Unemployment Is the Future

It's a midterm election year and the American right-wing is working a bit harder than usual on recruiting young people/millenials/the internet, which means downplaying (kinda-sorta) the whole hating of gay people, women, and immigrants aspects of its platform in favor of libertarian-styled poor-hating. This means attacking programs like Obamacare—in which care for the sick and poor is subsidized by the not-poor and not-sick, which is pure evil, of course—food stamps, and the vague specter of old-school entitlements like Social Security. Behind this hate is the myth of bootstrapping, in which most anyone in America can avoid poverty and dependence on state aid by simply working harder. Those that do not choose to work harder are lazy and shitty, not just undeserving of your tax dollar support but actively engaged in a kind of societal fraud to get it.

It's an impressive delusion, one that imagines a sort of pure state of employment economics in which self-reliance dominates overall. This domination includes inequalities in the playing field itself, and a playing field that more and more does not have the ability to provide work for every hungry bootstrapper that wants to get off the dole and be a true American (or whatever). Crucially, this is a delusion that does not allow for advancing technology and its job-eating capabilities. Instead, it imagines a realignment of job skills to new technologies, that technology does not take jobs but instead just changes them to other jobs and, thus, blame is returned to the unemployed themselves for unemployment.

Yet it sure looks like the future of jobs involves more and more robots and machines, to the point where they're not just replacing humans in factories but they're replacing humans in transportation, customer service, and most anything that might be considered "unskilled," e.g. the jobs that the bootstrapping myth depends on. A paper just out from the Brookings Institution makes the argument that the long-term unemployment generated during the Great Recession is poised to become a permanent fixture in the economy, a subset of the short-term unemployed that is never able to recover due to a "collapse in job vacancies" and "a decline in labor force withdrawal rates," e.g. people not retiring.

The report found that this new permanent class is made up of a population less educated and less likely to be married than the employed population. This new demographic is also slanted toward workers older than 50, which should be no surprise given the rapid migration of jobs toward technology and the acceleration of that technology. It used to be enough to be able to work hard on the assembly line to get a decent paycheck; now, a worker needs to be able to design and implement that same line.

The catch there is that it doesn't take an assembly line's worth of workers to design and implement an automated line. Robots are manning the lines now and those robots were built by other robots. A pessimistic look at the future might imagine a world where employment is limited to programmers and engineers, producing goods and services that most of the world, mired in permanent unemployment, can't afford to consume.

Tyler Cowen at The New York Times' 'Economics View' offers a bit of optimism (by way of skepticism):

What we have to assume, however, in order for those new wants to make it through and generate more jobs, is that America doesn't cut its unemployed or otherwise impoverished population loose to the wolves because of some myth. Wants are meaningless in an economy in which its constituents can't afford to have them. In fact, in our would-be dystopian future, wants don't exist at all. There are just needs, and some large portion of the American political class isn't interested in helping with even those.