In recent years, as the rapid development of artificial intelligence has given rise to anxieties about the future of work, the college has emerged as an early model for a more human-centered craft education. It offers a holistic alternative to the traditional university-to-white-collar route, one that focuses on training both the body and the mind. The idea is to prepare students for the coming era of technological disruption by helping them develop a deeper understanding of those qualities that have traditionally shaped the built environment: empathy, patience, humor, and an appreciation of beauty. These are not easily replaced by machines, precisely because they’re rooted in humanity. 

The renovated warehouse is a fitting setting. Charleston — with its unique blend of Georgian, Federal, and Greek Revival architecture — boasts one of the largest historic districts in the United States. ACBA was founded in part to help maintain that built legacy. 

When Hurricane Hugo tore through Charleston in 1989, damaging 80% of the city’s homes and businesses, local leaders discovered that there were not enough traditional artisans in the nation, let alone the state, to make necessary repairs to historic properties. Industrialization, combined with a cultural shift toward white-collar work, had almost entirely erased the craft of building. As a result, efforts to reconstruct the city were delayed. Desperate homeowners commissioned tradesmen from outside the United States or otherwise relied on contractors who used modern construction methods that undermined the historic integrity of the buildings. 

Alarmed by this shortage of skilled artisans, preservation groups began laying the groundwork for an institution that could bridge the gap. What began as a skilled trades summer program for high school students then evolved into a series of community workshops called the School of the Building Arts (SoBa). In 2004, SoBa formalized its curriculum and began offering four-year degrees. It also adopted a new name: the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA).

In the years since, the school has developed a reputation for training meticulous craftsmen capable of safeguarding millennia-old building traditions. In addition to assisting with major projects in and around the city of Charleston, students have supported work at the White House, the U.S. Capitol, Monticello, Mount Vernon, England’s Lincoln Cathedral, and Germany’s Hundisburg Castle. In an environment that favors speed over quality, the college is concerned with making objects of enduring physical beauty. In fact, that’s at the heart of its mission. 

Though the school allows and even encourages the use of digital tools, it requires its students to learn to do things by hand first. In one classroom, first-year students pore over digital images of Venetian facades, and then put pencil to paper in an architectural drafting exercise. When I approach her desk, Omarion McKinnon, a petite young woman with a warm expression and a searching gaze, points out to me the architectural wonders of the Doge’s Palace. 

Yet when I ask her what brought her to the school, her mind turns toward home to Beaufort, South Carolina. It’s the second oldest city in the state after Charleston. On her phone, she searches for photographs of places she knows more intimately — town centers and white churches, some with tabby walls. Her interest in design was informed, in part, by her deep familial connection to the place. A couple of times, she mentions Saint Helena Island, home to a rich architectural legacy shaped by the Gullah Geechee — an African American community that has preserved African cultural traditions for generations and helped make the Sea Islands a center of creative flourishing. “I do think it would be pretty cool,” McKinnon says, “if I could play some part in helping to preserve places like these.” 

That idea — architecture as an expression of cultural identity — is part of the school’s broader philosophy. Through its liberal arts curriculum, it teaches students about the history of craft, but it also teaches them to grapple with difficult histories manifested in the material world, including Charleston’s history of racial oppression. “It’s really important to us that the educated artisans we’re producing understand that they’re part of a long continuum,” Christina Butler tells me. “We want them to be thinking through these difficult questions, regardless of what the answers might be” 

Butler, who serves as Provost and General Chair of Education, goes on to warn that “some of these trades that have been passed down generationally almost completely disappeared in the 20th century”. “And they will disappear if there’s not a way to pass them forward,” she says. 

The college’s curriculum is specifically designed to support students as future professionals in the building trades, including through courses in literature and philosophy, business leadership and construction management, communications and composition, and mathematics and the material sciences. 

In addition to their academic studies, they spend at least 10 to 15 hours each week in trade-specific workshops where they refine their skills in one of six specializations: architectural carpentry, blacksmithing, classical architecture and design, plaster, stone carving, and timber framing. Inspired by France’s Compagnons du Devoir, a prestigious 10-year apprenticeship program that originated during the High Middle Ages, the school adopted a similar (albeit condensed) model that emphasizes observation and practice, technical development, and demonstration of mastery. 

Mentorship is at the core of practice, and it’s not uncommon for graduates to return to the college as instructors. Casey Hebel is a 2025 graduate who now serves as an adjunct professor. A Northern Californian who came to ACBA from the Marine Corps, he takes satisfaction in difficult tasks. When he left the military, he had a buddy who was already training to become a blacksmith. He was enticed by the idea of using brute force to bend and shape metal. “You’ve already done something hard and laborious,” he tells me, rocking back and forth from his heels to his toes as he talks, “so it’s exactly the sort of thing you’re drawn to” 

Now, Hebel is concerned not only with the practice of blacksmithing, but with the trade’s future. In 2012, NPR estimated that just 500 to 1,000 professional blacksmiths remained in the United States. Today, that number is likely even lower. “We are trying to remind people that it’s for the common good that these kinds of crafts continue to exist,” Hebel explains. “As soon as that knowledge goes away, then people stop building these kinds of things into their designs.”

Even before Hurricane Hugo, there were warnings that the traditional building trades were disappearing in the United States. Following the 1966 passage of the National Historic Preservation Act, comprehensive legislation designed to protect historic places amidst a wave of urban renewal, the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) released the 1968 Whitehill Report detailing major gaps in the preservation workforce. It warned that new building methods, inspired by new materials, were erasing the skills necessary to repair and maintain old buildings. There would be no easy fix, the report said. Instead, preservationists would have to come up with “a new solution”. It advised that these young men and women should not only engage in conservation work, but in making “contemporary works of beauty” as well.

It’s a recommendation that ACBA takes seriously. Seniors are required to design and execute a masterwork that demonstrates both technical skill and conceptual understanding. In the wood shop, Brendan Cerling is constructing a portative organ, its pipes carefully sized and shaped to produce melodic hymns. Nearby, Lee Brooks is building a desk with delicate features, “mostly as an excuse to do the tiny, particular, decorative stuff” 

In the blacksmithing shop, Riley White is at work on his own capstone project, which is also a commission for a local client. “Do you want to see?” he asks. He steps away for a moment, and when he comes back, he’s carrying a portfolio. He opens it to reveal sketches of an Art Nouveau lantern bracket that spans eleven feet from end to end. “You know how good it is, right?” I ask. “I wasn’t that confident when I started,” he says through a grin, “but I’ve had to sell it to so many people at this point, it feels like it has to be good.” As a final touch, he plans to restore a copper lantern that has been in the client’s family for generations. “It’s amazing,” he says. “I get to leave a mark on a city that I love.”

The physical, tangible nature of the work is part of what draws students and — increasingly — parents to ACBA. As the entry-level white-collar job market begins to evaporate, and as debates rage about the value of the four-year degree, there’s been a renewed interest in heritage crafts and in the trades as a whole. “What we’re finding,” Christina Butler says, “is that the stigma about the trades is fading away. There are high schools all over the country trying to reintegrate programs that were eliminated in these last decades. Everybody recognizes that there’s work that’s well paid now, and it’s work that we need.” When it comes to the traditional building trades, she says, there will always be people who want things that have been touched by human hands.

Even in this brave new world, where automation and instant gratification proliferate, ACBA students and graduates are finding work in new construction. That includes the new Courier Square project just north of the city. Students are contributing architectural elements — iron lanterns, gates, stone columns, sculpted terracotta panels, and hand-carved keystones representing each of the four seasons — to a large multi-family building that’s been dubbed the Laurel. Christian Sottile, one of the architects behind the development, said that working with ACBA has helped to humanize the project. He believes that the idea that traditional building arts are only for historic upkeep is outdated. “The frontier is new buildings,” he told me in an email. “The world needs artists. It needs a built environment that we can fall in love with again.” 

Bri Meyer, a blacksmithing student with a keen eye for detail, puts it another way: “Why not make something that inspires joy?” she asks. Meyer has watched people walking through Chicago, her hometown, with their heads tucked into their chests and their eyes cast down on the pavement. “When there’s nothing worth looking up at,” she says, “then people just don’t look up anymore. The world becomes tragic.” Like looking into a black box. She shows me some of the things that she’s made, a candle stick with dripping wax and flowers so delicate that they don’t seem made of metal. “You know you can get blind to beauty,” she says. She talks about the small ways she’s finding to fight against that. “A little wisp of flower here and there. If you change from iron to copper, you get a beautiful glow. Might as well, you know? Might as well.” 

The city settles in for the evening, and I linger for a while in the stone shop. The elegant white sculptures at the perimeter of the room make the space feel sacred. Resting on overhead shelves are dozens of medallions hand-carved for the Courier Square project. “Each one of those is distinct,” Professor Joseph Kincannon tells me. “If you really look at them, they’re almost like fingerprints. When everything is the same,” he continues, “we get bored and look away. But when we recognize even subtle differences, we can’t look away. And that’s really my hope — that we never stop looking.” 

Since the mid-20th century Americans have distinguished the “upper middle class” from the “lower middle class.” We can think of these as two lifestyle packages, combining certain jobs, certain homes and neighborhoods, and certain family structures.

The upper-middle-class lifestyle package has three elements: a well-paying job that requires a college diploma, preferably in a large, high-status institution, along with a trophy house in a prestigious neighborhood that functions both as a display room for fancy furniture and a speculative asset. Another part of the upper-middle-class package has been the ability of affluent professionals to delegate care for children and elderly relatives to servants or paid employees of institutions (public, private, or nonprofit).  

More from this author

The myth of Western crisis

By Michael Lind

Contrast this with the lower-middle-class lifestyle package: a decently-paid job that requires only a high school diploma or some additional training and sometimes a bachelor’s degree; a house that is productive; and reliance for care-giving chiefly on family members, supplemented sometimes by neighbors or friends. The productive household might generate some income by being the site of a small business or, with the help of appliances, allow residents to substitute unpaid DIY labor for market transactions, by building, fixing and refitting at home. 

The mass middle class that was created in the United States after World War II was a mass lower middle class, not a mass upper middle class. There were various paths of entry into the mass lower middle class, whose members included unionized workers, prosperous skilled artisans, minor functionaries, small business owners and even well-off family farmers.

Neither a college education nor a professional career was required for entrance into the mass lower middle class, between 1945 and the 1980s. In 1960, only 7.7% of Americans had bachelor’s or higher degrees; by 1980, around the time I graduated with a BA, the number was still only 16.2%.  

Between World War II and the last quarter of the 20th century, most Americans graduated from high school and went to work and got married and had children. Being part of the middle class was defined not by educational or job status, but by a certain material standard of living, like having a family home, at least one car, and a television that received the three commercial network channels (created in 1970, PBS was limited to big cities and college towns).  

Beginning in the Reagan and Clinton years, however, the American Dream was redefined to mean achieving the lifestyle of the small upper middle class — not the super rich, but the most affluent lawyers, doctors, bank executives, corporate executives, and tenured professors. We were supposed to believe that their affluence was the result of their superior skill and merit-accruing academic labor, as measured by tests and rewarded with graduate and professional degrees. And it was true that brain power counted for something. But just as important was the success of the legal, medical, and academic professions a century ago in the 1900s in creating professional associations like the American Bar Association (ABA) and American Medical Association (AMA), which captured occupational licensing in their fields and created cartels that protect their members from fee-lowering competition. 

We were also supposed to believe that upward mobility was achievable en masse, through a college diploma. By the 1990s, politicians, corporate executives, nonprofit reformers, and self-interested academic bureaucrats united behind this message. And Americans listened. The number with a BA or higher has exploded from 16.2%  in 1980 to 38.7% in 2024. In some European countries the college-graduate share of the population is even higher.

Suggested reading

The plot to replace teachers with tech

By John Allen Wooden

But the higher-ed industry was “talking its book,” i.e. painting a biased and overly rosy picture, when it sought to expand the number of applicants. And business leaders were pretending that stagnant wages were the result of inadequate education and insufficient skills on the part of workers, rather than the offshoring of industry, the flooding of the labor market with cheap immigrant labor, and the near-annihilation of private-sector labor unions. For their part, politicians of all persuasions found that encouraging more Americans to go to college cost little and avoided controversy.

The result of this massive and ill-advised expansion of higher education in the last half century has not been upward mobility, but too many college graduates chasing too few well-paid professional jobs. In 2025, only 19.3% of job postings in the US required a bachelor’s degree or higher, at a time when those qualifications are possessed by around 40% of the population. According to the St. Louis Fed, a year after graduation, 52% of Americans with college degrees are employed in occupations which do not require their degrees; the number after 10 years is 45%. For around half or more of college graduates, then, investing in a college diploma has been a bad decision.  

What about the second part of the upper-middle-class lifestyle package — the big trophy house in a prestigious neighborhood? There are plenty of modest houses in unfashionable neighborhoods, cities, and regions. But the Starbucks barista with a useless degree in communications or marketing wants to live in a hip neighborhood in New York or San Francisco or Austin, not in a tract-home neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio.

The final element of the upper-middle-class lifestyle package is outsourcing the caretaking and domestic roles to unrelated paid caregivers. The rich have always been able to afford to hand off their children and elderly to be looked after by servants or other paid non-relatives, and to delegate household chores to other servants and service workers. Today, however, there’s a “care crisis” in the form of college-educated professionals who belong to two-earner couples, who can’t afford private child care and private schooling. The rich can afford to be generous to Mary Poppins or Jeeves. But the struggling two-earner professional couple typically relies on poorly-paid, largely immigrant female labor to look after the children and keep the house or condo clean.

The point is this: half or more of the college-educated professionals in the US belong to a pseudo-upper middle class, a knock-off version of the actual professional-managerial elite.  These wannabes and also-rans have worthless diplomas and jobs which, however honorable in themselves, do not allow them to purchase the homes and lifestyles of which they dream. They have champagne tastes on beer budgets.

This ersatz upper middle class has been overbuilt from the late 20th century until the present. It was unsustainable and bound to collapse. By automating a lot of “knowledge jobs,” AI may accelerate the inevitable contraction. But the decline was bound to come at some point even without AI.

If the half-century experiment in creating a mass upper middle class of college-educated professionals has failed in the US and similar democracies, what is the condition of the mass lower middle class? Current data prove that lower-middle-class neighborhoods and lifestyles, far from being gone with the wind, continue to be as distinct from the professional class as they are numerically significant. 

Working-class people of all races are still more likely to be family caregivers or to rely on family caregivers than to rely on paid nannies or institutions. They are likely to live in multigenerational families, a trend that is growing. They have side-hustles and run home-business — in fact half of small businesses are run from a home or began there. And working-class and low-income people are more likely to engage in home improvement projects than the affluent, who hire specialized workers instead. According to a survey last October, more than half of American parents said they would make Halloween costumes for their children from scratch, while four in ten — presumably more upscale — said they would buy them.

For members of today’s bloated and unsustainable college-educated professional class who identify their own real or desired lifestyles with success, all of these traits of what I am calling the lower middle class represent the failure of American society. How terrible, that some children receive low-quality day-care from grandparents or aunts or uncles, instead of from an immigrant nanny or corporate daycare workers or public school teachers. How tragic, to think that some middle-aged people must let elderly parents live with them because they can’t afford to warehouse them until they need round-the-clock nursing care in an expensive, high-quality retirement community. It’s a national disgrace that some high-school graduates still run some small businesses out of their homes, when they might have been salaried college-educated professionals with their own cubicles in office buildings somewhere. Imagine, there are still Americans so deprived that they make the costumes that their children wear at Halloween, instead of buying them in stores. 

But the lower middle class may have the last laugh. AI may well wipe out whole chunks of the upper middle class. But innovative technologies may not only spare many people in the lower middle class, they might also empower some.  

Computers soon may be able to write wills and diagnose patients and grade papers, causing a mass extinction event for lawyers and doctors and professors. But it will be some time before physical robots are able to replace the “essential workers” who were lauded during the COVID pandemic — nurses, caregivers, first responders, police officers, public and private utility engineers and mechanics.

If you are an executive vice-president of a firm whose work consists largely of convening meetings and sending emails, you may soon find yourself the victim of technological unemployment. But if you run a cookie-baking business from your home, you can already do much of your accounting and tax work with software, while reaching a large client base online. Advances in AI will only accelerate these possibilities.  

If you are a middle manager in a large corporation, your job may vanish when many of those you supervise are replaced by computer programs. But if you like to tinker in your garage, instead of doing woodwork with old-fashioned tools you may be able to use 3-D printing and other advanced technologies to make toys, models, artwork, dishes and cutlery, household furniture, musical instruments, and even functional drones.

If you are a banker who evaluates loan applications, you may be replaced by bots that do the same job in less time and without human error. But if you want to rent out a spare bedroom, or rent an unneeded space in your two-car garage, you can do so with the help of Airbnb or other online services.

If you are an academic who specializes in researching archives, your occupation may not be long for this world. But if you want to home-school your children, technology will permit them to take virtual classes, listen to virtual lectures, and have access to first-rate libraries, while learning social skills by playing with neighborhood kids.

Suggested reading

We are all Eurasians now

By Antaol Lieven

If your job as an insurance company apparatchik is to boost company profits by denying coverage to your company’s paying clients, software can cheat sick people just as well. Meanwhile, telemedicine for doctors’ appointments, home visits by nurses, and home-based monitors connected to hospital or medical practice computers might allow your ailing, elderly parent to live with you in your home, instead of being committed to impersonal institutional care.

The obstacles to many of these classic lower-middle-class activities are not technological but legal. Many technology-enabled opportunities can be realized only by loosening or repealing restrictive local government and zoning regulations that bar businesses from being run out of homes, ban accessory dwelling units (ADUs) or “granny flats,” and prevent homeowners from renting rooms to non-relatives.  

Today’s YIMBY (Yes in My Back Yard) movement mostly represents the interests of greedy real-estate developers who want to plop down apartments in desirable single-family neighborhoods, and of social-climbing, childless singles willing to be packed like sardines in hip neighborhoods if they can enjoy a cool urban consumer experience in their 20s. What is needed is not replacing single-family neighborhoods with blocks of apartment buildings, but rather eliminating restrictions which prevent sterile, snooty upper-middle-class neighborhoods from being converted into dynamic lower-middle-class neighborhoods, with home businesses and garage craftshops and maybe the occasional chicken in the backyard.

Needless to say, property owners in upper-middle-class neighborhoods would fight these reforms.  But there are not enough affluent young professionals in the next generation who can afford the upper-middle-class lifestyle, and there would not be even if the progress of AI turns out to be exaggerated. It is conceivable, of course, that sufficiently advanced technology might lead to truly widespread unemployment or lower wages in most occupations and income levels. But the idea that there is a binary choice between a well-paid job and a universal dole reflects the bias of the professional class.  

In a lower middle class or working household, there may be multiple streams of income. There are full-time jobs for some members of the family, side hustles, and rental income, to say nothing of DIY projects that save money, compared to purchases of finished goods or labor. Meanwhile, government may also subsidize a multigenerational household in the form of child allowances and Social Security, as well as means-tested in-kind benefits like food stamps if necessary. In the event of a true robotic jobs apocalypse, it would be easier to incrementally increase these existing government cash and in-kind subsidies to households, in addition to their other income streams, than to provide everyone with a cash stipend or “universal capitalist” investments in stocks and bonds like Tony Blair’s failed “baby bonds” and the doomed-to-fail “Trump Accounts.” 

More from this author

MAGA’s samurai justice in Venezuela

By Michael Lind

In hindsight, the US and similar industrial democracies took a wrong turn after the 1970s when “middle class” was redefined to mean “upper middle class” rather than “lower middle class.” There is no reason why the post-1945 lower middle class, rather than the college-educated professional class, could not have continued to define the middle class to this day. The silicon chip did not force Western democracies to shower expensive college diplomas on great numbers of citizens who got jobs that do not require them. The internet did not compel people to aspire to move from lively, eclectic lower-middle-class neighborhoods to sterile upscale bedroom communities policed by authoritarian homeowners’ associations. Satellite telephony did not persuade people to equate social status with sitting in an office cubicle emailing memos instead of running a business from the garage or doing DIY projects at home. The idea that from the age of 18 until death in old age, the members of a multigenerational family should all have separate homes was not suggested by a computer program. Far from being determined by technology or economic trends, the failed experiment in ballooning the upper middle class in the last half century was the result of changing fashions, misguided reforms, and the self-aggrandizement of professionals as a group.

Having spent portions of my life in both the lower middle class and the upper middle class, I find the lower-middle-class environment more … well, more human. Born in 1962, I spent the first year of my life in a classic lower-middle-class, blue-collar neighborhood on the east side of Austin, Texas, which has now been gentrified beyond recognition. As an infant I lived with my parents in a studio apartment atop the detached garage behind the small house of my widowed paternal grandmother, a bank teller who made additional income by renting one of the two bedrooms in her home to female University of Texas students. My college-educated parents later moved the family to suburban houses, first in South Austin and then in West Austin. But our family spent a lot of time with my grandmother in East Austin and I lived with her as an undergraduate at UT-Austin.

My grandmother’s lower-middle-class neighborhood was like a tropical savanna teeming with wildlife, compared to the Arctic sterility of a professional-class suburb. One of my grandmother’s neighbors, a high school teacher, spent hours with the woodworking equipment in his garage. Another neighbor was a black lay preacher who supported his prison ministry by mowing lawns. A few doors down was a ladies’ “beauty parlor,” possibly unlicensed, that was operated by yet another neighbor out of her small home. Around the corner was a small grocery store owned by a relative, and one block away was a service station owned by a family friend, where I spent pleasant hours as a child watching garage mechanics repair cars, as my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, had done. Two blocks away was the black-owned and staffed barbershop where my father in the 1960s took me on occasion to get my Bart Simpson-like buzz cut.

If there was a homeowners association with restrictive rules in my grandmother’s lower-middle-class neighborhood, it was moribund in the 1960s and 1970s. People ran nursery schools out of their homes and rented rooms and put up cars on concrete blocks in the front yard and kept hens and crowing roosters decades before hipsters embraced backyard poultry. In an elite Austin suburb, if you ran a business out of your home or rented a spare bedroom, your neighbors, obsessed with possible declines in the value of their trophy houses as a result of the “wrong sort” coming in and out of the neighborhood, might sue you.

I for one will not lament the shrinking of the oversized upper middle class in relation to the lower middle class. When vacant downtown office towers are detonated and depopulated, university campuses are rented or sold off, and pretentious McMansions rot in the rain for want of buyers, humble lower-middle-class neighborhoods and their denizens will survive — and perhaps even flourish, with the help of advanced technology.  

This time might be different. Britain’s unemployment rate, according to figures released this week by the Office for National Statistics, is at its highest in four years. We are in a jobs recession. And it appears that young people are being disproportionately affected. Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, entry-level jobs have dropped by one third — a development for which large language models have been blamed. Companies are increasingly replacing junior workers with AI that can write code, analyze data, and handle customer service. The first rungs on the white-collar ladder — research assistant, junior analyst and so on — are disappearing.

Previous unemployment crises were temporary. Workers, young and old, waited out the recession, then found their place in the job market. But AI doesn’t go away when the economy improves. It only gets better. Paradoxically, we may be on the verge of unprecedented economic growth alongside unprecedented unemployment.

Until fairly recently, it was thought that the first modern jobs to be automated by AI would be those requiring the least academic education: manual jobs, such as those in manufacturing and agriculture. That forecast turned out to be incorrect. The tasks once considered particularly challenging, uniquely human (writing, programming, art) are the ones most vulnerable to current AI capabilities. In contrast, many skills that come easily to us (moving dexterously, making emotional connections) are much harder to replicate using AI.

Consider the case of Annabel Beales, a copy editor. In 2023, she landed her “dream job”, editing copy for a garden center, drawing on specialized knowledge from her university degree and formal training. But eight months in, her workload started to lighten, and she overheard her boss advising colleagues to “[j]ust put [their writing] in ChatGPT”. She was laid off six weeks later. Beales, a white-collar worker, bore the brunt of AI, not her gardener colleagues.

Some economists warn that millions of jobs could vanish within a few years. Others argue new roles will emerge faster than old ones disappear. Tech leaders promise AI will free us from drudgery while expert forecasters fear mass displacement (and replacement).

But some patterns are already emerging about which jobs will disappear first and which might survive longest. Of particular importance is the matter of autonomy — the extent to which AIs can act without supervision. ChatGPT can write emails and generate reports, but someone still has to send those emails and act on those reports. These chatbots, however, have led tech leaders to repeatedly insist AI will “augment” rather than automate. If demand doesn’t rise correspondingly, augmentation still reduces jobs. One person can now do the work of three.

But the real change will be autonomous AI agents. In June, one of us — Jason — attended an event, in San Francisco, fully organized by a team of AI agents. As far as we know, it was the first of its kind, and it was quite delightful. Sure, the AI agents couldn’t yet book a proper venue — we met in a public park — or organize catering. But 26 people still showed up. The agents are now setting up their own merch store. In the Bay Area, commuters often pass adverts for AI sales agent startup, Artisan, urging employers to “stop hiring humans.”

Not all challenges have been solved. AI models mostly still can’t act autonomously, make truly new scientific discoveries, or coordinate at scale — but these are all tractable engineering problems. And companies are hard at work to solve them.

So how do you predict which jobs will disappear? The most important factor is the “time horizon” of a task: how long an average human needs to complete it.

In Silicon Valley, where cutting-edge AI is being developed, the graph that people watch most closely is the so-called “time horizon” of tasks that AI can do well. This measures how long the technology can operate like a good employee. METR, a research non-profit that evaluates AI capabilities, has been tracking this phenomenon. They’ve found that AI’s ability to complete longer tasks is doubling every 3.5 to seven months. Existing models can handle tasks that take humans up to about 20 minutes with 80% reliability. At the moment, when put to work on tasks requiring more than four hours, the models almost always fail. But if this exponential trend continues, AI agents could tackle month-long projects within a decade.

For example, call center workers spend their days handling calls that take 10 to 20 minutes. Each call is a complete task an AI can master. The same goes for freelancers writing blog posts or paralegals drafting contracts, or analysts entering data.

Compare this, though, with a CEO whose day is broken up into activities — a meeting, a decision, a public appearance — that each requires years of context which a machine can’t yet replicate. The CEO might spend 30 minutes deciding whether to acquire a competitor, but that decision draws on decades of experience with similar deals, knowledge of company culture, and understanding of market trends. It’s not really a 30-minute task.

This suggests the first rule of a longer-lasting job: increase the context needed to perform your work. The rule corresponds well to climbing the corporate ladder: the higher you go, the more your decisions depend on long-term strategic planning and years of accumulated knowledge that can’t be easily replicated.

But task duration alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Other factors matter too. Every support chat, every line of code, every written report creates data that is used to train AI models. Companies are already deploying “productivity monitoring” software that records employee screens and keystrokes: ostensibly for performance review, but really to capture how humans complete tasks.

Your particular industry might have some resilience. Hollywood actors stopped AI from using their likenesses because they could halt billion-dollar productions if their demands weren’t met. Dock workers keep automation at bay because they can shut down ports. White-collar professionals, learning from the dock workers, might organize quickly enough to survive the first round of automation. In contrast, freelancers and contractors — who have no collective bargaining power — might be left worse off. Indeed, Duolingo’s CEO announced they will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle” , though he later pulled back after public backlash.

The transition, then, won’t happen overnight. At first, companies will keep employees as managers of AI agents, with each worker supervising automated systems that gradually take over their tasks. And some work will remain inherently human. We still watch people play chess even though computers have the beating of them. Live music, sports, and theatre draw audiences precisely because humans perform them. The appeal lies in limitation and struggle. We connect with the effort, not just the outcome.

Trust is important too. We’ll keep human politicians and military commanders for the reason that people are reluctant to delegate life-and-death decisions to machines. Parents want human teachers for their children, patients prefer human doctors for serious diagnoses, and clients choose human lawyers for high-stakes cases.

But preferences and levels of trust do change, eventually. Will we still want human entertainment when AI can create unlimited, personalized experiences tailored exactly to our tastes?

Overall, perhaps it is lockdown-friendly remote work, the kind that became the norm during the Covid-19 pandemic, that is the best insight into what is to come. If your job can be done from home via email, Slack, and video calls, then it is likely that AI will soon be a competent substitute for you. The pandemic revealed how many roles require only digital tools and clear instructions. Those jobs became automation-ready overnight.

Suggested reading

The UK’s last shot at AI relevance

By James Kingston

The enormous changes afoot demand deeper questions about work’s purpose. Beyond paychecks, jobs provide structure, identity, social connection, and meaning. The question “What do you do?” shapes how we see ourselves and how others see us. But the solution isn’t choosing between economic security and meaningful work — it’s decoupling them. Guarantee baseline economic security while creating new forms of meaningful participation outside traditional employment. Preserve opportunities for skill development, interpersonal connection, and societal contribution, even as jobs change dramatically.

The next couple of years are crucial. Building superintelligent AI should not be treated as inevitable. These systems require massive capital investment and government support. Data centers need licenses and construction approval. And union leaders and professional associations have a role to play. Instead of reacting after automation hits, they should get ahead of it and protect their members proactively.

Right now, then, we face a genuine choice about whether to build these systems at all. If we proceed, here are some guiding principles.

First, we should tax AI agents like we tax human workers. Governments should use that revenue to fund programs that maintain worker agency rather than creating helpless dependence.

Second, people should have democratic access to technology. Give everyone a compute allocation — enough processing power to run their own AI agents. We should prevent technology from concentrating power in fewer hands.

Third, we should preserve meaningful human involvement. Society should not stop at the low bar of requiring a human “in the loop”. Instead, pursue robust, effective techniques of supervising AIs even when their capabilities outstrip our own. When humans begin to drag down machines — like in chess — we lose the incentive to include them. But sometimes we need to choose human participation over pure optimization.

These changes aren’t inevitable. Offshoring manufacturing in the Nineties was a policy choice. So is the deployment of highly capable AI across the economy. Earlier this year, in his speech outlining an “AI Opportunities Action Plan”, Keir Starmer proclaimed that the UK must “make it work for working people”. To succeed, his Labour government will need to understand what makes jobs vulnerable: how long it takes to automate the smallest constituent task. Young people, contractors, and digital workers face the highest risk. But when they become unemployed — a process that has already begun — the rest of us will follow.

We should build technology to promote human liberty and prosperity. If technology fails to meet those goals, then it is no real progress.

Now for the bad: even with that tick upwards, the nation’s total fertility rate remains way below “replacement,” the level at which a given generation can replace itself, 2.1 babies per woman. In 2024, the U.S. fertility rate was 1.62. In most years since 1971, and in every year since 2007, the rate has been below 2.1. What can be done to boost it?

The short answer is a pro-worker natalist policy that emphasizes so-called predistribution — altering the spread of the social income through better jobs, higher wages, and worker bargaining power, rather than redistributive handouts from above.

The Trump administration has signaled openness to post-tax redistribution. Last month, President Trump echoed Vice President JD Vance’s case for giving mothers a $5,000 “baby bonus,” calling it “a good idea.” Maybe, baby. A recent Niskanen Center report touted baby-bonus policies in New Zealand and Australia and claimed that just “$2,000 for every baby” born in the United States could be “an affordable, effective” policy “to support families.”

Fair enough, but let’s not kid ourselves about how many more kids a baby bonus might beget. In most nations that have experimented with baby bonuses, the impact on birth rates has been trivial, transitory, or ambiguous. A 2024 study found that financial incentives boost fertility rates slightly in the short run but do little to “increase the total number of children in the long run.”

Still, what if we aspired not merely to claw back to 2.1, but soar past it to the Baby Boom days of 1946 to 1964, when America’s fertility rate averaged close to 4. What might we do?

Suggested reading

America’s baby boom is doomed

By Kat Rosenfield

Well, we might start by recognizing that while politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from economics with respect to fertility rates. Specifically, the quantity of high-quality blue-collar jobs for men matters greatly to marriage rates and birth rates: the better and more plentiful the jobs, the higher the rates of family formation and childbearing. There are good reasons, both anecdotal and analytical, for thinking so.

Let me start with the anecdotal. In 1958, I began life in a semi-dilapidated, brick-row house in South Philadelphia, just across the street from the cathedral-like Catholic church where the fictional Rocky “The Italian Stallion” Balboa got married in the sequel to the 1976 blockbuster Rocky — and where my nonfictional older sister got married in 1977.

The urban, Catholic, blue-collar Boomer world of my Philly youth was no paradise, but it was close. Most dads had steady, decent-paying union or other jobs. Nobody needed a credit card to take their vacation week on the Jersey Shore. Nobody bowled or drank alone. Nobody thought they needed to go to college to make it. Above all, nobody thought that intact families with three or four or more kids was anything but the natural, good, and godly order of things.

Indeed, Saint Barnabas, the Catholic elementary school I graduated from in 1972, had about 180 kids in each grade. And that was small compared to our K-8 rival, Most Blessed Sacrament, which at its Sixties peak averaged more than 400 students per grade.

Tutored by hard-won experience, the adult working-class women in my life never doubted that good jobs were essential to making men moral, marriage-ready, and marriage-worthy. As my maternal grandmother would say, “senza buon lavori, senza buon uomini,” meaning, “without good jobs, no good men.”

One of my aunts was married to a — as my father would always inject, “half-assed” — house painter. The guy would commence carousing and boozing whenever he was short on work, which was often. When girl relatives turned 15 or 16, she gave them “the talk”: men behave like animali (animals) on Saturdays and skip church on Sundays unless prezioso lavori (valuable jobs) await them and their paesani (male friends) on Mondays.

And lest you think it was just an Italian-American thing, one of my father’s brothers, a unionized construction boss, was married to a German-Irish woman. They had five children, plus me as their godson. She gave her four daughters essentially the same talk. And when her son talked of being a professional drummer, rather than working construction, she counseled him to “drum on the bricks” instead if he wanted to win a decent wife and lead a good family life. He did.

That job-centered male marriageability narrative is backed by statistics from numerous solid empirical studies. For instance, a 2024 study estimated that unionization, all by itself, “accounted for 20% of overall fertility increases during the Baby Boom”; and that these pro-family-formation effects were “driven primarily by wage growth” and “protection against adverse labor market shocks.”

Unfortunately, the relationship also holds in reverse. For instance, in 2017, three years before publishing their book-length discourse on “deaths of despair,” economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case detailed how decades of “worsening labor-market opportunities” were implicated in sizable and persistent declines in marriage rates.

Suggested reading

Left and Right get equality wrong

By Michael Lind

Likewise, “When Work Disappears,” a 2019 study published in American Economic Review, documents how, in the early Nineties, the loss in US manufacturing jobs, owing to the China trade shock, tanked earnings among young working-class and low-income men, and, in turn, resulted in steep declines in their marriage rates.

Now, Good Jobs, Strong Families: How the Character of Men’s Work is Linked to Their Family Status, a new study by the Institute for Family Studies, scholars Brad Wilcox and Grant Martsolf demonstrate that “the nature and character of men’s work play a major role in determining whether men marry and form families.” As they explain, factors like “job stability, predictable hours, good benefits, and high pay help men to flourish and, in turn, elevate their appeal as husbands.” The upshot: “prime-aged men with good jobs are markedly more likely to be married with children when they are well-paid, their jobs are stable, and their benefits are good.”

Based on cutting-edge statistical analyses of differences in married family-formation rates by job characteristics, Wilcox and Martsolf find that, across different employment sectors (construction, retail, health care, food and hospitality, trucking, manufacturing, and others), working-class “men who are employed in stable, good-paying jobs with decent benefits” are significantly more likely to get married, stay married, and become fathers.

So, more and better blue-collar jobs have been, and continue to be, the seedbeds of robust birth rates, stable working-class families, and strong blue-collar communities. If only we had a critical mass of seriously pro-worker and pro-family leaders in both parties, who knows, we might yet one day witness the dawn of a second midcentury blue-collar baby boom.

All of the occupations the president mentioned typically require college degrees, as well as advanced professional degrees for doctors and lawyers. But no college diploma is required for the three occupations in the United States with the greatest number of workers — home-health and personal-care aides, retail salespeople, and fast-food workers. In discussing economic opportunity, both Republicans and Democrats often overlook the 62% of Americans who lack a bachelor’s degree or higher.

This oversight is no accident. The debate about meritocracy in both parties is dominated by people who are college-credentialed meritocrats themselves. In promoting “equity” or equality of result, progressives focus obsessively on the racial and gender compositions of university admissions and university faculties. For their part, conservatives typically reject equality of results, in favor of equality of opportunity — which they tend to equate with the successes of highly educated professionals or entrepreneurs.

More from this author

Test article

By Michael Lind

But fewer than 15% of Americans have a professional or other advanced degree, and only 7% own and run their own businesses. Equality of opportunity, with its promise of delivering exceptional success to individuals with exceptional abilities, is not enough. Broader social progress involves raising the economic level of those with mediocre abilities, because, outside of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, it is mathematically impossible for all children to be above average.

The word “meritocracy” was originally coined as a term of abuse. In his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Michael Young, a Left-wing policy expert in Britain’s Labour party, treated the idea of a society of successful test-takers as a dystopian nightmare. In 2001, Young complained that under Tony Blair, Labour had adopted meritocracy as an ideal. He warned: “If meritocrats believe … that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they get.” In our time, a similar point has been made by the British thinker David Goodhart, with his distinction between college-educated “Anywheres” and working-class “Somewheres”.

Debates over meritocracy often focus on college admissions. For many centrist Democrats and Republicans, the golden age of the American university was between the Second World War and the Seventies. In that era, quotas limiting the number of nonwhite, Jews, and Catholics fell away, and new quotas to help black and Hispanic students and faculty were not yet widely adopted.

More from this author

Test article

By Michael Lind

For those who define merit in terms of academic ability the structures of the university and the workplace in the United States are essentially sound. What is needed is rejection of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), the progressive doctrine that rejects equality of opportunity for equality of outcome, defined as policies to make the demography of every social institution mirror the racial and gender breakdown of the most recent US Census by means of reverse racism, of the kind called for by Ibram X. Kendi: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

But the crusade to end DEI in higher education is more important to conservative activists and donors than to the working-class Americans of all races who put Donald Trump in the White House a second time. Most of those voters did not graduate from college, and they are more concerned about grocery and gasoline prices than about the roster of authors in the literary canon.

Some want the rethink the assumption that an elite college degree is the standard pathway to success. The high-tech libertarians of Silicon Valley include many who are skeptical about traditional liberal-arts education and professional schools. They believe that ambitious young entrepreneurs and innovators should not have to compile diploma after diploma on campus before beginning their working lives until their late 20s or 30s. Peter Thiel has endowed a two-year Thiel Fellowship, described thus on its website: “The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”

“Move fast and break things”, in the words of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg. Indeed, in the natural sciences, mathematics, and technology, the greatest geniuses often do their best work when young. But entrepreneurial meritocracy is as irrelevant to most people as academic meritocracy. Most Americans neither go to college nor found successful startups. For the majority of people of middling ability, both equality of result and equality of opportunity may be less beneficial than a third option: equality of condition.

Equality of condition means that you don’t have to be a high achiever in order to have access to the things that define a decent life. In 19th-century agrarian America, the promotion of equality of condition took the form of policies that helped people to become farm owners. Widespread ownership of family farms was encouraged by the federal land laws of 1796, 1800, and 1820, which provided for the partition of federal lands into small and inexpensive plots, as well as by the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed Americans to own 160 acres of free public land after cultivating it for five years.

In the urban and industrial America of the 20th century, equality of condition meant well-paid factory and office jobs that permitted mostly male breadwinners to buy homes and cars and enjoy some economic security along with their families. Leisure is also important, because, unlike hard-driving professionals and business tycoons, most working-class Americans are not married to their jobs.

More from this author

The rise of the slacker aristocracy

By Joseph W. Sullivan

A growing number of thinkers and policymakers in both the Republican and Democratic parties are interested in creating pathways to success that do not require graduation from a four-year college or graduate or professional school. These alternatives include apprenticeship programs, community colleges, and skills certificates.

But these alternatives to conventional higher education can only succeed if employers are willing to hire workers without traditional academic degrees. Some corporations have removed degree requirements from their online job listings or announced programs to hire and train more workers without college degrees. But according to Burning Glass, a labor-market analytics firm, this has not led to a significant increase in the share of workers without college diplomas in many of those firms.

It is not enough for employers to be willing to hire more people without college diplomas. Skills certificates and apprenticeship programs may be avoided by young people if those alternatives do not lead to jobs with pay and benefits comparable to those of many jobs that require undergraduate degrees. Indeed, the multiplication of worthless skills credentials would be no improvement over the multiplication of worthless college degrees.

Suggested reading

The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matthew Gasda

Dismantling race and gender preferences in higher education and hiring is a necessary and long-overdue reform. So is the creation of alternatives to college. But politicians of Left, Right, and center should complement these reforms with initiatives that foster a rough equality of condition, allowing more Americans to achieve a middle-class lifestyle by 21st-century standards. What it means to be middle class in contemporary America and similar societies is somewhat subjective, but most people would agree that it includes adequate wages and benefits, access to affordable health care, quality education for children, and access to home ownership for those who seek it.

How to achieve these goals can be debated. But there can be a consensus in favor of equality of condition, to ensure that the rich, the poor, and the middle class do not live so differently that they might as well belong to different societies.

The damage will not be limited to financial markets. Around half of all imports into the US homeland are used by American manufacturers as inputs to produce goods. By increasing the costs of production, Trump’s tariffs will reduce the competitiveness of US manufacturers. This will destroy manufacturing jobs, not promote them. Higher consumer prices from tariffs and trillions of dollars of wealth destruction will reduce consumer spending, threatening recession and rising unemployment. Uncertainty will freeze business investment, likely leading to layoffs. US manufacturing exporters will be hit hard by any foreign nations that choose to retaliate.

Some of the president’s closest advisers are true believers in protectionism and are likely surprised by the market’s reaction over the last three trading days. They may still believe that Trump’s policies will eventually produce beneficial results. They’re wrong.

Suggested reading

Can Trump win the tariff wars?

By Wolfgang Munchau

How can the president pivot? Three alternatives present themselves.

First, the president could declare victory. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered Washington a “zero-for-zero” tariff scheme today. Trump could accept her offer. The Japanese leadership has likewise signaled a desire to reach an accommodation. Other nations would follow. Trump could herald himself as having successfully struck great deals for American workers and businesses while taking a step back from the ledge of economic self-harm.

Second, he could alter the calculations used to derive the tariff rates. Team Trump has published the formula it used to calculate reciprocal tariffs. That formula has parameters that need to be selected, and administration economists turned to the research literature for the best parameter values. But the co-author of one of the key papers on which those administration economists relied, Alberto Cavallo of Harvard Business School, correctly pointed out that the administration picked the wrong value from his paper.

“While the [US Trade Representative] tariff calculator cites [our] findings”, Cavallo wrote, “it is not entirely clear how they use our findings. Based on our research, the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs is closer to one. If that figure were used, instead of 0.25, the implied reciprocal tariffs would come out about four times smaller.”

This mistake has big implications: the reciprocal tariff rates that the administration calculated are four times are large as they would have been if administration economists had picked the correct parameter value from the paper.

My American Enterprise Institute colleagues Kevin Corinth and Stan Veuger calculated corrected reciprocal tariff rates, using the administration’s formula and the right parameter values. According to them, the administration should be applying 10 percent tariffs for imports from key allies, including Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Israel, and the European Union. That is instead of the astronomical figures in the “Liberation Day” document that caused hearts to sink among political and business leaders the world over, and sent equity prices on a downward spiral.

Suggested reading

Trump will make China great again

By John Rapley

In response to this, the president could announce that the administration spent the weekend refining its calculations. He wouldn’t have to walk back his methods or even throw any staffers under the bus; he could simply announce the new rates.

Cards on the table: I support free trade, and I would like tariff rates to be much lower than the levels at which these calculations would leave them. But applying the formula correctly would be a good start. Subsequently, as more foreign leaders follow the example of von der Leyen in offering zero-for-zero, the president could lower tariff rates to zero.

Third, Trump could announce an immediate pause and follow up with a decision to roll trade policy changes into his plans for tax reform.

To avoid a massive tax hike this year, when key provisions of Trump’s signature 2017 cuts expire, Congress and the president must act. They could take this opportunity to overhaul the tax system by replacing the corporate income tax with a national consumption tax and a tax on business cash flows. By allowing the full expensing of business investment, this would accelerate productivity growth and raise the wages of working-class Americans.

Because some consumption goods are imported and some domestically produced goods are exported, such a tax would require a border-adjustment provision in which imports would be taxed and exports would not be.

This is not a tariff, but it sure resembles one. It would generate a lot of revenue. And unlike the administration’s current tariff policy, it would boost growth. The president could argue that this border adjustment satisfies his campaign promises and his goal to strike a better deal with other nations when it comes to international commerce.

I don’t see the problems with the economic situation of typical workers that the president sees. But even if I did, I would want to see Trump pivot from his current policy, because higher prices and more unemployment are bad for workers.

Trump has the opportunity to pivot. For the sake of the working class that sent him back to the Oval Office — and of the nation as a whole — I hope the president takes it. Some in the media, Left and Right, would no doubt crow. But there is greater heroism in reassessing a position in the face of evidence than in obstinacy.

His solution is equally blunt. He and his advisers insist that aggressive, universal tariffs, combined with deregulation and corporate tax cuts, will render cross-border supply chains less lucrative and domestic investment attractive for business.

The problem is that virtually every other Trump action since Inauguration Day has undercut the state capacity needed to rehabilitate core industries and shepherd capital and labor towards new ones. Instead of leveraging state power on behalf of massive public-private projects, research and development, and workforce training, Team Trump has subjected government agencies to DOGE’s ruthless budget cuts, and frozen funds from or threatened to terminate President Joe Biden’s flagship industrial policies.

The Trumpians are plotting to privatize a host of government services, and have sent a chill through research institutes vital to breakthroughs in advanced medicine, technology, and manufacturing. Meanwhile, the administration has largely crippled antitrust enforcement, thereby favoring powerful monopolies that can withstand or circumvent trade barriers over mechanisms to coax healthy domestic competition and investment.

More from this author

Trump stole tariffs from the Democrats

By Justin H. Vassalo

None of these actions furthers the purported aims of tariffs and targeted export controls: to create good jobs for the forgotten working class and turn depressed regions into desirable places in which to work and live. On the contrary, slashing and burning state capacity will hinder these goals. Most damningly, the Hamiltonian tradition the Trumpians claim to champion is a powerful witness against the belief that a crippled state can boost manufacturing.

These shortcomings haven’t stopped some of Trump’s most vehement critics on the labor Left, not least United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, from conceding that he is partly right on trade. The bipartisan Washington establishment of the late 20^th century made a colossal mistake in offshoring millions of jobs on the naive assumption that high-tech innovation and services would replace manufacturing, the historic engine of American upward mobility and growth.

But despite being motivated by fear over China’s phenomenal rise, Trump’s strategy has proved mostly incoherent, not to say contradictory, sowing serious doubts over whether America, after decades of outsourcing and regulatory capture by major multinationals, has the institutional know-how to meet the new president’s promise of industrial renewal.

Trump’s approach isn’t merely myopic, though — it betrays the legacy of the GOP statesmen whom champions of his tariffs regularly invoke to defend the current administration.

The populist Right’s evangelism for Trump’s protectionist impulses has long rested on the notion that he is boldly reviving the “American System” school of economics. This tradition stretches from Alexander Hamilton in the founding era and Henry Clay in the early republic to the heterodox economist Henry Charles Carey, the influential lawmaker Justin S. Morrill (architect of Civil War-era tariffs), and Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. These Republican statesmen and thinkers espoused a doctrine of development premised on diversified manufacturing, vast energy sources, scientific progress, and spreading education in the “industrial arts”.

Scholars describe this doctrine as unabashedly mercantilist. Yet 19^th-century Republicans maintained that it furthered the country’s founding ideals of self-government and associationalism: the notion that an industrious, republican citizenry will form voluntary organizations conducive to promoting shared interests that transcend divisions by region, sector, or class.

Neither laissez-faire nor statist, the old GOP that supposedly inspires Trump fused support for large developmental goals from disparate parts of society — inventors, aspiring industrial magnates, prospectors, advocates of “scientific agriculture”, financiers, and tradesmen. The intent was to spread commercial hubs built on regional interdependence, raising manufacturing and agricultural output while also curbing demand for goods from competitors like Victorian Britain.

Suggested reading

Is Trump engineering a crash?

By John Rapley

Tariffs underpinned this system by pushing farmers, merchants, and consumers to purchase US-made goods and support local industries. Post-Civil War, tariffs underwrote pensions for Union Army veterans and their families (then a huge constituency of the GOP). Tariffs were also meant to lessen the competitiveness of imports made by foreign “pauper” labor, attracting the support of skilled workers who had few other avenues to stable wages.

Like Trump, the Republican leaders of a distant epoch believed high tariffs were a means to building national wealth and power. And their aversion to foreign competition ran deep. Cheap foreign goods were, in modern parlance, the real source of “market distortions”, because, unchecked, they made profitable manufacturing less viable and threatened the livelihoods of skilled workers.

Even Republican reformers who, like Theodore Roosevelt, were more attuned to the daily needs of thrifty households and worried that tariffs had given rise to unaccountable monopolies tended to believe that free trade was decadent. On the verge of America becoming a world power, Roosevelt remarked that “pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fiber”. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was channeling the same sentiment when he asserted in a recent speech that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream”.

Suggested reading

Will Trump trigger a global meltdown?

By Wolfgang Munchau

But this is where the similarities end. In fact, depicting Trump as a descendant of the old protectionist pedigree misses an important dimension of past Republican thought. From the Lincoln era to Eisenhower’s, Republicans deployed a range of policies besides tariffs to stoke development and progress. The party’s Trumpian incarnation entirely ignores these other strategies, when it doesn’t undermine them.

Take the legacy of Morrill, the lawmaker who, in addition to protective tariffs, authored the legislation that created America’s exemplary land-grant colleges. Morrill well understood the relationship between education in fields like agronomy and engineering and productive innovation. The Homestead Act from the same period, which distributed public lands to frontier homesteaders for a nominal fee, likewise reflected the GOP’s belief in the importance of “decentralized” economic growth for a democratic society.

By contrast, Trump’s sweeping cuts to university grants, including for regional public universities that serve his rural base, disregard the country’s pressing skills shortage. Meanwhile, his lofty campaign pledge to build 10 “freedom cities“, still embryonic, evokes not so much the producer populism of westward expansion, but the dystopian “startup societies” dreamt up by Silicon Valley — or a Middle Eastern petrostate.

Suggested reading

Can ‘abundance liberalism’ save the Dems?

By Sohale Mortazaci

The administration’s axiomatic contempt for regulation is also not in keeping with the GOP’s historical view. Reductive histories portray the GOP as always preaching “small government”. But the party once had vigorous debates about the purpose and scope of regulation.

Despite occasionally assailing corporate malfeasance and grilling feckless CEOs in congressional hearings, today’s Right-wing populists have yet to match the Republican “insurgents” from the party’s Roosevelt wing, including the likes of Sens. Hiram Johnson and George Norris, who pushed for corporate regulation, public works, public utilities, and direct democracy, and took a stand against corruption. Though they were rarely “redistributive” in the social-democratic sense, such positions aimed to prevent abuses by the politically connected and to give working people a material stake in democracy.

Earlier Republicans were also quite experimental in their time. President Herbert Hoover, forever marked by his loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt for failing to alleviate the Great Depression, was, during his earlier tenure as Commerce secretary, a consummate technocrat who sought to deepen cooperation between various government bureaus and business associations to make policymaking more scientific.

Suggested reading

The roots of Trump’s realpolitik

By Michael Lind

In stark contrast to DOGE’s modus operandi, Hoover’s efforts to reorganize government were founded on a belief in expertise and the legitimacy of using regulation to make markets more rational; the development of America’s burgeoning aviation sector, improvements in radio technology, and national business standards for product sizes were among his achievements.

Hoover was hardly a central planner. Judged by the current GOP’s ethos, though, his record of bureaucratic oversight epitomized the growth of the modern administrative state.

Of course, the New Deal realignment, which hobbled the GOP’s support for a generation, cemented the popular view that Republicans regularly opposed active government. But until the Reagan era, most mainstream Republicans accepted the New Deal order, occasionally endorsed breaking up monopolies, and eagerly supported generous federal funding for science and technology, even as they ritually affirmed the principle of “free enterprise”.

Suggested reading

Elon Musk and the return of Anti-Federalism

By Michael Cuenco

Most famously, the Eisenhower administration’s vast Interstate Highway System updated Republicans’ past support for “internal improvements” for the Cold War era, further propelling the rise in suburban homeownership that characterized the postwar boom. And progressives’ arch-bogeyman Richard Nixon, now frequently regarded as the last “New Deal president”, signed NEPA and OSHA, the country’s landmark laws, respectively, for environmental protection and workplace-safety standards.

In short, major players in the Republican Party adopted a more flexible and interventionist view of political economy than is commonly recognized. Most MAGA influencers today would no doubt dismiss such evidence as not reflecting “true” Republicanism. Partisan progressives would similarly concur, at most allowing that “progressive Republicans” are extinct because the Democratic Party became their natural home.

This is to be expected. A few conservative think tanks and public intellectuals have sought to create a genuinely “pro-development” and “pro-worker” agenda for Republicans. But the anti-government tirades of Newt Gingrich, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and their successors in the Tea Party movement did much to fix the partisan battle lines of the last few decades, few of which the MAGA movement has redrawn besides disavowing George W. Bush’s embrace of globalized trade.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Oren Cass

Trump’s GOP is thus fixated on slashing and burning its way through the state, rather than restoring faith in positive government. For a little while, even skeptics allowed that a new working-class base, plus rising tensions with Beijing, might push Republicans to embrace an industrial strategy that recovered some of their party’s authentic traditions of domestic progress.

That possibility has come to naught. While Trump proclaims “liberation” is imminent, the rapid loss of state capacity under his watch promises anything but. Tariffs excepted, there is little concrete government action to compel market forces to meet national economic objectives, and the GOP has bent over backwards to accommodate banking lobbies vociferously opposed to even minor restraints on financial predation.

One hardly needs to be a radical populist to see this doesn’t bode well for American society. As the most perceptive believers in the “American System” understood, an economy that fails to maximize its productive forces and promote workers’ well-being is destined to wither. If America is to avert permanent decline, it needs leaders determined to prevent the spread of servitude masked as “liberty”.

Political alienation is at a high. As headlines proclaim disaster after disaster, from the pandemic to recession to the climate “apocalypse”,  people are losing their faith in the future. In the US, public trust in government is lower today than it was after Watergate, and Americans are disengaging massively from politics on social media and cable news. In the world’s democracies, voter turnout has dropped from an average 80% in the Eighties to closer to 60% today. More than half of that decline reflects generational change. In the US, for instance, citizens between the ages of 18 and 29 typically turn out at a rate more than 10 points lower than those over the age of 30.

Lower turnout, particularly among the young, has skewed politics towards the extremes. In France, barely 40% of the electorate voted in the recent election, part of what Le Monde described as “political de-socialisation”.  Those under 35 who did bother favoured Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the aged Trotskyite, or Marine Le Pen, the doyenne of French fascism, over President Emmanuel Macron, who embodies the technocratic centre.

A similar pattern is playing out in the United States. As apathy rises, young voters have tended to favour more ideologically extreme candidates such as Bernie Sanders, who, in the 2016 primaries, won more votes from people under 30 than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. But for the most part, young Americans are rejecting the system altogether. According to the political scientist Yascha Mounk, while more than two-thirds of older Americans still embrace democracy, only one in three millennials do.

It would be one thing if people were merely tuning out of politics, but they are increasingly dropping out of the economy as well.  In Japan, the historical heartland of workaholics, observers in the Eighties began to note the rise of the “shinjinrui”, or the “new race”. These were young people who rejected work for a life as “freetors”, often living with their parents and spending their time traveling, playing video games, and pursuing hobbies. Lately, a similar phenomenon has spread elsewhere in Asia, including China, where millennials have abandoned striving in favour of “lying flat.”

More from this author

The cost of Biden's racialism

By Joel Kotkin

Even before the pandemic there were rising labour shortages in Europe, which are expected to become more severe in the future. But the problem isn’t limited to Europe. In the US, labour-force participation fell from its peak of 67.1% in 2000 to 61% today, according the St. Louis Fed. A 2021 report from the Chamber of Commerce noted that as recently as 2012, there were four available workers for every job. Today that number is barely 1.4, half the historic average.  The decline is particularly marked among men, whose participation rate has dropped by 5% since 1980. Today, an estimated one-third of America’s working-age males are not working.

The answer to why so many are dropping out starts with economics. In the United States, social mobility has declined precipitously over the last four decades. A 2016 study found that since the early Eighties, the chance of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder dropped by approximately 20%. According to projections from Deloitte, by 2030, millennials will be the largest adult generation by far but will own only 16% of the country’s wealth. Gen Xers will hold 31%, while Baby Boomers, who will be entering their eighties and nineties, will control 45%.

Partly, this is a result of the post-pandemic reluctance to take low wages or accept jobs in the “gig” economy, where pay and hours are often uncertain. Some low-wage workers have also found state support during the pandemic to be, in many cases, more profitable than work itself. In countries such as Italy and Spain, high levels of public welfare delinked from work have also been associated with the persistently high unemployment.

More from this author

California needs a recession

By Joel Kotkin

A recent analysis of Federal Reserve data shows that young Americans with a college degree today earn about as much as their Boomer grandparents without degrees did at the same age. Upwards of 40% of recent college graduates have jobs that don’t require a degree at all. In 2018, half of all college grads made under $30,000 annually, and another recent study suggests that most underemployed graduates remain that way permanently.

In Japan and China, too, college graduates face diminishing opportunities. And unhappiness among the young is growing across the developed world. A 2017 study found that young people in France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany were even more pessimistic about the future than their American counterparts.

This rising disaffection has severe implications for our political and economic health. Capitalism certainly is not in good stead. A strong majority of people in 28 countries around the world believe capitalism does more harm than good. More than four in five worry about job loss. It’s hard to sell a system that provides so little opportunity, particularly for new entrants and small firms.

It is possible to imagine a future society in which a small, hyper-productive managerial elite delivers food, housing, and pleasure to unemployed and demotivated plebs. This idea has wide acceptance among American tech oligarchs. According to Greg Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders, most believe that “an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.” This notion, usually associated with Universal Basic Income (UBI), has been endorsed by numerous oligarchs, including Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman.

Suggested reading

Big Tech's threat to democracy

By Matthew Crawford

This prospect — of governments providing their citizens with unearned lucre to boost consumption — would seem a natural fit for a population that is unmotivated and often lacks useful skills. Rather than working, people can live in subsidised apartments and spend their time feeding their cats, losing themselves in the emerging metaverse, drinking, and smoking pot as they grow old without ever starting a family. A prototype for this model has already been glimpsed in America’s Covid-19 relief program and in Biden’s proposed Build Back Better plan, which would have extended benefits to those who were able to join the workforce but don’t care to.

Some may call this socialism, but it is closer to Brave New World. Marxists and social democrats, whatever their flaws, traditionally celebrated work. They did not envision a a stagnant, oligarchic society that would come to resemble the last centuries of the Roman Empire or Qing dynasty China. As author Aaron Renn suggests, societies where income transfers have become a way of life tend to be bad for their members. Native American tribes that receive a form of de facto UBI from casinos show shocking levels of drug abuse, alcoholism, and idleness.

In the future, the disaffected masses could find themselves living more like prisoners than citizens. Avoiding that outcome requires finding ways to replace disaffection with ambition and a commitment to human progress. “The habit of despair is worse than despair itself,” Albert Camus noted in The Plague. Absent a recommitment to growth and democracy, we can expect a future of stagnation and ever-growing inequality — one in which we, lacking the will and capacity to create new riches, may find ourselves reduced to fighting, like junkyard dogs, over the scraps of a diminished world.

When my name is read out, I affect a smile for the benefit of my mum. There is a wicked pleasure to feeling so removed from such a major life event. The choirboys and bagpipes add extravagance to an already surreal spectacle: beyond the screen, we are afforded no interlude from the cacophony of the present job crisis (for which the university’s emphasis on “networking” over the years has done little to prepare us). My precarious situation has, by now, clearly become a monomania, through whose filter any show of gaiety appears in bad taste.

I belong to what some unpalatably call “Generation Covid”. Just as I and thousands of other graduates were preparing to enter the job market last May, open vacancies dropped by 278,000 and two thirds of graduating students saw applications paused or withdrawn due to the pandemic. Since then, job-hunting has bordered on the farcical: an entire corpus of myths has originated from the effort by applicants to understand the dos and don’ts of the hiring process.

The practical value of university degrees has been publicly called into question, and academic career services have finally revealed their raison d’être: none whatsoever. And so CVs are handed out like flyers, in a scattershot fashion. Most of them are bound to disappear into a black hole: my couple hundred applications obtained a total of two interview invitations. Rejection letters, too, were provided only by a courteous minority.

Suggested reading

Will 'Coronnials' be scarred for life?

By Eliza Filby

Some of us young jobseekers cannot rely on generational wealth and a family home to sustain us through this crisis. My single mum raised me way beyond her financial means: though I missed nothing growing up, supporting us through her freelancing gigs was never what you’d call a breeze. A recent eviction notice has eroded the little security we had left, and made finding employment crucial to affording rent elsewhere.

Whenever applying to a role, I wish I could convey all that is contingent on the simple “yes” or “no” of my faceless correspondent. I yearn to explain that, even though my CV looks like that of countless others, a secure position means an immensity more to me than what is discernible. Yet, an unwritten rule binds me to reticence.

Indeed, I was cautioned many times against “seeming desperate” as something of an indecency, an assault on recruiters’ sensibilities. Need, and in particular, financial need, seems doomed to always achieve the opposite effect to the one desired: to repel, rather than to conjure assistance. This is informed by the very structure of job applications, and, specifically, of equal opportunities’ forms. I am asked about my ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and religion, but a crucial (perhaps, the most crucial) feature of my candidacy appears to never be of any relevance: household income. This way, a company is able to reach its yearly diversity target and give itself a good pat on the back, while those in most desperate need of work go unrecognised.

I am living proof that these questionnaires are wholly inadequate at reckoning with the complexity of personal circumstances. The “working class background” checkbox, strictly speaking, does not fit me: up to some point, I could afford traveling abroad and a private education. Now, however, a knock on the door evokes images of bloodthirsty creditors, and, by night, I dream about my adventures as the best-dressed bag lady in Covent Garden, a modern Eliza Doolittle minus the accent.

Ticking the “BAME” box, too, involves a contradiction: I may have non-white blood in me, but I was raised exclusively by a white mum. My language, education, and life experiences are entirely European. Yet, I dare anyone call me an impostor for applying to opportunities reserved to candidates from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. I am obliged to deform reality by a screening system that favours perception over experience.

Suggested reading

Generation corona has been handed a life sentence

By Will Tanner

The checkbox forms, the automated emails, the applicant tracking software – all accommodate a hiring process that caters to optimisation, rather than human interaction. Requests of feedback are predominantly ignored by recruiters, I suspect, not due to the “overwhelming amount of applications received”, as every single rejection email invariably recites, but to the fact that machines are, as yet, unable to express personalised criticism.

I may have been born in the digital era, but I still resent the alienating quality of modern job-hunting. Instead of it being geared to suit me, the human applicant, I am the one having to blunt my idiosyncrasies, legacy, urgencies — all that makes me me, and not somebody else — to suit the mechanised screening process.

Last November, my Zoom assessment day with a well-known social enterprise gave me a hypnotising taste of the assembly line. About twelve of us were passed over from one desensitised recruiter to another, with the job of evaluating whether our answers would align with the company’s listed “competencies”. Candidates who, even unwittingly, resisted standardisation like myself were discarded with ease.

A lot of time and emotional investment went into my prep; even so, they had the cheek to turn me down without feedback. This time I was not in for it, however: I engaged in a hunt that lasted two weeks, until, finally, a videocall was arranged. The woman on the other side of the screen, who had only her audio on, giggled as she invited me to disable my own video, clearly more comfortable addressing a disembodied voice than a feeling person just like herself. It looks like, in a more or less unconscious attempt to delay being supplanted by them, human recruiters are also increasingly adjusting to robotic modes.

The tribulations of young jobseekers are brushed under the carpet not only by all political parties, but also by those responsible for keeping them accountable for their shortcomings. As, a couple of months ago, the media were busy contending over whether Suzanne Moore’s essay from decades ago should or should not have been considered evidence of her transphobia, Rishi Sunak’s plans to cut welfare payments and ending furlough within the spring went relatively unchallenged. The amount of activistic effort that goes to waste in the realm of symbolism and semantics could be almost comical, if it didn’t end up diverting politics away from the material predicaments of large sections of society.

Suggested reading

The generation betrayed by Boris

By Louise Perry

Perhaps unemployment would earn its own hashtag if its impact on mental health — a catch-all term that nonetheless holds the power to prick ears up — was seriously explored. Unemployment does not just hurt people’s chances at wealth and stability; it also undermines their sense of self. More than 70 years ago, Simone Weil taught, in her essay Need for Roots, that, just like the body needs nourishment, the soul, too, has its own set of needs. Among them are responsibility and honour, which indicate human hunger for productivity, accountability, and public recognition for our deeds. Living on Universal Credit is not enough for me to feel whole. Instead, my labour is necessary to me — in that, when made to experience its value and utility, I also perceive myself to be useful and valuable. Without it, I feel more unsure in myself, feebler.

During this pandemic, policies have failed to reflect this common need for purpose, instead treating citizens as mere consumers. Much thought has gone into strategies for safely letting people out of their homes, straight into shops and pubs, wallets ajar, whereas none has been employed to ponder the harmful effects of prolonged economic inactivity on people’s sense of worth as human beings.

I don’t just speak for myself when I say that joblessness has made me anxious, more sad and more resentful towards institutions than ever. Though unable to progress as time progresses, I can feel myself growing old with unnatural clarity every day. Yet I, like so many other job-seekers, am not lost, let alone part of some “lost generation”. We do not want to be shut away and forgotten. What we want is to be seen for exactly what we are: the very individuals on whose strength the sound course of the rest of the century depends.

“No”, he answers — the threat of “technological unemployment” is now real. Susskind isn’t the first to write a robots-will-replace-you book. He won’t be the last. But he does set out his reasoning with unusual depth and clarity — for which I’m grateful because it makes it easier to understand the flaws in an increasingly influential argument.

*

Susskind’s own version of the argument begins with a pile of crap and then goes on to a load of balls. No, I’m not being rude — those are two of the images he conjures up to explain his thinking.

Let’s start with the crap — specifically, the “great manure crisis” of the late 19th century. Like a lot of stories about our Victorian forebears, this one doesn’t really stand up. Horse-dependent cities such as London and New York weren’t in any danger of being buried under horse manure, for the very simple reason that it was regularly removed and used as fertiliser. But, as the author points out, it ceased to be an issue at all when transport was motorised. Horses, once integral to the urban economy, disappeared from our cities, never to return.

Suggested reading

There's no such thing as factory farming

By Peter Franklin

Will technological progress do the same to the human workforce? That’s what economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Wassily Leontief have supposed — and Susskind, also an economist, agrees with them. In the final third of his book he sets out a policy response, but I’m more interested in why he thinks it will be necessary.

To sum up what he thinks the future of work looks like, he imagines the economy as a giant ball pit. Blue balls represent the tasks that human beings are the best at doing, and red balls those where machines have the advantage. He then paints a picture of how the ball pit changes over time. For most of human history, almost all the balls are blue. A few go red with early mechanical inventions, but then the industrial revolution happens and the process massively speeds up. As we hurtle past the present day and into the future, there are more and more red balls. Though some blue ones persist in the mix, they’re too few in number and small in size to provide a basis for anything like full employment.

This is Susskind’s vision of the future. It’s not “a boot stamping on a human face forever”, like in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, but rather the relentless shrinking of our balls.

Of course, it’s not the future yet. Though machines have never been more productive as they are today, the same can be said of human beings, which is why there have never been as many jobs as there are now.

Susskind himself speaks of an “Age of Labour” in which “successive waves of technological progress have broadly benefitted rather than harmed workers”. He does a great job of explaining why the “substituting force” that machines have on the demand for human labour has, on the whole, been exceeded by the “complementing force” — i.e. the tendency of mechanisation to increase the productivity of, and demand for, human workers.

The Age of Labour will only end if the complementing force is persistently and pervasively overwhelmed by the substituting force. This has never happened before. For it to happen in the foreseeable future, requires some disruptive technology that’s never existed until now.

There’s an obvious candidate: AI or artificial intelligence. (If we define an AI-controlled machine as a robot, then we can include robotics under this heading too.)

*

The story of research into AI stretches back to the post-war era. But, as Susskind reminds us, the founders of AI got off to a false start. Their big mistake was to think they could build a human-like intelligence. Needless to say, they got nowhere. Eventually the funding dried up and research ground to a halt (the “AI winter”). The field revived when developers realised that they didn’t have to mimic the human brain to computerise tasks that previously only a human could undertake. Instead, they exploited the capacity of computers to learn through trial and error. In the right circumstances, they’re very good at this — possessing vast processing power and infinite patience.

Suggested reading

What you need to learn about machine learning

By Peter Franklin

Not that they are patient of course. Not being conscious, nor possessing anything that could be called a mind, they don’t have human qualities. Even the ‘intelligence’ in ‘artificial intelligence’ and the ‘learning’ in ‘machine learning’ are just metaphors. But that’s beside the point, says Susskind. No matter how mindless and mechanistic AI might be, what really counts is what it can do, not how it does it.

He describes the new wave of AI research as the ‘pragmatism revolution’ and there’s no doubt that it’s made breakthroughs. For instance, AI systems have been trained up to achieve total supremacy in games like chess and Go. There have been big advances in speech recognition, language translation and medical diagnosis software. AI is literally driving progress in automated vehicle technology. Facial recognition systems are now sufficiently advanced to raise serious concerns over civil liberties.

So just how far will the revolution go?

*

There’s long been a distinction drawn between routine and non-routine jobs — or, rather, routine and non-routine tasks. A routine task is one that can be taught as a ‘how to’ set of instructions — which is not the case with non-routine tasks. For instance, operating a till in a supermarket is routine; cutting someone’s hair (to an acceptable standard) is not.

The conventional thinking is that the first kind of work can be automated, but not the second — which is why we have automated tills and cash points, but no robot hairdressers. The key point is that because most jobs involve at least some non-routine tasks they’re safe from the robots.

Or are they? Look at the way that smart meters have replaced human meter readers. It wasn’t necessary to create a robot that can knock on your door, ask to be let in, find the meter, read it and report back to HQ. Instead, you just need a small box that sits in the meter cupboard, sending in the readings electronically. All the non-routine aspects of the meter reader’s job are thus eliminated, allowing the role to be fully automated.

Suggested reading

Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

Of course, that won’t work with every job. You can’t eliminate the non-routine aspect of a hairdresser’s work, i.e. cutting hair, because that’s the whole point of it. Susskind, however, argues that AI is finding ways of turning non-routine tasks into routine ones. 

For instance, there might not seem to be anything routine about playing chess at a professional level. There are various principles and strategies that can be taught to any reasonably intelligent individual, but there is no list of instructions that one can follow to become a grandmaster. Except now there is — if you’re a sufficiently advanced chess computer. AI systems like AlphaZero have taught themselves how to play chess, encoding the instructions as a very complex algorithm that can be applied to any particular game.

It’s not that AI researchers have cracked the secret of human mastery of chess. The computers that can beat any grandmaster do so mindlessly — they don’t need to be conscious or creative or cunning. All that’s necessary is the brute processing power of the silicon chip — plus some smart machine learning software kindly supplied by some helpful humans.

Far from being reassured by the fact that there’s been zero progress towards the creation of a true machine mind, Susskind’s key point is that the ‘narrow’ AI systems that do exist are nevertheless routinising tasks previously thought to be non-routine. Thus a crucial limitation on the automation of human work has been lifted. The process of task encroachment is therefore fundamentally unconstrained.

Suggested reading

Which is worse, work or no work?

By Peter Franklin

The implication is that the substituting force of technology will continue, while the complementing force falters. The ongoing automation of tasks will free up resources that can be devoted to other tasks — but increasingly that demand will be satisfied by further AI-controlled machines instead of humans. The routinisation of more-and-more non-routine tasks would thus mean less-and-less need for us. 

Do you feel those balls shrinking yet?

*

But what if there’s nothing particularly special about AI? What if there’s nothing new about routinising non-routine tasks? 

Though Susskind clearly understands that an AI isn’t a true intelligence, he does suggest that they are nonetheless things of wonder. He draws a parallel between the mindlessness of AI and the godlessness of Charles Darwin’s account of the natural world. Though he had no place for a divine creator, Darwin still believed in the “grandeur” of life. The products of both AI and natural selection may arise from a mindless, bottom-up process, but nevertheless they can inspire “an almost religious sense of awe.”

As well as bigging-up our “unhuman machines”, Susskind is also keen on “demystifying human beings” and “not granting them magical powers”. Indeed, he rails against what he calls the “superiority assumption” — the idea that we’re special and will always be indispensable.

This is where the deepest flaws in his argument are exposed.

I once had a colleague who was a gifted draughtsman. Using nothing more than a pencil and a piece of paper he could draw a near perfect square or circle. There were slight deviations, of course, but they didn’t distract from the essential squareness or circularity of what he’d drawn. Beyond the basic techniques, there are no instructions for achieving that quality of draughtsmanship — it only comes with practice and then only to those with natural talent. It is certainly non-routine.

And yet the task of drawing a square or a circle can be routinised using nothing more than some simple tools. So should we discern “grandeur” in something as basic as a plastic ruler — just because it provides a commonplace substitute for a rare talent? Should we think any less of what a draughtsman can do because some of it can be replicated by the contents of a child’s geometry set?

Many of our tools and machines routinise non-routine tasks. A camera captures a landscape in greater detail than any painter; a record player plays music with greater consistency than any musician. But which is superior, the machine or the artist?

Machines, including AI systems, can mindlessly do things that people do mindfully. But even if the outputs are comparable, the difference between the inputs remain all-important. The mind that allows the draughtsman to draw a pleasing square is also what enables him to design and build a cathedral. 

Creativity requires consciousness. AI has been able to automatise various tasks, both routine and non-routine, because there are ways of doing them without creativity, common sense or any other faculty that depends on a conscious mind. But just because this method works with games that have clearly defined rules and with various kinds of pattern recognition, it doesn’t mean that AI methods would work in most other domains of human endeavour. To assume there is an algorithm waiting to be discovered for just about anything human workers can do, is just that — an assumption, one unsupported by compelling evidence.

Suggested reading

How gamification makes losers of us all

By Peter Franklin

Another assumption is that there really is nothing “magical” about human consciousness, that it is purely material in origin. But even then, one would then have to ask why natural selection would go to all the trouble of evolving such an unfathomably mysterious feature, instead of relying solely upon the biological equivalent of the algorithmic processes that AI uses. Perhaps the explanation is that conscious thinking is so much more capable.

*

Ultimately, an AI system is just another tool. It may be a very useful tool, but, being mindless, it’s got a lot more in common with a plastic ruler than a human being. AI technology isn’t even unique in making a routine out of the non-routine. That’s been going on for millennia with much simpler machines.

To prove his point, Susskind would have to show that AI has accelerated the process of task encroachment to a level never seen before in human history. But he doesn’t.

Indeed, one has to ask whether the process is slowing down. Just think about our home lives. My grandparents, who were born at the beginning of the 20th century, lived through changes of immensely greater significance than anything I’ve experienced. In particular, my grandmothers were liberated from a life of utter drudgery by domestic technologies like electric lighting, central heating, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the gas cooker and the refrigerator. Nothing in more recent decades compares to the importance of these machines. The wretched smartphone doesn’t even come close.

Where are the great labour saving devices of the 21st century? If task encroachment is all set to make us redundant, then why are we still doing the ironing?

*

Susskind is not a engineer and his book is not a technical manual. Rather he’s an economist and therefore what we might expect from his profession is statistical evidence that AI is transforming the economy. If a revolution really is underway, it should show up in lower employment levels and a much higher rate of productivity growth. He does cite various economic trends, for instance job losses in the manufacturing sector, but these are better explained by factors like outsourcing, offshoring and immigration.

Suggested reading

Sod the singularity

By Peter Franklin

That’s not really a criticism. The reason why killer facts are absent from his book is because they don’t exist. Not yet, anyway. What A World Without Work does provide, however, is a conceptual framework that can be tested against the evidence as it comes in.

Until it does come in, we can only argue the case on a theoretical level. On that score, I have deep disagreements with Susskind’s argument. 

Nevertheless, where he does go wrong, it’s always in an interesting way. Which is more than you can say for any machine.

Scylla was a absolute horror who lived on one side of the Strait of Messina. With six heads, each on a long neck, she’d reach down and pluck unfortunate sailors from passing ships. Charybdis lived on the other side of strait, but underwater. She really sucked — generating a whirlpool to capsize entire vessels.

The gruesome twosome feature in the Odyssey. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, has to navigate the strait — twice — and only just survives.

Like all myths, the story works on a number of levels. There’s the story itself, of course — and monsters are always good for a ripping yarn. Then there’s the super-naturalisation of things in the real world; in this case, the two fiends personify the shipping hazards of razor-sharp rocks and treacherous currents. Most important, though, is the deeper meaning — the moral of the tale.

Suggested reading

Brexit, Thunberg and the dangers of blind hope

By Daniel Kalder

Scylla and Charybdis — ‘the devil and the deep blue sea’ — symbolise the complexities and dilemmas of risk. In life, there’s often more than one danger to watch out for. Veering away from the first can take you too close to the second.

An added level of mythic meaning is that the two monsters are not mirror images of each other. The danger posed by Scylla perched high upon her rock is much more obvious than that posed by Charybdis submerged beneath the waves. This too is of contemporary significance.

Take, for instance, the extremes of Left and Right in modern politics. There are many asymmetries between the communist and fascist systems. Both are essentially totalitarian, with a blood-soaked history, but some of the evils of one can appear to have no parallel in the other. This is a reason why those repelled by the most characteristic features of communism have sometimes veered too close to fascism — and vice versa.

*

Politics is full of bad ideas that come in pairs — to navigate our way between them we need to be aware of both. An increasingly important example is that of workism versus a tendency which I’m going to call anti-workism (though you could see it as a kind of consumerism).

In a brilliant essay for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson provides the following definition of workism:

“…the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

Examples of the workist policy framework include the push to get people off welfare and into the labour market, the raising of the retirement age, state subsidies and tax breaks for childcare to get parents (especially mothers) of young children back into paid employment ASAP, and the expansion of the workforce through large-scale immigration.

Even policies that, in the short-term, shrink the size of the workforce, such as the expansion of higher education, ultimately serve a workist purpose — i.e. supplying the so-called knowledge economy with a steady stream of suitably qualified new recruits. Of course, there’s plenty of talk of education for its own sake, but the cost of tuition and the accompanying burden of student debt is sold on the basis of the ‘graduate premium‘ — a thoroughly workist proposition.

Suggested reading

Freud would know why we're all workaholics

By Giles Fraser

Workism may go hand-in-glove with hyper capitalism, but it cuts across political lines. Left-leaning Millennials and Post-millennials flock to global cities because that’s where the best employment opportunities are. For some, opportunity equals money. But for many others ‘meaning‘ is equally, if not more, important; which is why employers, especially in the creative industries, can get away with unpaid internships and other forms of exploitation. Alternatively some industries, such as management consultancy and corporate law, will pay top whack for the brightest new talent, but will use that money to own their employees’ lives, insisting on long hours in the office plus the electronic leash of the smartphone.

Of course, technology can be used to exploit low paid workers too — digital platforms serving to control a workforce without the responsibility of formally employing it.

*

I don’t want to overdo the dystopianism here. Workism works out for a lot of people and not only those at the top of the tree. It’s certainly preferable to mass unemployment. Nevertheless, our economy, society, culture and politics have become so centred around workist ideas that it’s not surprising that we see a reaction in the form of anti-workism.

This has several strands. There’s the obvious-because-it’s-true argument that there’s more to life than work. If family and community life are being sacrificed to the demands of the labour market — or even basic needs like sleep — then clearly that’s not good.

Then there’s the Marxist critique — which views wage labour in a capitalist society as exploitation. More recent intellectual developments on the Left, such as accelerationism, anticipate and advocate a post-work society in which machines replace workers and a benevolent state meets our material needs — leaving us to occupy our days with macramé or something.

Suggested reading

Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

This fever-dream isn’t exclusive to the Left. Ideas such as a universal basic income paid by the state to every citizen are finding favour among centrists too and even a few conservatives.

The problem with the idea of a post-work society is that despite all the automation, globalisation and immigration we’ve already experienced, most western countries (excepting the victims of the Eurozone) are at, or close to, full employment. Some, like the UK, are experiencing record levels of job creation.

Therefore, a more mainstream form of anti-workism forgets the science fiction and concentrates on present-day issues such as stagnant wages, low pay and poor working conditions. One might think that the obvious solution to these problems is a programme to boost wages and opportunities in the workplace. For instance, through investment in productivity-improving factors like skills and infrastructure.

But instead of emphasising work, the contemporary Left in Britain and America emphasises consumption. Labour’s 2019 manifesto was a case in point — with its high profile offers of state-provided free stuff, like free broadband. (Significantly, the most notable work-related policy was for a transition to a four-day work week, the priority being placed on less work not better work.)

The Right has its own version of enhanced consumption as compensation for rubbish jobs. Unlike the Left, however, the Right’s consumerist offer relies on the market to (literally) deliver the goods. It’s all about cheap stuff, if not free stuff, and nothing must stand its way: domestic markets are left unprotected; offshoring is encouraged; infrastructure spending subsidises global supply chains; the embedded carbon in imports is left unaccounted for; and the tax avoidance of the tech giants is ignored while they disrupt the economy. As long as we get our smiley cardboard boxes, everything’s fine. So shut up about that pay rise, peasant, and enjoy your flatscreen telly.

*

So there you have it: workism and anti-workism — the Scylla and Charybdis of the 21st century economy. Because they present conflicting narratives — work-is-everything versus work-is-for-robots — it is easy to recoil from one and fall into the grip of the other.

How then do we navigate between them?

Firstly, we need to move beyond the idea of work-life balance as if work and life are entirely separate things. They ought not to be. Yes, the potential exists for work to crowd-out the other parts of life but it can enrich them, too — and not just materially. For instance, places of work have a vital role to play as generators of social capital. They ought to be, and often are, community institutions — which is why the damage done by the collapse of industries isn’t only economic.

Suggested reading

The rise of the hippie conservatives

By Freddie Sayers

Secondly, we should reject the compromise position that divides society between people who ‘live to work’ (and therefore might benefit from workism) and people who ‘work to live’ (and therefore need anti-workism). With very few exceptions everyone needs a life outside work and work in their lives. We must not allow work to become a positional good — a blessing only to a lucky few.

Thirdly, we need to be aware that while workism and anti-workism appear to be opposites, they actually feed off one another. Tech lords such Mark Zuckerberg may flirt with the idea of Universal Basic Income, but until that distant day comes they need us in jobs earning money so we can buy their stuff. It doesn’t matter if you’re not in the knowledge class and thus supposedly about to be replaced by a robot, you must work to consume.

If, however, you are in the knowledge class, then it’s the other way round: you must consume to work. That’s because you can’t devote every waking hour to your job without buying support services that free up your time (e.g. taxis, restaurants, childcare, cleaning and laundry services, to-the-door deliveries and all rest of it). To maximise this capacity, service workers need to be cheap and plentiful, which in turn requires the state to provide enough free stuff to make their low-paid, unsatisfying jobs bearable — and their lives in overpriced global cities feasible.

*

Scylla and Charybdis always were partners in crime. But somewhere, beyond their reach, there is the prospect of a very different society.

Whether it would be richer, in aggregate, I don’t know. But it might be happier.

Suggested reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

The impossible economy we’re living in ought to be a matter of intense public debate; but, for reasons I explore here, our attention is focused elsewhere. Fortunately, not everyone’s forgotten the economy: a thought-provoking new report from the Resolution Foundation aims to explain the jobs ‘miracle’.

Further reading

How the world forgot the financial crash

By Peter Franklin

Let’s start with the facts. Employment levels didn’t just recover after the deepest recession in living memory: they’ve gone on to exceed the high point before the crash when we were supposedly at full employment. As the report sets out, there are three million more people in work now than in 2008 and the employment rate is three percentage points higher.

The authors (Torsten Bell and Laura Gardiner) point out that this has happened in the face of some pretty strong “headwinds” — not only slow growth, but also the demographic greying of the population. Then there was the impact of austerity, in which public sector employment fell (the jobs miracle is thus a private sector jobs miracle).

One might also add the growing ease with which employers can offshore production, not to mention the onward march of automation. Indeed, this is an era in which pundits breathlessly predict wholesale replacement of the human workforce with robots. They may be proved right — eventually; but thank goodness for authors like Bell and Gardiner, who attend to things that are happening on a relevant timescale.

*

How, then, do they explain the great surge in (human) employment? Their argument can be summed up in two words — income shock:

“…real working-age incomes are today only 4 per cent above their pre-crisis levels, rather than the 28 per cent growth we might reasonably have expected.”

It is said this has been the worst decade for wage growth in over 200 years. That’s debatable, but undoubtedly it’s right up there with the 1910s and 1940s, when there were world wars on.

As the authors put it, “we’re a lot poorer than we expected to be” and to compensate for this, they argue, households are working more. If that’s the case, then we’d expect the employment surge to be especially strong in households that (a) have non-employed adults free to enter paid work and (b) a limited capacity to cut their spending. The report shows that this is exactly what’s happened in respect to single parents and “coupled women with children”.

Further reading

The exploited underclass is revolting

By James Bloodworth

Rival explanations are not such a good fit with the data. In particular, the UK labour market, while pretty flexible compared to a lot of other countries, did not become significantly more flexible over the course of this decade. In the early days of the Cameron premiership there was a move to weaken workers’ rights — but, thankfully, it was defeated. Indeed subsequent reforms have placed employers under heavier obligations — especially the National Living Wage and the Apprenticeship Levy.

*

But what about welfare reform? Might that be a better explanation for the rise in employment than wage stagnation? The report shows that the phasing-in of Universal Credit comes too late in the decade to explain the bulk of the jobs boom. However, the authors do concede that other welfare changes — like the squeeze on benefits and the increasing use of sanctions — have done a lot to push people into work.

Meanwhile, increases in the minimum wage and National Living Wage have acted as a pull factor. The same could be said for the raising of the income tax personal allowance, which was £6,475 in 2009/10 and £12,500 in 2019/20 does provide reassurance that work pays and people won’t be penalised for coming off welfare.

Political rhetoric matters too. Both before and after the recession, governments have pushed pro-work, anti-welfare messages (not least because they’re consistently popular with the public). Tony Blair appealed to “hard working families”, Gordon Brown promised “British jobs for British workers” and the Coalition Government championed the cause of “alarm clock Britain” (i.e. that part of the population that gets up early in the morning to go to work, while their non-working neighbours are still in bed).

As the report itself makes clear, the employment surge is concentrated among lower income groups, who also saw stronger earnings growth than the rest of the population. So while the authors make a strong case for the income shock hypothesis, they under-emphasise the role of welfare-to-work policies.

*

There’s something else that the report could have said more about — which is where all those extra jobs came from. Wage stagnation and welfare cuts may have created additional demand for work, but that doesn’t guarantee that employers will supply it.

Over this decade, we’ve seen some severe income shocks in other parts of Europe — but no jobs miracles. It’s not that the Greeks, for instance, lack the British desire to work. Indeed, the country has suffered a devastating drain of youth and talent, with almost half a million Greeks leaving the country in search of employment abroad.

Further reading

The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

If the mere demand for work created jobs we wouldn’t have had three million unemployed in this county during the 1980s, let alone the devastating joblessness of the Great Depression. An especially interesting feature of the jobs boom in this decade is just how widespread it is. It isn’t just limited to London and the South East — in fact, as Bell and Gardiner point out, the “least jobs rich subregions of the country (Merseyside, the West Midlands metro area and South Yorkshire) have all experienced growth during 2008-18 around twice as fast as the average.” Evidently, the “Northern Powerhouse” and “Midlands Engine” are more than just words.

*

One thing is for sure, the British economy is capable of creating and filling jobs to an extent not previously thought possible. Which brings us to the report’s key recommendation, which is that our leaders need to wake up to the new economic realities.

Full employment — i.e. the point at which demand for labour starts outstripping supply — is structurally much higher than it used to be. The risk of the economy overheating through runaway wage inflation is correspondingly lower. Indeed, the greater risk is of the economy falling short of the point at which the labour market is just tight enough to encourage healthy wage growth — plus the investment in productivity that is the ultimate guarantee of our future prosperity.

Further reading

Are we really reaching full employment?

By Peter Franklin

If we’d woken up to the new realities earlier, then, as Bell and Gardiner say, this would have “supported running a looser macroeconomic policy in years gone by.” Macroeconomic policy has monetary and fiscal components, which if loosened would mean lower interest rates and more government borrowing (to fund spending and/or tax cuts). In theory, this would have stimulated the demand that could have meant more growth and higher wages over the last ten years.

In practice, though, it’s hard to imagine how monetary policy could have been any looser since the crash. Interest rates have stayed on the floor, banks have been bailed out and we’ve had repeated doses of quantitative easing. As for government spending, there’s an argument to be made that the restoration of fiscal discipline helped give businesses the confidence to start hiring again. On the other hand, cutting capital spending on infrastructure and other investments in productivity was an obvious own goal.

*

Ultimately, the most important debate isn’t over how best to set the macroeconomic ‘temperature controls’ of the nation, but about what sort of an economy we want. Obviously, we want enough jobs for everybody who needs one. But quality matters as well as quantity. A good job offers more than subsistence. It must also hold out the prospect of a brighter future, as well as providing dignity and fulfilment in the present.

Further reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

Instead of organising UK economic policy around access to a limitless supply of cheap labour, the priorities need to be reordered around investment in people and the communities they live in. Therefore we should be open to global talent, but not use immigration as a tool for suppressing wages; rather than weakening workers’ rights, we should strengthen their preparation for the world of work; and instead of funding transport links that facilitate outsourcing, we should concentrate on local infrastructure that boosts the competitiveness of domestic supply chains and thus the market power of British workers.

As we draw to the close of an extraordinary decade, it’s time to choose a better future. A bargain basement Britain of low wages, low skills and poor prospects is not a good enough – no matter how hard we work.

It’s really not that long ago that the cathode ray tube was a part of everyday life – the vital component in the heavy, box-like TV screens and computer monitors sat in our living rooms and offices.

Suggested reading

Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

As far back as the early 1980s, I remember people speculating that flat screens were “five-to-ten years away”. The joke was that they always would be. But then, suddenly, they arrived – displacing CRT screens just about everywhere.

The thing is that just prior to this revolution, the old technology was never more ubiquitous – thanks to multiple TVs in many homes and computerisation in the workplace.

That’s a pattern worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the puzzling phenomenon of (nearly) full employment in the contemporary capitalist economy. It may be that our robot replacements are lurking, flat screen style, just around the corner. In five-to-ten years we human beings may find ourselves joining those cathode ray tubes on the rubbish heap of history.

But, so far, there’s little sign it. That’s puzzling because even if technologies like advanced robotics and AI aren’t quite in full swing, other potentially job-destroying factors – such as globalisation – certainly are. Furthermore, we’re only ten years on from the calamity of the global financial crisis – and still propping up a low-growth economy with piles of debt, QE and ultra-low interest rates.

And yet, as a special report in The Economist describes, most western economies are generating jobs like there’s no tomorrow:

“Across the OECD a jobs bonanza is under way. In the past five years the group has added 43m jobs. The unemployment rate—the number of people looking for work as a share of the total labour force—is at its lowest in decades… In 2018, the employment rate among people of working age was the highest ever in Britain, Canada, Germany, Australia and 22 other OECD countries.”

Furthermore, the jobs boom doesn’t seem to be leaving many people behind:

“The boom is broad based. Unemployment among unskilled workers and the young is tumbling, as is long-term joblessness.”

The UK’s ‘jobs-led recovery’ is especially interesting. Prior to 2010, private sector job creation was massively skewed to the richer half of the country, but, in this decade, the North-South divide has narrowed dramatically.

Nor can the jobs-boom be explained away as a sub-optimal shift to temporary, part-time and self employment. The big picture is much more solid than that. And as for wage levels, those appear to be on the rise again after a long period of stagnation.

Even if our long-term future is one of ‘fully automated luxury communism’, the present is one of fully employed luxury capitalism.

But to some critics, the ‘luxury’ part of that formula would be better described as ‘unnecessary’:

“David Graeber, an anthropologist, goes further. In ‘Bullshit Jobs’, a book published last year which has become akin to a holy tract for millennial socialists, he claims that a big chunk of modern employment is pointless and soul-sucking. ‘Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed,’ he argues.”

Of course, “bullshit” in this context is a subjective term. Deplorably, there may be some unkind souls who’d apply it to Professor Graeber’s profession!

Isn’t it better to see our surplus-to-requirements economy as a sign of progress? One can argue about how best to achieve and distribute frivolity-for-all, but as long as we don’t wreck the planet in the process, what’s wrong with a little luxury – or, indeed, a lot?

Of course, if luxury for some is only made available through the drudgery of others, then that is a problem. The kind of demoralising service-sector jobs described by writers such as James Bloodworth are clearly nothing to celebrate. And yet, as the anonymous authors of The Economist article point out, governments across the Western world are placing stronger requirements upon employers to look after their employees – for instance, through training opportunities, childcare provision, parental leave, health and safety measures and minimum wage levels.

Suggested reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

Furthermore, and contrary to the prophecies of the free market fundamentalists, pro-worker regulation has not killed off job-creation – quite the opposite it would seem.

The authors offer various explanations for this jobs miracle – the most interesting of which is that technology has revolutionised the process of recruitment:

“Better tech improves the ‘matching’ of employers with potential employees. Not long ago those hiring put an advert in a local newspaper or spread the word by mouth. Now employers can shoot from the hip, posting vacancies on a slew of jobs websites. In the ten years to 2016 the cost of filling a vacancy fell by 80% in real terms.”

I suspect that we’ve hugely underestimated the significance of the progress made in solving this most difficult of coordination problems.

The perception that the digital age hasn’t made more of an impact on productivity levels is one of the great mysteries of contemporary economics. But perhaps we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Or, rather, we’ve been misled by the key statistics.

The standard measure of productivity is specifically one of labour productivity – i.e. GDP divided by the total number of hours worked. But what about hours not worked because people are unemployed – earning nothing and producing nothing? This zero productivity is excluded from the standard measure, making a high unemployment economy look much more productive than it actually is.

If the internet has enabled employers to employ more people and workers to find jobs more easily then it will show up in the statistics as a hit to productivity – because more of the least skilled workers will be included. That is perverse, because while these newly-included individuals may be less productive than other workers, they’re obviously more productive than the uncounted unemployed.

One day the robots may finally arrive with our P45s in their steely claws. But until then we need a better measure of productivity to show the job-creating effects of technology as a plus not a minus.

Suggested reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By John Cruddas

Contrary to expert opinion, America has been adding hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the past two years. Last year, the nation’s manufacturers added 284,000 jobs – the most in any year since 1995. That comes on top of the 207,000 additional jobs in 2017, itself a reverse of patterns in the final two years of the Obama Administration.

Trump might not deserve the credit for this, but the timing of the gains strongly suggests he does. Federal government data shows that manufacturing jobs started to increase in December 2016. The gains continued throughout 2017, and accelerated in late 2017 after it became clear that the President’s large corporate tax cuts were likely to pass Congress. Correlation does not prove causation, but it’s hard to imagine what other circumstances were more important to manufacturing’s health than Trump’s election and his agenda.

Suggested listening

Is Trumponomics really helping blue-collar workers?

By Henry Olsen

The problem for Trump, however, is that the Rust Belt is not getting the bulk of those new jobs. Data shows that less than 89,000 of the 503,000 manufacturing jobs gained since November 2016 were in the five Rust belt states whose switch from Obama to Trump decided the election.[1. (Wisconsin;  Pennsylvania;  Ohio; Michigan;  Iowa.] Moreover, the number of jobs varied significantly among these states. The smallest of the five states, Iowa and Wisconsin, obtained nearly half of the new jobs. The largest, Pennsylvania, gained just 7,700 new manufacturing jobs, barely a ripple in the state’s large economy.

The uneven distribution of jobs can also be seen within the Rust Belt states themselves. Ohio, for example, has gained over 21,000 manufacturing jobs since Trump’s victory. Yet the hard-hit Youngstown area, site of many closed steel mills and a region with some of the largest swings towards Trump in 2016, has actually lost 2,100 manufacturing jobs in the past two years.

Suggested listening

Trump's white identity politics

By Lynn Vavreck

Michigan, which Trump won by only 11,000 votes, has received nearly 16,000 new manufacturing jobs since he won. But 7,000 of them are in the Grand Rapids and nearby Muskegon regions. Long troubled areas like Flint, meanwhile, are experiencing a continued loss of coveted manufacturing work.

The states really benefiting from the manufacturing upsurge, perhaps not surprisingly, are mainly the same ones which were growing quickly before Trump.[2. See data.] Texas, America’s second largest state, has added over 56,000 manufacturing jobs during the Trump era. The fast-growing Southeast has added another 62,000; while Arizona and Nevada – which have grown rapidly over the past two-plus decades – added more than 30,000. Even tiny Idaho, which is about one ninth the size of Pennsylvania, has added 6,000 manufacturing jobs under Trump – nearly as many as the once-great Keystone State itself.

This gap highlights one of America’s most pressing political challenges: how to ensure that growth is widespread. As in many Western countries, America’s economic growth for the past decade has primarily occurred in large metropolitan areas, and has mainly benefitted people with more advanced education.

Increases in manufacturing jobs are intended to help ‘spread the wealth around’, as they are more often filled by people without college or post-graduate degrees. But if the jobs these people can fill are not going to the places they live, then that’s a problem.

Suggested listening

Why the Democrats need the Deplorables

By Henry Olsen

People could, of course, move to fill these jobs, but the evidence suggests that this is not happening quickly enough. Fast-growing Texas, for example, gained a net 467,000 Americans in 2017. Only 35,000 of these, or about 5%, came from the five economically hard-hit Rust Belt states mentioned above. That is far below the 13.3% of the population that the five states comprise.[3. See Table 1]

This strongly suggests that rather than move in search of economic opportunity, many Rust Belt residents are staying put, adding to the political tensions caused by living in towns and areas that are no longer vibrant.

Of course, two years is a very short time in which to change the economic trajectory of a large country. It may be that the significant uptick in manufacturing job growth seen in 2018 will accelerate in the coming years and be more evenly spread throughout the country. That could start to turn around depressed Rust Belt cities, and in the process help Trump’s re-election chances by demonstrating that he could keep promises that national elites thought foolish from the start.

If that does not happen, however, Trump’s re-election chances will likely suffer even if aggregate national growth figures look healthy. The people who put their faith in him may have signed on to a campaign that intended to “Make America Great Again”, but what they really wanted was to make their lives great again. If Trump fails to do that, big job gains in other parts of the country won’t matter to the folk whose dashed dreams are symbolised by the shuttered factory around the corner.

Suggested reading

How politics is poisoning the truth

By Graeme Archer

Further reading

Advanced economies shouldn't depend on cheap labour

By Peter Franklin

In an important article for Bloomberg, Kai-Fu Lee, encourages us to take a different perspective. What will robotics and AI do to jobs in the developing world?

“Artificial intelligence is dramatically accelerating the automation of factories and taking over routine tasks such as customer service or telemarketing. AI does such jobs cheaper than the low-wage workers of the developing world and, over time, will do them better. Robots examining your iPhone for scratches don’t take vacations for Chinese New Year; AI customer-service agents don’t demand pay raises.”

For any given range of jobs where automation is a viable option, one would expect those paying the highest wages to be prioritised. So does that mean that developing economies, with their comparatively low wage levels, are safe?

Not necessarily. Offshoring may save on payroll costs, but can be expensive in other ways. Distance from home markets and the difficulty of operating in an unfamiliar regulatory environment can both take their toll. Then there’s the potential threat to intellectual property and the opportunities for efficiency improvement that get lost when the shopfloor is a half-a-world-away from designers, engineers and other specialists.

It seems likely that many companies would re-shore their manufacturing facilities and call centres if they didn’t have to pay higher wages – or, indeed, any wages.

That could have devastating consequences for the countries left behind:

“Without a cost incentive to locate in the developing world, corporations will bring many of these functions back to the countries where they’re based. That will leave emerging economies, unable to grasp the bottom rungs of the development ladder, in a dangerous position: The large pool of young and relatively unskilled workers that once formed their greatest comparative advantage will become a liability — a potentially explosive one.”

China, though, will be fine.

As highlighted before on UnPacked, the Chinese want much more for themselves than to be the ‘workshop of the world’; Chinese demographics mean that the country can’t rely on an endlessly abundant labour supply; and, in any case, Chinese technological expertise and domestic consumer markets are strong enough to keep a heavily automated manufacturing sector at home.

Further reading

The innovation game: Can China regain its lead over the West?

By Peter Franklin

The real threat is to those much poorer countries that hope to get the sort of jobs from China that China once got from the West. In other words, if robotics and AI puts an end to the advantage of having a young and cost-competitive workforce, it could also end the spread of industrialisation and the prosperity that comes with it.

That looks like especially bad news for Africa – the great population growth centre of the 21st century. A different way forward is required:

“…what is an emerging economy to do? The first step is to recognize that the traditional paths to economic development — the China and India models — are no longer viable… The next wave of emerging economies must chart a new course.”

The developing world’s use of new technology to leapfrog entire stages of development that richer countries had to go through is a well-documented phenomenon. Examples include mobile phone-based financial services in places where there are no high street banks or, indeed, high streets. Then there’s the use of distributed forms of renewable energy where there are no electricity grids or big central power stations.

But that’s just for starters. If progress in artificial intelligence results in significant automation of specialisms such as the law, accountancy and education, then developing countries may be able leapfrog a lot of the services infrastructure that appears to be so essential to the functioning of a western economy.

Note that this does not require complete automation. For instance, in ten or 20 years time, an AI ‘law bot’ probably won’t be able to do everything that a London QC can do now, but it might be able to undertake more basic legal work. Such tools could combine to allow developing economies to advance without the highly expensive – and, one might argue, self-justifying – public and private sector bureaucracies that weigh us down in the West.

This would free the brightest and best in rising nations to focus on real entrepreneurship and true innovation.

Well, that’s the optimistic scenario – but why not go for it?

Further reading

How long before the world's youngest continent revolts?

By Daniel Knowles

The latest GDP growth figures are impressive, exceeding 4% in the second quarter, and the unemployment rate is now a paltry 3.9%. Wage growth, which has been low throughout most of the long recovery from the 2008-9 financial crash, has also started to pick up. And there is some evidence that wages are increasing especially quickly in traditional blue-collar occupations, like truck driving, that don’t require college degrees. Even the number of people receiving government disability insurance, who tend to be less educated and skilled, has started to decline after more than a decade of rapid growth.

No one can turn a giant economy around in one year, but these metrics suggest Trumpian economics is working. And yet, aggregate statistics mask as much as they reveal.

Further reading

Work is worth more than a wage

By Henry Olsen

Trump became president on the strength of votes from White people without college degrees. He received particularly strong support from voters outside major metropolitan areas, in the small and medium-sized towns that have seen old-style manufacturing jobs leave over the past thirty years. Aggregate economic growth is great, but America has been growing wealthier overall for decades, even as these areas have moved backwards.

“Make America Great Again” was ultimately a promise that good jobs with good wages would return to these areas and benefit these people. Trump’s success or failure, therefore, should be judged not on the overall economic data, but on whether change is coming to these places.

And that’s when the success story loses some of its varnish. Only fifteen of America’s fifty states had job growth that exceeded the national average between March 2017 and March 2018 – and these are the same places that were growing quickly before Trump’s election places like California, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Dig a bit deeper and you see some of the fastest job growth came in the progressive tech regions of Silicon Valley, the Microsoft-Amazon-dominated Seattle region, and counties around Denver, Houston, Dallas, Austin, and Atlanta. All citadels of the “new economy” that gave Hillary Clinton a much higher share of the vote than they gave Barack Obama.

Further reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

So does this mean Trump has failed? Not quite. The story changes again when we look at wage growth. While some of the usual suspects also had above average wage growth, states like Georgia and New York drop off the list. They are replaced by blue-collar, Midwestern states like Vice President Mike Pence’s home state of Indiana, and Wisconsin, a Democratic-leaning state which was perhaps the most surprising Trump win.

This is consistent with the claim that wages for blue-collar workers are increasing particularly quickly, as these states have a higher share of these employees than the more white-collar-heavy economies of Manhattan and the San Francisco Bay Area. The county with the largest percentage wage growth in the country was in fact Peoria, Illinois (which voted for Hillary Clinton). In this old manufacturing-dominated county average weekly wages surged by nearly 24% last year as local area manufacturers strengthened. That sort of growth is exactly what Trump promised flyover America.

With that level of increase, Peoria is clearly an outlier, but when you look below state level data, there is evidence that both job and wage growth might indeed be picking up in the places in the American Midwest that made Trump president. Employment increased at a faster rate in the areas outside the big cities in three of the five midwestern states that shockingly switched from Obama to Trump.[1. Those five states are Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The three states where employment growth in non-metro areas of those states exceeded the growth in the urban regions are Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.] Average weekly wages increased by more in non-metropolitan counties in one of the other states, Iowa, than in the cities; and wages increased faster in blue-collar and outstate Michigan than they did in high-income, suburban Oakland county. These are tentative signs that wealth is slowly being spread more widely.

Further reading

The elites missed populism's rise (but shouldn't have done)

By Henry Olsen

In 1972, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai famously said it was “too soon to say” when asked what the effects of the French Revolution were. While it turns out he was referring to the student protests of 1968, not the events of 1789, his comment is still instructive. Partisans for and against President Trump over the next year will be quick to assess whether he has kept his economic promises – but they will do so based on what will, at best, be incomplete data.

If four years are too soon to assess the effects of student protests, eighteen months is clearly too soon to determine whether flyover America is heading for better times. Voters will be judging Trump’s economic policy not by national-level metrics, but the direction of the economy in the towns and neighbourhoods in which they live. If politicians and pundits want to determine whether Trump is delivering for the people who put him in the White House, that is where they too should look.

The robot that performed this stunt was the called the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR). It wasn’t a humanoid robot like we’re used to in seeing on screen. Instead, it was a one-arm machine that looked as though it belonged on the factory floor of BMW.

Nor was it completely autonomous. Using a near-infrared camera, the robot followed tiny marks that the researchers had placed on the tissue beforehand. A human was also needed to vacuum away the vapours from burning fat and tissue.

In 2016, the robot performed a similar stunt when it sewed together two segments of pig intestine with stitches that were more regular and leak-resistant than those of experienced surgeons.

For some – the surgeons themselves, perhaps; and those who harbour worrries about robot overlords – it is the stuff of nightmares. But to its creators, it is the future of surgery.

The heroic age of the surgeon, they believe, is coming to an end for the same reasons the age of the pilot and driver did. Robot surgery offers patients more precise and less invasive keyhole surgery than they get from a human with a scalpel, gown and mask. In time, whole new operations may become possible.

More precise surgery means faster operations, quicker recovery times and less chance of secondary infection – of vital importance with an ageing population and the spread of antibiotic-resistant infections. It is predicted that in some countries, 40% of the population may be over 65 by the middle of the century. And deaths from these opportunistic infections could amount to 50 million a year globally by 2050. The robots could save them.

Robotic surgery would also mean busier operating theatres and patients spending less time in hospital beds afterwards. It would make recruitment easier, when the predicted shortage of 100,000 doctors in the USA becomes a reality.

Once humans got over the fear factor, it would also mean fewer mistakes on the operating table. The researchers behind STAR believe that the autonomous features of their robot will develop in a similar way to the autonomous features that are now common on cars. Forward collision avoidance and lane detection were once novel features: now they are standard in the family car.

Likewise, they believe that robots like STAR will slowly take over specific functions from human surgeons until they eventually morph into fully autonomous surgical robots.

Well – that is what the engineers hope. Medicine is a notoriously conservative field. Worries over the safety of the hardware and unforeseen side effects of the surgery have a tendency to reduce innovation to a crawl. This in turn can eliminate competition and drive up prices.

For now, the dominant robot machine on the market is one that was approved 18 years ago, called da Vinci and made by Intuitive Surgical. It is probably better described as a robotic assistant as it is directed by the surgeon.

The surgeon controls the robot’s four arms via a 3D HD screen on a console, allowing her to operate with joysticksand a pedal; computers translate her movements into precisemovements of the robot’s micro-tools, offering greater precision than the human hand. The da Vinci has no autonomous features at all.

Nor are there many of them in existence. For pretty obvious reasons. Each costs an eye-watering $2m to buy and is large enough to fill a standard-sized room – permanently. Furthermore, the yearly maintenance charge can be close to $200,000.  This is the robot for the 1%.

Happily, many of the over 650 patents that protect the technology of the da Vinci have recently expired or are due to expire soon, which should mean that cheaper generic copies will arrive at a hospital near you soon.

These copies won’t be the only new arrivals. We can expect quite a crowd of robotic assistants in the near future, given the size of the potential market that was last year valued at $3,000 million. In six years’ time, it is expected to be worth a whopping $11,000m.

Rushing in is CMR Surgical a British start-up keen to get in on the act. It has launched a robotic assistant called Versius, which has a set of independent, human-looking arms. Unlike the da Vinci, they are light enough to move from theatre to theatre. And they are much cheaper too. The Italian start-up Medical Microinstruments (MMI) has designed a robot intended for reconstructive microsurgery delicate enough to be used on babies. And Auris Health, from its patents, seems to have big ambitions to use to robotics to transform surgery. In all cases, this is man and machine in perfect harmony.

But there is a move to reduce human input behind all this. And, naturally, Google is already in on the act. Johnson & Johnson has teamed up with Google’s life-sciences division, Verily, to form Verb Surgical.Verb is developing a connected digital surgery platform that will incorporate robotics, visualisation, advanced instrumentation and machine learning. STAR’s developers, too, are pushing to make the robot fully autonomous.

It is difficult to imagine medical regulators agreeing to the kind of testing in surgery that has driven experimental self-driving vehicles on to our city streets, yet this would be the necessary step to accelerate the development of such a revolutionary technology.

As prices tumble, more companies enter the market and innovation increases, it’s clear that surgical robots now have the capability to revolutionise surgery for the 99%. But the question remains whether the regulators will let them.

Writing for the Guardian, Andy Beckett explores the ideas of the ‘post-work’ movement:

“…a loose, transatlantic network of thinkers who advocate a profoundly different future for western economies and societies, and also for poorer countries, where the crises of work and the threat to it from robots and climate change are, they argue, even greater…”

“Post-work may be a rather grey and academic-sounding phrase, but it offers enormous, alluring promises: that life with much less work, or no work at all, would be calmer, more equal, more communal, more pleasurable, more thoughtful, more politically engaged, more fulfilled – in short, that much of human experience would be transformed.”

But isn’t work an integral part of life? If it seems so, it’s because we’ve been conditioned, say the post-workists:

“One of post-work’s best arguments is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the work ideology is neither natural nor very old. ‘Work as we know it is a recent construct,’ says [Jeremy] Hunnicutt. Like most historians, he identifies the main building blocks of our work culture as 16th-century Protestantism, which saw effortful labour as leading to a good afterlife; 19th-century industrial capitalism, which required disciplined workers and driven entrepreneurs; and the 20th-century desires for consumer goods and self-fulfillment.

“The emergence of the modern work ethic from this chain of phenomena was ‘an accident of history,’ Hunnicutt says. Before then, ‘All cultures thought of work as a means to an end, not an end in itself.’”

I think this misrepresents both the present and the past. It may come as a surprise to the cognitive elite, but even today most people work to live, not live to work (though this isn’t the same thing as seeing no value in work). As for the notion of a Protestant/capitalist work ethic, the idea that labour has moral content precedes both Protestantism and capitalism by centuries, even millennia.

Consider the Benedictine motto ora et labora (pray and work), or the alternative version laborare est orare (to work is to pray). Going back yet further there’s plenty in the Old Testament about the necessity and dignity of work, for instance the following passage from the book of Proverbs:

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.”

Thinking about the ant and her having no “guide, overseer, or ruler”, I wonder if what the post-workists truly object to is work itself or its regimentation in modern times?

Industrialisation can be seen as a process in which humanity has been mechanised to serve the literal and organisational machines of the capitalist era. From the smoke-belching factories of the 19th century to the high tech production lines of the 21st, it’s easy to draw an equivalence between capitalism and the dehumanisation of work.

Yet, there’s another story to tell about capitalism, which is the liberation of humanity from work. Marian L Tupy sets out the facts in an article for Reason:

“Between 1870 and 1987, working hours in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States declined from roughly 3,000 hours per year to roughly 1,600 hours per year. That’s a reduction of 47 percent. In Japan, an outlier, they declined by 33 percent.”

Do improvements in health and longevity mean that we’re making up these shorter hours over our longer working lifetimes? Quite the opposite, in fact:

“…in 1856 a British male worked 149,700 hours over the course of his lifetime. By 1981 that number dropped to 88,000 hours. That’s a decline of 41 percent.”

And, of course, those shorter working hours come with a massive increase in living standards. Despite the stagnation of wages in the last couple of decades, it’s important not to lose sight of the long view.

Counting hours is not the only way of looking at the progress we’ve made. Think of all the facets of the human experience that we’ve freed from work:

• The end of child labour
• Increasingly long retirements, supported by pensions
• The expansion of higher and further education (not to mention the ‘gap year’)
• The two-day weekend
• Shorter working days and longer holidays

(The entry of women into the paid workforce might seem like a move in the other direction, but it’s beeen enabled by their substantial, if incomplete, liberation from unpaid labour in the home.)

For millions of people, especially the young and the old, the post-work society is already here. For those still in the labour force, work is generally safer and less physically demanding than it was for most people in previous generations.

All of this has been made possible by three things. First, improvements in economic productivity; secondly, the fact that the fruits of this productivity have been widely shared; and, thirdly, people being able to enjoy their additional free time.

Will we be able to sustain these conditions in coming decades?

I’d say we have our work cut out.

Or how about a cauliflower field in Cornwall?

That’s where Sarah Knapton went for her Telegraph report on the latest in agricultural robotics:

“The University of Plymouth is currently working in cauliflower fields in Cornwall to see if a fleet of smart robots could fill gaps in labour market and help cut costs.

Manual labour can represent around half of total costs of agriculture and can sometimes be in short supply, particularly around harvest. So automating the process would not only keep overheads down but make sure farmers are not left with food rotting in fields because of a lack of human workers.”

The robot takes the form of a platform, that supports a mechanical arm – at the end of which is a disconcertingly human-like hand:

“Robotics lecturer Dr Martin Stoelen invented the ‘GummiArm’ robot which moves more like a human than a machine, and has jointed arms which can be made soft or stiff, depending on if the task requires strength, or a more gentle touch.

“Cameras and sensors in its dexterous fingers can also assess the crop as grows, so it can determine exactly which vegetables to harvest, and which to leave, as a human farmer would know instinctively.”

Recommended reading

Test article

By Geoff Heath-Taylor

The problem with relying on human labour isn’t just its cost, but also its availability.

In advanced industrial economies like the UK, the native population isn’t exactly desperate to do low paid, physically grueling, seasonal work; which is why food and farming sector has come to depend on migrant labour. There are now fears that, because of Brexit, the supply of willing workers will dry up – leaving crops to rot in the fields.

Obviously, the way forward is automation. That of course will require investment. It would therefore be wonderful if we had a major source of public funding for agriculture – one worth, say, several billions every year.

As luck would have it, we do! After Brexit, the agricultural subsidy payments currently funnelled through the EU’s famously awful Common Agricultural Policy will revert to national control. This represents a huge opportunity for reform – not least by using subsidies to promote environmental objectives.

Perhaps it’s time to stop thinking about subsidies altogether – and direct funding either as payments for the delivery of public goods (e.g. the enhancement of landscape and biodiversity) or as an investment in business models that aren’t just environmentally sustainable, but financially too.

In a civilised society, there’s no such thing as cheap labour – somebody, somewhere has to pay the price. It might be the taxpayer providing further subsidies in the form of tax credits and housing benefit; it might be local communities impacted by rapid demographic change; and it might be the impact of extreme levels of emigration on the workers’ countries of origin.

In the end, one has to ask whether an economy that depends on cheap labour has any right to call itself advanced.

Recommended reading

The debate over immigration ignores half the issue

By Peter Franklin

The man hasn’t changed his mind since the 1970s, but Corbynism isn’t about the past. The cult inspires mindless devotion, but Corbynism is diverse in its ideological tendencies.

In a deeply fascinating essay for the New Statesman, Jonathan Rutherford critiques one of the most influential of those tendencies – a futuristic and heterodox school of thought called ‘accelerationism’:

“The Corbynistas influenced by the ideas of accelerationism have larger ambitions than Labour’s conventional manifesto policies. They argue for a reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Instead of class struggle driving the course of history, the motor of change is technology. This theory of post-capitalism politics is about unleashing the boundless productive forces of capitalism in order to accelerate technological transformation…”

The idea is that in an era of super-productivity, the state will give us everything we want and robots will do all the work:

“…Everyone will be their own musician and poet in a state of ‘fully automated luxury communism’.”

Jonathan Rutherford is part of the Blue Labour movement – which is non-Marxist, communitarian and often characterised (mostly by its enemies) as culturally conservative. Judging by Rutherford’s arguments, it is also anti-accelerationist:

“For Corbynistas, automation will liberate people from wage labour. A Universal Basic Income will create the conditions to allow each individual to be and do whatever they want. For Blue Labour, work is how people create their lives. They contribute to society and in return receive esteem. Work fulfils the ethic of reciprocity which binds people together and by which we support those unable to work. A Universal Basic Income would undermine social solidarity by increasing the power of the market and state. Workers need more power and control not the promise of free money.”

The accelerationists are right about one thing. Automation really does have the potential to liberate people from drudgery. We can be confident of this because it’s already happened (for example, try washing your clothes without a washing machine).

Recommended reading

Does capitalism have an answer to ‘fully automated luxury communism’?

By Peter Franklin

Automation has also destroyed millions of manufacturing jobs across the developed world. A new wave of innovation in robotics and machine learning is set to go even further – upending basic economic assumptions. Even if one doesn’t agree with their conclusions, the accelerationists are surely right to think about the implications.

However, Rutherford is right to question the desirability of a world without work. We already know what happens to communities when they lose their work-based institutions and worklessness becomes the norm.

Recommended reading

How the decline of American Christianity helps Donald Trump

By Peter Franklin

The accelerationists may protest that in their vision of the future Universal Basic Income will be hugely more generous than today’s welfare system; that, though, is to presume that the only problem with a life of worklessness is a lack of money:

“The pursuit of individual freedom without constraint is a kind of promethean bourgoise version of Marxism. It is the other side of the coin to neo-liberalism and unwittingly represents the interests and preoccupations of a knowledge class. It would destroy the web of communal social relations and values that bind people together.”

Still, at least the Labour Party is having a debate about these issues – unlike their Conservative opponents, who govern as if tomorrow’s economy is going to be substantially the same as today’s.

Spoiler: it won’t be.

In most of the fifty States of America, truck driver is the most common occupation. Trump’s campaign managers knew exactly who they were appealing to.

They also knew what they were appealing to – a sense of working class industrial pride. While conventional politicians like to go on about ‘knowledge workers’, ‘the creative class’ and ‘global talent’, Trump reached out to those who strain their backs and muscles in the workplace, not the gym. And of all the blue collar occupations, which could be emblematic than the one that literally keeps America moving?

Writing for Bloomberg, Conor Sen summarises the importance of what truckers do:

“The trucking industry is unique because it’s the lifeblood of moving goods around the country, representing 70 percent of the nation’s freight volume by weight. Without enough trucks and drivers on the road, some combination of things is going to happen: Shipments will be delayed, and producers will have to pay higher prices to get goods to market.”

Ironically, a shortage of truckers is now one of America’s biggest economic headaches:

“Industry leaders have been complaining about a truck driver shortage for a while, but unlike other industries that have been complaining about worker shortages, we have real evidence both in employment numbers and in business activity that the shortage is starting to have an impact on the economy…

“The level of employment in the truck transportation industry… is essentially unchanged since the middle of 2015. This level happens to coincide with the peak attained in the last economic cycle in 2006.”

Why can’t the industry attract more recruits? Sen provides a surprising explanation:

“Everyone in business and the technology sectors is talking about a future of self-driving trucks – hardly giving prospective workers the incentive to commit to multi-week classes to attain a commercial driver’s license for an industry that might be going away.”

Does the idea that automation causes labour shortages count as an irony, a paradox or a non sequitur?

Perhaps it’s better to think of it as a vicious circle: the push for automation disincentivises investment in skills, with the consequent labour shortages leading to a harder push for automation.

Whatever you call it, this is only going to end one way. Automation will become so widespread as to render the labour shortages irrelevant. (Tesla has already unveiled a semi-automated electric truck that will enable a convoy of vehicles to be driven by a single human driver in the lead vehicle.)

Recommended reading

Will Elon Musk drive a truck through the oil industry?

By Peter Franklin

Once the need for human input is greatly reduced or eliminated altogether, a key constraint on growth will be removed. Until that point, however, the constraints may tighten, throttling productivity, increasing costs and pushing up interest rates.

This will be problematic in itself, but worse it will blind governments to what will come next – a wave of automation that will end the limits on productivity, but also millions of jobs.

Donald Trump might like to remember that robots can’t vote.

And yet, in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson reports on one industry moving in the opposite direction – the US beer industry:

“…between 2002 and 2007, employment at breweries… declined in the midst of an economic expansion.

“But in the last decade, something strange and extraordinary has happened. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of brewery establishments expanded by a factor of six, and the number of brewery workers grew by 120 percent. Yes, a 200-year-old industry has sextupled its establishments and more than doubled its workforce in less than a decade.”

One might suspect that American workers are drowning their sorrows, thereby expanding a market in which new entrants can find a niche. In fact, overall US beer consumption has declined, meaning that the smaller breweries are taking market share from the big players:

“Between 2007 and 2016, shipments from five major brewers—Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, Heineken, Pabst, and Diageo, which owns Guinness—fell by 14 percent. Goliaths are tumbling, Davids are ascendant, and beer is one of the unambiguously happy stories in the US economy.”

It’s a story that runs counter to the conventional wisdom:

“Technology and globalization are supposed to make modern industries more efficient, but today’s breweries require more people to produce fewer barrels of beer. Moreover, consolidation is supposed to crush innovation and destroy entrepreneurs, but breweries are multiplying…”

Does that mean that the commercial success of the craft beer movement is just a load of froth? Is the bitter truth one of collapsing productivity? No, because while Americans are drinking less beer by volume, they’re paying more for it. Quality has trumped quantity – and furthermore the kind of quality that comes not from standardised perfection, but from specialised craftsmanship.

In December, I asked which were the jobs most likely to survive the march of the robots. This was was my conclusion:

“In a world where most goods and services become increasingly abundant as a result of automation, the ability to add to the human experience in an irreplaceable and enriching manner will become evermore valuable.”

Recommended reading

How to save your career from the march of the robots

By Peter Franklin

For many people, beer is one of the things that makes life worth living – not as a means of blotting out the world, but of experiencing it more richly. Controversially, I would venture that there’s more to life than beer alone – which is just as well because we can’t expect micro-breweries to employ everyone. Rather, we need an economy in which craftsmanship of all kinds can flourish.

Governments need to start preparing their people for the mass automation of the workplace. Like it or not, many of the jobs that people do today will be done by robots tomorrow. In finding something else for them to do, culture is a big part of the answer.

By this I mean culture in its widest sense, not just the privileged art forms that conventional ‘culture policy’ is concerned with, but the crafts – like brewing – that add shape and texture to everyday life.

It is here that we can build commercially-viable industries in which people can’t be replaced by robots. If the point of making something is to make living more enjoyable, not more efficient, then the human touch is irreplaceable.

NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed into law by President Clinton in December 1993 – has been headline news in the US. The agreement is currently being renegotiated, as promised by Candidate Trump. In August, President Trump reiterated his view that NAFTA is the “worst trade deal ever made”, and with negotiations seemingly at an impasse, his threat to terminate the deal looks like a real possibility.

We are in the NAFTA (worst trade deal ever made) renegotiation process with Mexico & Canada.Both being very difficult,may have to terminate?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2017

There has been much debate on the pros and cons of NAFTA, but on balance the evidence suggests it’s been beneficial – the problem is, that’s not really the point. Focus on retooling NAFTA is dangerously distracting from the more powerful forces that threaten US jobs.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

Trump’s stance is based on his view that NAFTA has destroyed American manufacturing jobs. For once, the President is factually correct… just. The deal is estimated to have resulted in a net loss of around 100,000 manufacturing jobs.[1. Joshua Meltzer and Danny Bahar, NAFTA under the Trump – the myths and the possibilities, Brookings, 23 February 2017]

That, however, is just part of the story. Research has shown that for each job lost as a result of NAFTA there have been “several hundred thousand dollars of gains to the economy” as a result of increased productivity and lower prices. The cheap consumer goods, which help reduce the cost of living for millions of Americans, are overlooked by Trump. As are the export benefits of NAFTA and the deeply integrated nature of manufacturing supply chains across the three nations. ‘Intermediate goods’, like plastic and steel, are imported tariff-free, which in turn makes American products more globally competitive. Advanced manufacturing and energy are particularly dependent on these goods.[2. Joseph Parilla, How US States rely on the NAFTA supply chain, Brookings, 30 March 2017]

All of which, of course, is little comfort to those Americans whose solid, well-paid manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and who haven’t benefited from the new, higher paid jobs that have been created.[3. Research on the impact of NAFTA shows that on average, export-related jobs pay 7-15% more than lost import-competing jobs; Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Cathleen Cimino and Tyler Moran, NAFTA at 20: Misleading Charges and Positive Achievements, Peterson Institute for International Economics, May 2014] To them it’s simple: NAFTA equals job-killer. That was the view of my Atlanta customs officer, and it’s widely shared – Americans show the lowest support for NAFTA of all three nations, just 51% see the deal as a good thing (compared to 74% of Canadians and 60% of Mexicans).[4. Bruce Stokes, ‘Views of NAFTA less positive – and more partisan – in U.S. than in Canada and Mexico’, Pew Research Centre, 9 May 2017]

There’s no blank page

The problem is that scrapping NAFTA isn’t going to return America to a golden age of manufacturing.

In fact, it’s likely to make things worse. Caroline Freund of the Peterson Institute for International Economics goes so far as to say: “If the US blows up NAFTA, it will blow up the US economy.”[5. Alexia Fernandez Campbell, ‘The US, Canada, and Mexico are renegotiating NAFTA — here’s what each country wants’, Vox, 5 September 2017] That feels an overstatement, but there’s no doubt that after more than two decades, unpicking the deal would have real consequences. There’s no blank page to work with.

The US Chamber of Commerce calculates 14 million jobs depend on trade with Canada and Mexico – five million specifically on the additional trade generated by NAFTA.[6. .The Facts on NAFTA. Assessing Two Decades of Gains in Trade, Growth, and Jobs, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, no date] Some of those jobs will be unaffected if the deal collapses (trade won’t simply stop). But for sectors such as auto and agriculture, the likely imposition of high tariffs would be disastrous – for states dependent on those industries, scrapping NAFTA would mean job losses.

NAFTA is a scapegoat 

Put NAFTA’s impact on jobs in perspective, however, and you can’t help but wonder why so much time and energy is being expended on a side-show. It’s like treating a patient’s paper-cut while ignoring his gunshot wound. The US lost almost six million manufacturing jobs in the decade starting in the year 2000 – but NAFTA has resulted in a net 100,000 reduction. (If you want some historical perspective, economist Brad DeLong points out that manufacturing as a share of employment has been collapsing since the 1950s.[7. Bradford DeLong, ‘NAFTA and other trade deals have not gutted American manufacturing — period’, Vox, 24 January 2017])

Indeed, many of the impacts associated with NAFTA would have occurred without the deal – that’s the process of globalisation. The US has no NAFTA-equivalent deal with China, but trade between the two countries has ballooned, resulting in similar benefits and drawbacks.

The gunshot wound? That’s automation. The drive for more efficient means of production has been constant. Throughout history, as technology from steam to electricity has evolved, low-productivity jobs have been replaced by higher skill, higher pay roles. But today we’re facing automation on an unprecedented scale. Seven times the number of jobs have been lost to automation as to offshoring. Why isn’t the Trump administration focusing on that?

Where are the meaningful policies to equip displaced workers with the skills to compete in new sectors? What is being done to incentivise businesses to re-train staff whose jobs are under threat of automation? Could large businesses making people redundant be required to provide a retraining package alongside the usual compensation payments?

Public employment services should be using local labour market data to identify growing and declining sectors and tailor their services accordingly. In a world where technological change happens at pace, continuing education and skills training is essential – where are Trump’s tweets on that?

Scrapping NAFTA is a bad idea – it’s highly unlikely manufacturing jobs will return to America, yet highly likely that jobs in the auto and agricultural sectors will be lost. But twist or stick, the outcome will be a footnote in labour market history. Whatever the result of the negotiations, the march of automation is not going to stop. In Atlanta, when I suggested NAFTA wasn’t all bad the customs officer asked, “Don’t you care about the poor?” I do, which is why I want to treat the gunshot wound.