Far afield from jobs
Seemingly endless corn and soybean fields stretch out on either side of all the roads heading out of my hometown in rural Illinois. Row after row of perfectly planted crops become a blur at highway speeds yet, until the corn gets too high, you can see someone if they are standing up in a field.
But you almost surely wouldn’t see someone in a field.
If you grew up like I did, surrounded by fields tilled by ever more efficient machines and ever fewer actual farmers, President Trump’s promises about bringing jobs back through deal-making with companies and Congressional Republican’s proposals to widen loopholes for big corporations both fail to address the root of a deep fear that is also a burgeoning hope.
Months into the new Congress and new Administration and one of the most powerful forces shaping Americans’ lives hasn’t been named yet. Back in January, President Obama came much closer to pointing out a fundamental cause of so much disruption in places like my hometown.
President Obama confronted a challenge central to the daily lives of Americans when he said “the next wave of economic dislocation won’t come from overseas” rather from “the relentless pace of automation that makes many good, middle-class jobs obsolete.”
What will 45% of work getting automated look like?
A wide range of researchers from the Oxford Martin School to McKinsey & Company find that 45 percent of the activities humans are paid to do can be automated using only currently available technology. Project modest technological innovation and the number of people with impacted jobs is even more staggering.
Ignored for too long by many political leaders, the hollowing out of our job markets can no longer be papered over. President Trump has had virtually nothing to say about the challenge of automation.
Even one of President Trump’s most touted actions demonstrates the limitations of “deal-making” and public policy in general when targeting jobs and not targeting the well-being of people themselves.
Last year, when Carrier came under fire and struck a supposed deal with the then President-Elect, headlines around the country carried the story of how many “jobs would be saved.” Look a little closer and a short while after the initial headlines and you can find that the CEO of Carrier’s parent company said “we’re going to…automate to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive.”
Carrier is only a small example. As Bill Gates and others have suggested, automation can now upend entire categories of jobs all at once including one of the most common jobs in my hometown: truck driving.
A similar criticism to that of the President can be made of Congressional Republican tax proposals, which focus on economic growth and cutting corporate tax rates to spur companies to create jobs. As the Carrier example shows, businesses will seek to lower their marginal costs and automation can often help achieve that goal. We should be skeptical that cutting a corporate tax rate will mean benefits to people as opposed to enabling companies with lower rates to simply continue the trend to automate.
We need political leaders to start asking the right questions about the way the economy has changed and will continue to change.
Fortunately, it’s not just President Obama who has started asking the right questions. Republican Senator Ben Sasse dissented from orthodoxy on job creation, saying “automation — even more than trade — will continue to shrink the number of manufacturing jobs.” Libertarian academic Charles Murray argued last year that “we are approaching a labor market in which entire trades and professions will be mere shadows of what they once were.”
Millions of jobs in sectors as different as supermarket checkouts and financial management have already been disrupted by automation.
Millions more jobs can and will be disrupted by technology in the years to come but it is entirely unclear what will replace them.
Because the economy has handled innovation in the past, some are content to say that we will make new jobs to replace the old ones. The main focus in that world would be retraining programs for the multiple transitions in types of work that people will face.
But there are reasons to think that this isn’t the same as the move from a mostly agrarian society to a mostly industrial society, for example. One key difference is how quickly these changes can come.
The upheaval in hard-working people’s lives of the past generation should caution against assuming Americans will have the opportunity to find anything approaching dignity and economic security if we only tinker at the edges of the economic policies in place today.
Signs of hope: starting by asking the right question
Fortunately, there are signs of hope. Aside from President Obama and Senator Sasse, libertarians like Murray and progressives such as former labor leader Andy Stern can find common cause by exploring the bold idea of a universal basic income to ensure everyone’s basic needs are met.
People who enabled automation by driving technological advances, like Bill Gates, can entertain taxes on automated components of production to uphold benefits for people.
Creative local actions can allow people to make the basics for themselves whether that’s energy, food or the items they need by using open-source designs and 3-D printers. If we ask the right questions and try a range of big ideas, we can bring hope back to the people who once would have found a living working in places like those perfectly aligned fields sprawling across the Midwest.
