What is perhaps most striking for our purposes is what the commission did end up recommending in its report. It said that the technological threat to employment only underscored the crucial need for the government to “fulfill the promise of the Employment Act of 1946: ‘a job for all those able, willing, and seeking to work.’” The report called for the federal government to “be an employer of last resort, providing work for the ‘hard-core unemployed’ in useful community enterprises.” It specifically mentioned the sort of “unmet human and community needs” where this labor, and the new technologies, could be deployed as improving healthcare, transportation, and housing, and battling air pollution and water pollution—in short, a massive expansion of spending on vital infrastructure and cleaning up the environment. Moreover, to ensure that everyone benefited by “the abundance” generated by technological advances, the report called for a guaranteed annual income for all Americans, which would effectively end poverty. The report also specified that it was imperative that traditionally disadvantaged communities receive “compensatory” resources such that their public education gave them the capacity to participate alongside those from more privileged sectors. And it called for a commitment to “improvements in public education” overall, with free schooling for all Americans through grade fourteen.107 1305
These recommendations are breathtaking from the present vantage point because they are so radical, and they were agreed to by some of the leading CEOs in the nation. Indeed, the report even went so far as to urge firms to use automation to “humanize” the workplace and develop the new technologies in such a manner as to make the work experience more rewarding for the worker.108 By the late 1970s or 1980s, with the changing political currents, one can only imagine how a subsequent commission on automation might have considered these issues. Indeed, one can “only imagine,” because no such independent body ever came into existence. This was the one and only time in American history that automation and employment were formally studied and considered by an official government commission. The early to middle 1960s proved to be the high-water mark for popular recognition of automation as an important social and economic issue, and a problem demanding political attention. What is striking is that these writers posed almost the exact same concerns, questions, framing, and even solutions that are being raised today; they were simply fifty years ahead.1316
No longer “news” after the mid-1960s. Chart 18 documents the decline in stories mentioning automation in the New York Times from 1955 through February 2015. But the disappearance of automation as a political issue owes to more than the exaggerated claims of the early 1960s. To a large extent it reflected the fact that organized labor, aside from a handful of progressive unions like the United Electrical Workers (UEW), the International Association of Machinists, and more recently National Nurses United, threw in the towel. This shift in focus was encouraged in the late 1960s by the virtual disappearance of unemployment with the booming economy that accompanied the Vietnam War. It was also encouraged by the persistent management stratagem to label any critic of automation a “Luddite,” as if asking questions about whether all automation was always good was tantamount to saying that society should abandon cooked food, electricity, and indoor plumbing.1091330
Thanks to computerized programs and robotics, for example, US steel industry production rose from 75 million tons to 120 million tons between 1982 and 2002, while the number of steelworkers fell from 289,000 to 74,000.120 In the 1960s, for another example, a single textile worker operated five machines, each able to run a thread through the loom at one hundred times per minute. By 2014 machines ran at six times that speed and a single operator supervised one hundred looms.121 Office work increasingly became the target of automation and computerization.122 To some extent, this process was so comprehensive and overwhelming—and part of a broader digitalization of all aspects of social life—that it eluded sustained analysis, as water escapes the comprehension of the proverbial fish. It certainly paved the way for what was and is about to come. American jobs were being radically changed by technology, and more than a few were being lost to technology, but until the Great Recession it did not seem to be much of a loss. And even then, as Galbraith put it, “you can’t distinguish a job lost to technology from a job lost to a business slump. The two are, actually, the same thing.”1231375
Gordon Moore, a computer engineer and a founder of Intel, wrote an article in 1965 in which he projected, in effect, that due to continuous technological improvements, the computing power one could buy for a dollar would double every year for a good ten years. This became Moore’s Law. He later suggested that it would double every two years, and most observers have come to use the notion that it would double every eighteen months. People once anticipated that Moore’s Law would peter out or at least slow down over time, but it has proven resilient and astonishingly accurate. “Over and over again,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee write, “brilliant tinkering has found ways to skirt the limitations imposed by physics.”125 1395
It took scientists a decade of intensive work to sequence the three billion base pairs in the human genome by 2003. By 2013, a single computer facility could sequence that much DNA in a day.127 More recently, the Economist reports, “the new iPhones sold over the weekend of their release in September 2014 contained 25 times more computing power than the whole world had at its disposal in 1995.”128 1403
All the spectacular growth in the “first half” of the chessboard barely registers before 2008. We are now at the part of the curve that is shooting straight up like an oil-well gusher. Even if the rate of growth eventually does slow down, we are deep into uncharted terrain, as though we have traveled through a wormhole to some distant galaxy.130 As Brynjolfsson and McAfee note, “Things get weird in the second half of the chessboard.”131 In their view, the world is at an inflection point, where all sorts of operations that only recently were thought impossible for computers and uniquely the province of humans—driverless cars, anyone? robot “nurses”?—will be easily done by computers, and soon other tasks that presently are considered unthinkable for computers will become standard fare. The most striking feature may well be how very quickly this will take place in historical terms.1422
To put the moment we are entering in perspective, consider the analysis of Gill A. Pratt. Until 2015 Pratt served as Program Director at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he oversaw work on robotics. This is important because DARPA has been at the center of technological innovation throughout the digital era. Pratt argues that humanity may be on the verge of experiencing something comparable in impact to the “Cambrian Explosion,” referring to the relatively brief period 540 million years ago when life underwent an astonishingly rapid diversification, including arguably the evolution of vision. It was crucial for the subsequent development of complex and intelligent life. Pratt outlined a series of related and complementary breakthroughs in robotics and computing that will make it possible for machines “to replicate the performance of many of the perceptual parts of the brain,” including, ironically enough, vision itself. At the very least, Pratt observes, “the effects on economic output and human workers are certain to be profound.” He refuses to predict when exactly this will occur, “as the timing of tipping points is hard to predict,” but it is on its way.132 1429
Computers can now access an unimaginably large body of stored information that is growing by leaps and bounds and process that information almost instantaneously with ever more sophisticated algorithms. This is what is referred to as “big data.”136 Computers, as Nicholas Carr explains, may never be able to replicate “tacit” or “procedural” knowledge, which refers to the stuff we do without thinking about it, like riding a bike or driving a car. Instead, computers are very good at “explicit” or “declarative” knowledge, which is the stuff we do that we can write down instructions for, like how to change a flat tire or solve a quadratic equation. “The superhuman speed with which computers can follow instructions, calculate probabilities, and receive and send data,” Carr notes, “means that they can use explicit knowledge to perform many of the complicated tasks we do with tacit knowledge.” Driverless cars are just the tip of that iceberg. The implications for automation are striking, if not revolutionary. “Even highly trained analysts and other so-called knowledge workers are seeing their work circumscribed by decision-support systems that turn the making of judgments into a data-processing routine.”137 Much of this “big data” is accumulated in the “cloud,” a group of enormous “server farms” controlled by a handful of massive corporations like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. The cloud becomes the rational and most cost-effective way for businesses to store and analyze their data. One of the great benefits and therefore consequences of cloud computing, according to Vincent Mosco, the leading scholar on the subject, is that it “essentially deepens and extends opportunities to eliminate jobs and restructure the workforce.” This is, in fact, a primary selling point that cloud computing firms use to drum up business.138 (That seems fitting, as these vast corporate server farms “virtually run themselves,” Carr writes.139) Ford observes that with “the migration of much of the intelligence that animates mobile robots” into the cloud, it makes it possible “to build less expensive robots, since less onboard computational power and memory are required, and allows for instant software upgrade across multiple machines.”140 In the meantime, for the same reason, as the Economist notes, cloud computing is also ideal for harnessing freelance workers to replace higher-paid labor.141
Another possibility opened up by being in the second half of the chessboard is the “Internet of Things,” a term for the billions of human-made devices that are connected to each other on a universal computing infrastructure. Each of these devices has its own Internet address, and will communicate with other devices more than with people. “That’s the whole point of the thing,” technology writer Michael Miller enthuses, “to connect just about everything in the aptly named Internet of Things.” It promises “more automatic, and more intelligent services provided by interconnected smart devices—with a minimal amount of human interaction.”142 “Make no mistake,” author Samuel Greengard writes, “we are entering a brave new world of immersive and embedded technology. . . . It’s entirely clear that a more technology-centric world is in the cards.”143 Depending upon the source, by 2020 or very soon thereafter, it is expected that there will be as many as fifty billion such devices, and only a small fraction of them will be personal computers, tablets, or smartphones controlled by individual humans. “Engineers expect so many of these connected devices,” Philip Howard writes in his book Pax Technica, “that they have reconfigured the addressing system to allow for 2 to the 128th power addresses—enough for each atom on the face of the earth to have 100 addresses.”144 Much of the economy will run through the Internet of Things. As Carr notes, “Manufacturers are spending billions of dollars to outfit factories with network-connected sensors, and technology giants like GE,…1449 They will be not only in factories, they will be everywhere.1498 Then, to put an exclamation point on their analysis, they say that 3D printing, robotics, driverless cars, and computers like Watson “are not the crowning achievements of the computer era. They’re the warm-up act.”1531506
The Economist has been at the forefront of studying and writing about the issue.154 “Until now,” it wrote in 2014, “the jobs most vulnerable to machines were those that involved routine, repetitive tasks. But thanks to the exponential rise in processing power and the ubiquity of digitized information (‘big data’), computers are increasingly able to perform complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than people.”155 As computer science reporter Federico Pistono puts it, “Millions of algorithms created by computer scientists are frantically running on servers all over the world, with one sole purpose: do whatever humans can do, but better.”156 What does this mean? “The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some occupations wholesale; in others it will allow firms to do more with fewer workers.”157 In earlier stages of automation, Brynjolfsson explains, firms automated the physical work but required humans to be the control system. Now the control system can be automated, and when it is, “then it is less clear what the role for humans is.”158 1511
The Economist notes that new technologies also make it possible for firms to “reshape” those jobs that remain, so that they can “be done by less skilled contract workers.”159 “In case after case,” Carr writes, “we’ve seen as machines become more sophisticated, the work left to people becomes less so.”160 This was anticipated first by Harvard Business School professor James R. Bright in his 1958 book Automation and Management. “It seems that the more automatic the machine, the less the operator has to do,” Bright wrote. “The progressive effect of automation is first to relieve the operator of manual effort and then to relieve him of the need to apply continuous mental effort.”161 1522 In 1966 Bright filed a report for President Johnson’s National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress: “The lesson should be increasingly clear; it is not necessarily true that highly complex equipment requires skilled operators. The ‘skill’ can be built into the machine.” With his orientation toward management, Bright was the first dissenting voice regarding the notion that automation required workers to have better education and training: “I suggest that excessive educational and skill specification is a serious mistake and potential hazard to our educational and social system. We will hurt individuals, raise labor costs improperly, create disillusion and resentment, and destroy valid job standards by setting standards that are not truly needed for a given task.”162 He was decades ahead of his time.163 As Tyler Cowen puts it, most of these new jobs that interact with sophisticated machines “won’t be much harder than, in today’s world, operating a tollbooth on the New Jersey Garden State Parkway, a job performed by both man and machines.”164 1529
The magazine offers up Uber as an example of a business that may well be “a forerunner to an eventual system that has no drivers at all.”167 Martin Ford points to a New York–based start-up, Work Fusion, which sells software to firms to automate big projects formerly done by office workers. Where people are still needed, the software recruits freelance workers online to do the temp work, and then the software monitors what the workers do to learn from them so that their jobs, too, can be automated. “As the freelance workers do their jobs they are, in effect, training the system to replace them. That’s a pretty good preview of what the future looks like.”168 “The combination of advanced sensors, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, big data, text-mining, and pattern-recognition algorithms, is generating smart robots capable of quickly learning human actions, and even learning from one another,” writes former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “If you think being a ‘professional’ makes your job safe, think again.”169 So exactly which jobs are on the chopping block?1544 A report in the New York Times adds “counselors, salespeople, chefs, paralegals and researchers” to the list.171 Or consider utility meter readers. In 2001, 56,000 American workers held that job. By 2010 the number was down to 36,000. By 2023 the number is expected to be zero.172 Consider that the four most common occupations in the United States are retail salesperson, cashier, food and beverage server, and office clerk. Nearly 10% of the labor force, over 15 million workers—more workers than there are in Texas and Massachusetts combined—are so employed. Thompson notes that these jobs are highly susceptible to automation.173 Ford sees 50% fast-food jobs disappearing, and argues it is likely there will be “explosive growth of the fully automated self-service retail sector—or, in other words, intelligent vending machines and kiosks.”174 Or consider driverless cars. Robotics scientists like MIT’s Daniela Rus make a powerful and convincing case that the impending shift to a driverless world—the technology is in its final stages—will be much more efficient, vastly improve the transportation system, and do wonders for the environment and the quality of life.175 One problem: the most common occupation for American men is driving some sort of vehicle, be it automobile, bus, or truck. What happens to them?176 Then there are the two sectors of the economy harboring the most professionals—health care and education. They “are under increasing pressure to cut costs,” Reich notes. “And expert machines are poised to take over.”177 A 2014 article asked: “Robot Replacing Nurses: Is It Really That Far-Fetched?” The answer: Dr. Rosalind Picard, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), recently told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that robots should be made available to healthcare providers (nurses and physicians) in order to enhance healthcare delivery. However, when pressed by the interviewer to guarantee that robots will not fully replace nurses as a way for hospitals to save money, she answered: “You know, when people are in charge all kinds of things can happen . . . right?”178 For education “entrepreneur” John Katzman, the great question is, “How do we use technology so that we require fewer highly qualified teachers?”179 The better question may be: What jobs aren’t susceptible to elimination or radical de-skilling and downsizing by automation? Computer entrepreneur Peter H. Diamondis and technology reporter Steven Kotler concur. Within a decade, they write, robots “will make up the majority of the blue-collar workforce.” They will be doing everything from “shelf-stocking” inventory at Costco to “burger-slinging” at McDonald’s.180 That’s not all. Ford argues that the last remaining labor-intensive areas in agriculture—primarily picking—are soon to be susceptible to automation.181 1561
“Robots deployed in manufacturing today,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 2015, tend to be large, dangerous to anyone who strays too close to their whirling arms, and limited to one task, like welding, painting or hoisting