Like it or not, the future is coming ... with robots!

I routinely warn students, like I did this week, that we don't really know for certain how all the technological revolution will shape up in their lives.  We deal with probabilities, I like to remind them.  One aspect we can speak with confidence: The rate of change will be higher in the future than we have ever experienced.

"In this coming future, do not think of robots as the cliched robots that you have seen in cartoons and movies," I told them.  "Alexa is, for instance, a robot. which carries out your instructions and also does other things in the background."  Before we know it, there will be plenty of sophisticated robots, I warned them.

I think I saw panic in a few of their eyes.  Good for them. Now they will be alert and plan for their lives.

I am not the only one who says such things.

So let’s stipulate: no one knows for sure what’s about to happen to the labor market. Most observers agree, however, on at least two things. First, the pace of AI discoveries and implementation is accelerating. Robots are now doing things that seemed like science fiction just a short time ago. Was anyone talking about a retail-sector meltdown, driven in good measure by AI-facilitated e-commerce, last year? Second, fasten your seatbelts. Whether you call it “the second machine age”—as MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee do, in a 2014 book by that name—or the fourth industrial revolution, this will be big. Most Silicon Valley honchos, scientists, and economists think that this time is different. Exactly how many jobs will be lost, which kinds of jobs and when, and what to do to prepare for these losses may be matters of dispute. No longer questioned is that a massive disruption in the way we earn a living is coming and that it will transform communities, education—and perhaps even our notion of an America defined by industriousness and upward mobility.

The future won't be a mere continuation of the present.  It will be unrecognizably different.

One of the differences will be this: More jobs will be destroyed than created.  We need to broadcast the truth and have more people engage in the discussions.

These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times. If we act rationally and quickly, we can bask in what’s best rather than wallow in what’s worst.

But, of course, we won't--people are too busy instagramming their lives and downloading crap!

Jane Austen in 2018

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

A wonderful opening line from Pride and Prejudice.

Whether or not it is an universal truth, for a while now I have been worried about the changing fortunes of single men--many do not seem to be capable of possessing "a good fortune," which then makes it less likely that they will find a wife.

Tyler Cowen provides me with more to worry about when he asks, "Why are marriage rates rising for educated Americans but falling for the less educated?"

At this point, it is tempting to rewrite Jane Austen's opener as:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good education, must be in want of a wife.

But, let's not race ahead.

It is not really about the education alone; "more jobs demand good social skills."  Women are more skilled in this than men are.

How about the polarization of marriage rates across the well-educated (almost steady) and the less well-educated (drastically falling)? Well, if you are an educated, high-earning man with a good white-collar job, you will meet more women at work than before. You are facing less competition from other men with comparable workplace status, and so your marriage prospects may be quite attractive. But lower-status men don't have it nearly as good in the marriage market, and many women may prefer to stay single.

I have been saying all these for years!

Why do women prefer to be single?

You don’t want to marry a man who is in all likelihood not economically viable, because it’s not a free lunch.

Ouch!

Like "Olivia Alfano, a 29-year-old single mother living in Evansville, Indiana":

 The money is pretty good, she told me: She drives a BMW and was able to buy a house last year. Alfano now wants to go into management, which she thinks will give her more security in the long run. When I asked her why she hadn’t married, she told me, “I haven’t run into someone I would consider doing that with.”

The times are changing. Many men have yet to even understand the changes, leave alone respond constructively.  The better educated and prepared women population “creates a surplus of men” at the low end who are not going to get married."  And, therefore, "millions of these less well educated men are not going to get the benefits of marriage":

Married men live longer, are less likely to become alcoholic, take drugs, commit suicide, etc.

The less educated men will, also, kill many in mass shootings, beat up foreigners, and vote for trump!

Thus, the modified Jane Austen opener:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a good fortune, is not in want of a husband.

On the economic geography of health care

"Health care in America is in crisis" is a serious understatement. It will only get worse!

Consider, for instance, employment.  We tend to assume that health care is a growing industry and, therefore, that is where the income stream is, right?  Yes, jobs are there, but ...

Yet for every higher-paying job held by workers like nurses and doctors, more than six workers such as orderlies, phlebotomists and cooks make less than $15 an hour. Nationwide, 70 percent of hospital service workers make less than $15 an hour, NELP found. In the Midwest, it's 71 percent.

Now, the $15/hr might sound like quite a compensation to a person in Bihar.  But, ahem, a cup of coffee is not 15 rupees either; there is the cost of living:

Most counties in the U.S. have a cost of living across industries that isn't covered by minimum wage incomes, according to a recent blog post from Amy Glasmeier, a professor and co-chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's economic geography and regional planning Ph. D program.
For instance, in Chicago, a single parent of one child needs to earn $24.67 an hour to meet a definition of living wage, while a person living alone there needs at least $12.33, based on a living-wage calculator  developed by Glasmeier in conjunction with MIT.

At least the cities are better, when one looks at health care in rural America; "half of the country's rural counties now don't have hospitals with obstetric services":

Maternity care is disappearing from America's rural counties, and for the 28 million women of reproductive age living in those areas, pregnancy and childbirth are becoming more complicated—and more dangerous.

One important factor is nothing but dollars and cents:

If hospitals want to offer obstetric services, they need to be ready for a baby to be born at any time—they need to have a bed available, the equipment available for mom and for baby, clinicians and staff available that have the necessary skills. That's a substantial expense. If a hospital's revenues are limited because it has a low volume of births—as many rural hospitals do—or if revenues are unpredictable, that creates a really difficult administrative problem.

It is exactly in such situations that we expect the government to step in where the market fails, right?  Especially when you consider this: "Medicaid funds about half of all births in the United States, and an even greater percentage of births in rural hospitals."  So, if these health care services for pregnant women are gone ...?

State and federal programs to support the rural maternity workforce are crucial. There ought to be programs to support training in emergency births in rural communities that lose obstetric care, and to support the costs of providing maternity care in communities where there are willing providers.

trump and his 63 million voters can fix this all with a complete repeal of Obamacare, right?

The dirty truth that does not have to be mined

If only more people understood the importance of economic geography in their own lives.  I often tell students in my intro class that if they carried with them the economic geography way of looking at the world, ... but, of course, rare is a student who pays any attention to me.

Most of this current president's campaign lies were on issues that are absolutely economic geography.  China's competition with the US? Yes. Immigration from Mexico and elsewhere?  Yep. Coal? Of course, yes, dammit!

I read two essays on the coal country in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia.  I am guessing this a region that this president won by a huge margin over Hillary Clinton, who spoke the truth about coal jobs not coming back.

Click here to zoom into the map

You know the economics of the region is in shit streets when even Walmart closes down a store.

Rural areas like McDowell County, where Walmart focused its expansion plans in the 1990s, are experiencing accelerating depopulation that is putting a strain on the firm’s boundless ambitions.
Hit hard by the longterm decline in coal mining that is the mainstay of the area, McDowell County has seen a devastating and sustained erosion of its people, from almost 100,000 in 1950 when coal was king, to about 18,000 today.

This president can bullshit all he wants, and 63 million people can vote for him, yes.  But, then there is the real world.

This wasn't even a regular Walmart store, which can seem huge to visitors from most other parts of the world.  This was a supercenter!

“It’s all about jobs,” says Melissa Nester, publisher of the local newspaper, The Welch News, which sells 4,500 copies three times a week and doggedly refuses to have a website. “Dollar stores have picked up some of the trade left by Walmart, but they haven’t created many jobs.”
At its peak, Walmart employed 300 people in the McDowell County supercenter. That was down to about 140 by the end, but it still made it the largest employer in the area.

 The reality of life in a corner of the US that is being rapidly left behind.  These are the "forgotten" people that this president bullshitted to.

After jobs, taxes are the next things to go. The town of Kimball in which the supercenter is located used to receive $145,000 a year in taxes from Walmart, and when that went it had to cut back its workforce and put all remaining staff on a four-day week.
The county government also lost $68,000 in taxes, most of which went to schools, and all its staff were given a 10% pay cut.

It does not take much for economic conditions to quickly spiral down.  Rome was not built in a day, but it did not take long for the decline and fall, right?

Linda McKinney ... "mourns the communal aspect of the supercenter, its quality as a “social hub”."

McKinney rattles off a list of all the community facilities that disappeared from the region in recent years as the population declined and the culture of mega-chains like Walmart took root.
There used to be 28 churches of her United Methodist denomination in the county, now there are six; there were seven bars in Welch, all but one have closed; there were three cinemas, now it’s down to one; there are no community centers left; many of the corner shops have gone. “There’s nothing here,” McKinney says.

A complementing essay at a different publication looks at another aspect of this economic geography: What can a community college do to help people?

As manufacturers shed workers and businesses gravitate to urban areas, they often leave economic devastation in their wake. Thousands of people reliant on a dominant industry, in this case coal, are thrown out of work and their options are few. In the hills and hollows of Eastern Kentucky, communities must also contend with low levels of education, high rates of poverty, weak infrastructure, and an opioid epidemic.

If you are like me, you are thinking this: A community college cannot do much to address such complicated issues.  True,  But, they try their best.

Meanwhile, state and regional leaders wrestle with a pressing challenge: Can they bring decent jobs to an area that lacks the infrastructure, education levels, and geography to support large manufacturers and skilled jobs? In 2014 the average annual wage for a coal miner in Kentucky was $72,000. Nothing has come along since to replace that.

Nothing will come along to replace that $72,000 job.  Of course, that is not the truth that this president and his minions talked about, right?

Keep in mind that there are other jobs.  It is just that those other jobs barely pay minimum wages.

"A lot of what you see in terms of opioid abuse, a decrease in life expectancy, a lot of that is being driven by the hopelessness of seeing jobs, but not good jobs," says Nate Anderson, who spends a lot of time in Kentucky as a senior director at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit organization that promotes skills training and job opportunities for low-income people. "No one wants to spend their entire life in retail earning next to nothing. They want opportunity and that’s gone."

So, what can be done?

Anything that can be done will have to start at step number one, which will never ever happen.  That first step is this: Political leaders need to start talking the truth to people.  Because that will not happen, and because even partial-truth will only make losers out of candidates, well, ... we are where we are now!

The second best thing to do: Take courses in economic geography and save yourself a whole lot of trouble!

I. Told. You. So.

But then you, like everybody else, would not listen to me!

In many posts here, I worried about the rapid annihilation of jobs in the retail industry.  In recent posts, like here and here, I expressed my concerns that unlike previous economic revolutions, this will not lead the displaced workers into more productive jobs.  Automation is king, of course,

It is not that the retail job losses are only in large metropolitan areas.  Nope.  They hit hard--perhaps even hardest--the very areas that also coincide with the regions that elected trump, whose empty rhetoric on coal and manufacturing apparently swayed the voters:

Small cities in the Midwest and Northeast are particularly vulnerable. When major industries left town, retail accounted for a growing share of the job market in places like Johnstown, Decatur, Ill and Saginaw Mich. Now, the work force is getting hit a second time, and there is little to fall back on.
Moreover, while stores in these places are shedding jobs because of e-commerce, e-commerce isn’t absorbing these workers. Growth in e-commerce jobs like marketing and engineering, while strong, is clustered around larger cities far away. Rural counties and small metropolitan areas account for about 23 percent of traditional American retail employment, but they are home to just 13 percent of e-commerce positions.
E-commerce has also fostered a boom in other industries, including warehouses. But most of those jobs are being created in larger metropolitan areas, an analysis of Census Bureau business data shows.

Of course that is the story.  Any lame-brained pretentious economic geographer in small town Oregon could have told you that!

“Every time you lose a corner store, every time you lose a restaurant, every time you lose a small clothing store, it detracts from the quality of life, as well as the job loss”

Yes, that is exactly how the downward spiral happens.  While in the aggregate customers are all better off thanks to the efficiency offered by e-commerce and automation, the impacts are local and tangible.  

As I have often argued here, politicians need to, therefore, rework the social contract and strengthen the safety net.  Instead, trump and his (adopted) party are hell bent on shredding even the minimal safety net of today.

This situation will only worsen with the increasing level of automation that we can and should expect.  So, what can be done?

Part of the answer will involve educating or retraining people in tasks A.I. tools aren’t good at. Artificial intelligence is poorly suited for jobs involving creativity, planning and “cross-domain” thinking — for example, the work of a trial lawyer. But these skills are typically required by high-paying jobs that may be hard to retrain displaced workers to do. More promising are lower-paying jobs involving the “people skills” that A.I. lacks: social workers, bartenders, concierges — professions requiring nuanced human interaction. But here, too, there is a problem: How many bartenders does a society really need?

Exactly.  It is not as if we need a gazillion bartenders and waiters.  Right?

So, can we think creatively in another way? 

The solution to the problem of mass unemployment, I suspect, will involve “service jobs of love.” These are jobs that A.I. cannot do, that society needs and that give people a sense of purpose. Examples include accompanying an older person to visit a doctor, mentoring at an orphanage and serving as a sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous — or, potentially soon, Virtual Reality Anonymous (for those addicted to their parallel lives in computer-generated simulations). The volunteer service jobs of today, in other words, may turn into the real jobs of the future.

If trump and his (adopted) party cannot even understand how retail jobs vastly outnumber coal mining jobs, there is no way on earth will they even begin to understand that paragraph!

Who will pay for these jobs? Here is where the enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands comes in. It strikes me as unavoidable that large chunks of the money created by A.I. will have to be transferred to those whose jobs have been displaced. This seems feasible only through Keynesian policies of increased government spending, presumably raised through taxation on wealthy companies.

Yep, this will take reworking the social contract by increasing the tax on the gazillionaires--not by offering them more tax cuts!

Anything else that will be restatement of what I have been talking about and writing about for ever?

As for what form that social welfare would take, I would argue for a conditional universal basic income: welfare offered to those who have a financial need, on the condition they either show an effort to receive training that would make them employable or commit to a certain number of hours of “service of love” voluntarism.
To fund this, tax rates will have to be high. The government will not only have to subsidize most people’s lives and work; it will also have to compensate for the loss of individual tax revenue previously collected from employed individuals.

If only you would listen to me!

Here is the most interesting twist; the author of that essay, on how to deal with the increasingly sophisticated automation that borders on artificial intelligence, is:

Kai-Fu Lee is the chairman and chief executive of Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm, and the president of its Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Some day, sooner than later, there will be a few people who will regret not having listened to me ;)

What's the price of retail jobs?

The pussygrabber ranted on and on about jobs in the coal mines, as if he knew anything about the industry or the people who work.  But, 63 million suckers voted for him anyway!

If only his voters had paid attention to the real world, they would have been worried about an entirely different industry: "The retailing industry employs 15.9m people, accounting for one in nine American jobs."

The retail industry is shedding jobs, and closing stores, are frightening speeds:

 Since January the industry has shed 50,000 jobs, with more lay-offs sure to come. Mr Mathrani reckons that, for shopping centres to match demand, 30% of space should close permanently. In one particularly gloomy scenario, all retail property would shrink by as much. If staff dropped by the same proportion, 4.8m would be at risk of the sack—around half the number of American jobs lost during the financial crisis. Eventually, even more may be laid off, as remaining stores cut costs through automation.

Did you notice that "a" word?  Automation!

The result is that America’s rich landscape of shops now looks like a dangerous glut. Since the start of 2016 Macy’s has announced that it is closing 140 shops. J.C. Penney said in March that it would shut 138. More closures are sure to come. Department stores’ floor space has contracted by 11.5% since 2006, but sales have shrunk more than twice as fast, according to Green Street Advisors, a real-estate research firm (see chart 2). To reach the inflation-adjusted sales productivity of 2006, at least another 800 department stores would need to close, reckons D.J. Busch at Green Street.

In the world of politics, it is coal that translates to diamond when it comes to votes:

This slow melt has so far attracted little attention from politicians, despite jobs in retailing outnumbering those in coal mining, which has caught the political eye, by a factor of 300.

Meanwhile, automation in retailing is taking on another fundamental aspect of the transaction: price.

The right price—the one that will extract the most profit from consumers’ wallets—has become the fixation of a large and growing number of quantitative types, many of them economists who have left academia for Silicon Valley.

Yep, "the right price can change by the day or even by the hour" thanks to automation, which is killing the real world stores:

Guru Hariharan uncapped a dry-erase marker in a conference room at Boomerang’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. He was talking about what had led retailers to this desperate place where it’s necessary to change prices multiple times a day. On a whiteboard, he drew a series of lines representing the rising share of online sales for various kinds of products (books, DVDs, electronics) over time, then marked the years that major brick-and-mortar players (Borders, Blockbuster, Circuit City and RadioShack) went bankrupt. At first the years looked random. But the bankruptcies all clustered within a band where online sales hit between 20 and 25 percent. “In this range, there’s a crushing point,” Hariharan said, clapping his hands together for emphasis. “There’s a bloodbath happening.”
Beyond this crushing point, traditional retailers with both a brick-and-mortar and an online presence feel compelled to compete purely on price. Hariharan talked wistfully of the days when he’d walk into RadioShack and have a salesperson direct him to the exact connector cable he needed. But once retailers enter the crushing zone, expenses like staff, training, and customer support typically are slashed. Profit margins keep falling nonetheless—why go to the store at all if no one there can help you?—and a death spiral ensues. (RadioShack traced just this path before filing for bankruptcy in 2015.)

Yet, the pussygrabber always talks about those few thousand coal mining jobs?

From ENIAC and EMERAC to ... HAL and Siri

There were three questions in this quiz. Ahem, I scored three out of three!

Go ahead, take that quiz, and come back for the rest of this post.  OK?

Alright, you are back.  Well, you never left, did you? ;)

Consider the statistics in the following image:

Source

Yes, even Kenya.  Wherever one is, the bottom-line is no different:

For all the differences between countries, many of automation’s challenges are universal. For business, the performance benefits are relatively clear, but the issues are more complicated for policy makers. They will need to find ways to embrace the opportunity for their economies to benefit from the productivity growth potential that automation offers, putting in place policies to encourage investment and market incentives to encourage innovation. At the same time, all countries will need to evolve and create policies that help workers and institutions adapt to the impact on employment.

For regular readers of this blog, this is all same-old, same-old, right?

Unfortunately, such stuff is not discussed on Fox & Friends, which is where the current president learns about what is happening around the world and in the US!

On the other hand, news programs like this one that the president and his 63 million fucking minions do not care for, remind him:

President Trump has very specific talking points when it comes to jobs in the U.S. They go kind of like this: China — bad. Mexico — bad. Outsourcing — bad. Made in America — great. Hiring American — even better.
Trump and his supporters have spent a lot of time focusing on trade policies and how to bring back jobs lost to globalization, but experts say most of those jobs are not coming back. The key issue facing the American workforce — and therefore America’s prosperity and stability moving forward — is not trade, but technology.

Ah, those supporters of his are soon going to figure out that they are nothing but 63 million suckers!

So, what can be done?

“The jobs that we’re preparing them for haven’t even been created yet, and really, that’s a hurdle that we need to figure out how to get over, because how do you prepare them for the unknown?”

Ahem, I have written plenty about this.  Even as op-eds.  Like this one in which I wrote about educating for a world of unscripted problems.  

Unscripted because we do not know what the future holds. But, we do have a sense of how we might be able to reasonably prepare for that future, by developing skills that will help people to constructively engage with the unscripted problems.
Yet, contemporary public policy discussions on higher education and workforce preparation rarely ever go into serious and sustained thinking about the “world of unscripted problems."

Some day, after I am gone, maybe a couple of people will remark that people should have listened to me ;)

Let them eat cakes!

Most students work part-time, unlike my story when I was an undergraduate student.  In contrast to these students, I was an idle, good for nothing, bum.  I wasted away my time bullshitting with other students.  My parents paid for my tuition and living expenses.  Hey, at least I didn't waste money on alcohol and movies and cigarettes!

With my students, I am always worried that they are doing too many things with the hope that a real and well-paying awaits once they graduate.  In one-to-one conversations, I don't bluntly burst that bubble that is the well-paying job--I do that in the group therapy sessions called classes.  

Last term, a student walked in about five minutes late for a meeting with me.  I gave her time to settle down.  I slowly asked her, "you looked frazzled today."

"I just need more time to sleep," she replied.  "After I graduate, with no school anymore, at least I will be able to sleep more," she added.

At least she has a part-time job for now, in contrast to another student who told me that she was finding it difficult to land any part-time retail job.  "I have always been an excellent student, and I am reasonably good with communications, and yet nothing."  She was frustrated.  I told her about yet another student who was working at a retail store and how I told her to hang on to it because the retail industry is being decimated at a rapid rate.

Forever, I have been talking and writing about the destruction of the retail business here in the US.  It was clear to us ever since we started using the word e-commerce back when the web was still in its infancy.  Brick and mortar would be killed by click and order.  Bookstores were pretty much the first to be caught in this, and then every kind of retail business.  The latest news is more along these lines:

The battered American retail industry took a few more lumps this week, with stores at both ends of the price spectrum preparing to close their doors.
At the bottom, the seemingly ubiquitous Payless Inc. shoe chain filed for bankruptcy and announced plans to shutter hundreds of locations. Ralph Lauren Corp., meanwhile, said it will close its flagship Fifth Avenue Polo store -- a symbol of old-fashioned luxury that no longer resonates with today’s shoppers.
And the teen-apparel retailer Rue21 Inc. could be the next casualty. The chain, which has about 1,000 stores, is preparing to file for bankruptcy as soon as this month, according to people familiar with the situation. Just a few years ago, it was sold to private equity firm Apax Partners for about a billion dollars.

People click their orders on Amazon.com (and a gazillion other sites) and the retail brick and mortar stores go bankrupt.  When businesses go bankrupt, jobs evaporate.

The rapid descent of so many retailers has left shopping malls with hundreds of slots to fill, and the pain could be just beginning. More than 10 percent of U.S. retail space, or nearly 1 billion square feet, may need to be closed, converted to other uses or renegotiated for lower rent in coming years, according to data provided to Bloomberg by CoStar Group.
The blight also is taking a toll on jobs. According to Labor Department figures released on Friday, retailers cut around 30,000 positions in March. That was about the same total as in February and marked the worst two-month showing since 2009.

Those laid off workers now join the competition to find at least part-time work, which makes it next to impossible for students to find the kind of part-time work that was once typically done by students.

Payless is closing 400 stores as part of a bankruptcy plan announced on Tuesday. The mammoth chain had roughly 4,000 locations and 22,000 employees -- more than it needs to handle sluggish demand.
HHGregg Inc., Gordmans Stores Inc. and Gander Mountain Co. all entered bankruptcy this year. RadioShack, meanwhile, filed for Chapter 11 for the second time in two years.
Other companies are plowing ahead with store closures outside of bankruptcy court. Sears Holdings Corp., Macy’s Inc. and J.C. Penney Co. are shutting hundreds of locations combined, reeling from an especially punishing slump in the department-store industry.

It is a tough world out there.

Meanwhile, the bullshitting Republicans continue to tell people that they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  Very rarely do students have bootstraps like the ones my parents gave me for them to pull themselves up!  

The pursuit of happiness

As my daughter settled the restaurant bill--I tell ya, it is such a pleasure to get older and to have a son or a daughter pay for dinners!--I briefed the maître d' about why she was in this town, and why I had come visiting.

"No kidding!  I was a neuro-psychology major in the undergrad," he said.  The maître d' looked barely about mid-thirties in age.  About my daughter's age.  "But, this is what I love.  The magic of the food coming together from ingredients. The wines. People having fun.  This is what I wanted to do," he added.

I was genuinely happy for him.  "I am so glad you found something that you love doing."

"With that major, I assume you did that as a path towards something ..." I remarked.  Perhaps a pre-professional major.

"Yes.  But, with this, and my wife and three kids, I am happy."

Happiness.

America might promote the pursuit of happiness.  But, it does not mean that Americans are happy.  Whether or not a government, a society, actively talks-up happiness, most people all around the world seem unhappy in their own ways, as Tolstoy phrased it.

Restaurant work, which even to the outsider is clearly a whole lot of intense work, is happiness to most who toil in that industry.  Even at the neighborhood restaurant back home, the waiters and the crew in the kitchen always seem to be in good moods.

At the previous meal that my daughter took me to, the huge crowd was having a lot of fun, exactly like the maître d' at the other restaurant would love to see.  The up-tempo music mix that the DJ was playing added that much more zest.  "I will be back in a minute--I want to look through the glass at the people working in the kitchen," I told the daughter.  The magic was happening, well-rehearsed.

Our table was by the bar and once when I looked up at a TV screen, I noticed it was a movie from years past--about two immigrant brothers who set up a restaurant business.



That movie, which I loved, was perhaps the first of the many restaurant-themed movies that I have watched in the US.  Typically, the characters struggle--physically and emotionally--with everything that comes with the industry, but that is also what they are passionate about.

This maître d', with his origins in the Subcontinent, reminded me of the young immigrant chef in the movie The Hundred-Foot Journey.



The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that we live in a mad, mad world where most people do not seem to be doing things out of passion, and not out of seeing the joy in others, but, instead, they curse their ways through the bullshit jobs that they do.  Whatever happened to the pursuit of happiness?

Automate or die

My class freaked out when we got to discussing the economic geography of the future that will be highly automated.  Well, these are the latest class to get all worried; I have been doing it to students for a few years now.  Because, it has been an open secret that automation has been replacing humans at various jobs here in the US. However much trump wants to tell his people that China, Mexico, and India are to be blamed for their job losses, automation is the real story.

And that story has barely begun.  You ain't seen nothin' yet!

Imagine if trump and his people were to even glance at the headlines that USA Today recently had:

Bill Gates: If a robot takes a human job, it should be taxed

Read that again.  It is Bill Gates.  Yes, that Bill Gates.  He is making an argument that robots taking jobs from humans should be taxed.

Not a human in China, Mexico, or India, but a robot right here in America!

Ah, but all these are nothing but fake news anyway, right Mr. President?

There is a reason that Bill Gates wants to talk about taxing robots.  Robots are not the real problem.

Well, automation is for real, and the robots--physical and software agents--are an unstoppable force.  But, we humans are the ones designing and using the robots, right?  Who benefits from the use of automation?

Answering that question, which is what Gates does, means that trump and the Republicans have to seriously engage with a topic that they would rather not: Redistribution.  Or, if you prefer the milder phrase that I have been blogging about for years: The Social Contract.

The NY Times gets to that in its editorial:

While breakthroughs could come at any time, the problem with automation isn’t robots; it’s politicians, who have failed for decades to support policies that let workers share the wealth from technology-led growth.

You think that the fabled white working class will not support this, if the logic is explained to them?  They will immediately embrace it.  They will demand a new social contract.  But, of course that is exactly what trump and his party do not want to do.  After all, the white nationalist party hates the very idea that some brown-skins might also benefit from this redistribution!

The editorial gives a quick lesson in economic history, and then concludes with:

Economic history shows that automation not only substitutes for human labor, it complements it. The disappearance of some jobs and industries gives rise to others. Nontechnology industries, from restaurants to personal fitness, benefit from the consumer demand that results from rising incomes in a growing economy. But only robust public policy can ensure that the benefits of growth are broadly shared.
If reforms are not enacted — as is likely with President Trump and congressional Republicans in charge — Americans should blame policy makers, not robots.

My guess is that such reforms will not even be discussed.  And trump and the GOP will continue to blame China, Mexico, and India, and the white voters will continue to vote for the white supremacists who promise to beat up on the non-whites.

Jobs, jobs, and jobs. But, hey, incomes?

"I am especially keen to have you involved in the panel given your distinguished track record," was a sentence in a lengthy email inviting me to a session at the upcoming international conference.  After years of marching to my own drumbeat of scholarship that is aimed at public engagement, it is encouraging that there is some recognition of the urgency of the issue--and, of course, recognition of what I do as an academic.

I won't hold my breath for any recognition within my university.  The latest was an email from my dean who pooh-poohed my work and external recognition with a note on how I need to work on "scholarly activities."  I.e., my public scholarship is not "scholarly activities."  I figured that his email is best ignored--no reply.  I hope at some time--sooner than later--he and the rest will understand that intellectual onanism is not necessarily what "scholarly" means.

In many op-eds and blog-posts over the years, and in classroom discussions with students, I have been worrying a lot about automation's impact on jobs and incomes.  My bottom-line to students has always been that they will experience a fantastic future thanks to automation, but that jobs--and well-paying jobs, in particular--might not be easy to come by.  "It could be a challenging future" is what I typically tell them.  But, like my faculty and administrative colleagues, most students too do not listen to me.  Why should they, when they hear from those faculty and administrators that awesome jobs wait for college graduates!

This POTUS does nothing to help people understand the rapidly changing employment scene.  He thinks believes that jobs--and well paying middle-class jobs--can be brought back by him beating the pulp out of the CEOs, as if his job is to be the mafia chief.  Why doesn't he explain to his faithful followers, and to the unprincipled Republican leaders, the reality about automation's impacts on employment?

Trump knows virtually nothing about technology — other than a smartphone, he doesn’t use it much. And the industries he’s worked in — construction, real estate, hotels, and resorts — are among the least sophisticated in their use of information technology. So he’s not well equipped to understand the dynamics of automation-driven job loss.

One does not need to even work in the information industry, or in manufacturing, in order to understand the impact of automation.  Consider, as a contrast, the former POTUS, whose experiences were shaped elsewhere--"community organizing" that the unprincipled Republicans always ridiculed:

“The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas,” Mr. Obama said. “It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.”

Even if he is informed enough, the current POTUS does not want to talk about automation because that will mean speaking truth with people.  And he has made it immensely clear that truth is nowhere in his mind, ever.  While he makes a grand spectacle out of his "negotiations" over plant closings and offshoring,

automation-related job loss is difficult to negotiate about. It’s the silent killer of human labor, eliminating job after job over a period of time. Jobs often disappear through attrition. There are no visible plant closings to respond to, no press releases by foreign rivals to counter. It’s a complex subject that doesn’t lend itself to TV sound bites or tweets.

If only his people will understand this:

Technology delivers its benefits and harms in an unequal way. That explains why even though the economy is humming, it doesn’t feel like it for a large group of workers.

The solutions to this are not simple, and "they’re not easily summarized in a sound bite."  Certainly not in 140 characters!

Masculinity and jobs ... with a p*y-grabbing president

Trying to get people--students, in particular--appreciate the urgency in understanding what masculinity means in the 21st century has been a frustrating failure for me, and yet I try again and again.

This issue of masculinity is extremely important because so many of our public policies, and social mores, depend on how much we are ready and willing to redefine a new masculinity that will be appropriate for the contemporary times and into the future.

Even in this blog, I have forever been talking about it.  There is a thread of "save the males," for instance.  Right?  Or, consider that just a couple of months ago, I quoted the following:

Succeeding in the new economy and culture may well require rethinking conventional ideas about masculinity.

Which is why I find nothing new when I read in the NY Times:

Much of men’s resistance to pink-collar jobs is tied up in the culture of masculinity, say people who study the issue. Women are assumed to be empathetic and caring; men are supposed to be strong, tough and able to support a family.
“Traditional masculinity is standing in the way of working-class men’s employment, and I think it’s a problem,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins and author of “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America.”
“We have a cultural lag where our views of masculinity have not caught up to the change in the job market,” he said.

Seriously, tell me something that I have not been saying for years now!

 One solution is for the men who have lost jobs in factories to become health aides. But while more than a fifth of American men aren’t working, they aren’t running to these new service-sector jobs. Why? They require very different skills, and pay a lot less.
They’re also seen as women’s work, which has always been devalued in the American labor market. ...

“It’s not that they couldn’t become a health worker, it’s that people have backward views of what their identity is.”

Unfortunate that quite a few men (and women) are holding on to some outdated definitions of "real men."

It’s no surprise, then, that Donald J. Trump appealed to men who feel this way — not just his promises to bring back factory jobs, but also his machismo.  

If only many more had understood that masculinity does not mean grabbing pussies!

Our sterile pursuits

Consider this:

Does anyone, for instance, believe that tax accountants contribute to national wealth or to productivity, and altogether add to society’s well-being, whether material, physical or spiritual?

Perhaps you are thinking that it is so typical of this left-of-center blogger to beat up on tax accountants.  If so, ahem, you don't know me then ;)

The writer also follows up with another comment that we are wasting well-educated human intellect on such "essentially sterile pursuits.”

So, who said that?  Peter Drucker. Yep, that Drucker.

It is bizarre how in a liberal democracy we continue to add taxes and tax-breaks, which almost always end up making creative work for tax accountants and attorneys, while making even more money for corporations, when the whole idea of government collecting revenue is for the "public interest."  At the end of the day, a presidential contender struts around with everybody understanding that he paid no taxes thanks to all those lines in the tax code and all those accountants.  It is a fine mess that we have created, and even an Alexander cannot handle this Gordian Knot!

To some extent, the tax attorney/accountant jobs that we have created are not that different from the textbook case of paying people to dig holes and have them fill those hole back.  We pass laws that create all those tax loopholes, and then these highly educated folks get paid to needle the thread through those holes.  One hell of a Keynesian jobs creation scheme, except that the ones who benefit from it usually attack Keynesian ideas.

But, back to Drucker's point on highly educated people following sterile pursuits.  I wish I had known this phrase back in my undergraduate days, because all I knew then was that I didn't want to waste my life in sterile pursuits.  But, it took me a while to also figure out what might be a worthwhile pursuit.

I am yet again reminded of the observation on "bullshit jobs" that I blogged about.  In another place, that same author--David Graeber, who is as far from Drucker as can be possible in the political economic spectrum--notes:

A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But it’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish

Of course, that is a a little exaggerated.  Without actuaries?  But Graeber's larger point is no different from Drucker's.

Like many, I too worry that the automation that is rapidly coming down our way will further drive many into sterile pursuits, instead of liberating us to pursue activities that will add meaning.  My father commented a while ago, "everybody says they are consultants.  But I don't understand what they are consulting about."  The next time he says that I should perhaps tell him that most are sterile pursuits--only because that sounds more official than saying "bullshit jobs."

Captain Goodhope is dead. Long live General Malaise!

I first came across the idea of "social contract" in graduate school.  "Aha!"  I realized that my teenage infatuations with various anti-social political elements were nothing but a result of my frustrations with the existing atrocious social contract and a desire to contribute to rewriting it.

In recent years, as the global economic geography began to tear up the fabric of the fabled middle-class life in America, I started yelling again my frustrations with the political system that was seemingly uninterested in rewriting the social contract.  Of course, nobody listens to me.

The frustrations got worse when the political faces for the rewriting came in the form of Bernie Sanders and the fascist!  Major Buzzkill got promoted to General Malaise ;)

The next best thing then is to wallow in excellent company.  Like with Laura Tyson and Anu Madgavkar.

The consequences of such failures are far-reaching. Stagnating or falling real incomes do not just act as a brake on consumption demand and GDP growth; they also fuel social and political discontent, as citizens lose confidence in existing economic structures.

Yep. And, unlike me, those two are awesomely qualified people to say that.

MGI surveys in France, the United Kingdom, and the US have found that people whose incomes are not growing, and who do not anticipate an improvement, tend to view trade and immigration much more negatively than those who are experiencing or foresee gains. The Brexit vote in the UK and bipartisan opposition to trade agreements in the US are clear signs of this.

In case you are wondering about MGI: It ain't any socialist think-tank!  McKinsey Global Institute is as pro-capitalist as it can get, as I am sure this guy would attest to.

Another expert--this time a male, for a change--who is a columnist at another pro-capitalist publication, The Economist, also states the same ideas, using different words:

I think we are headed for a really important era in economic history. The Industrial Revolution is a pretty good guide of what that will look like. There will have to be a societal negotiation for how to share the gains from growth. That process will be long and drawn out. It will involve intense ideological conflict, and history suggests that a lot will go wrong.

A lot will go wrong?  Looks like I have company in the buzzkill department ;)

 Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are two sides of the beginning of this social evolution. Bernie is pushing along the direction of, "let’s distribute more." Trump is pushing along a related direction which is, "let’s exclude others who are not like us."

I tell ya, misery loves (excellent) company!

So, what kind of challenging political/ideological issues can we expect in the near future?

What comes next would be higher wage subsidies and in-kind benefits, like tuition-free college or subsidized health care. But it’s coming, and the debate will be: If we’re going to pay people to do work that isn’t necessary, who do we let into the system? Who is allowed to benefit?

If only we the people could talk about all these as responsible adults.  Oh well, democracy ain't perfect!

Of course college guarantees jobs ... for academics and administrators!

In its editorial, the Editorial Board of the NY Times has a powerful sentence, which is consistent with what I have been writing here (and in op-eds) for years:

the familiar assumption — graduate from college and prosperity will follow — has been disproved in this century.

I have been warning students about that broken relationship ... for years.  The American Dream is not a guarantee, when all over the world people are working hard to achieve their own versions of the American Dream.  But, hey, nobody listens to me :(

The editorial continues with this:

The problem is that the economy does not produce enough jobs that require college degrees. Private-sector white-collar jobs can increasingly be moved offshore and automated, while public-sector jobs that require degrees, notably teaching, have been decimated by deep layoffs and feeble hiring. Business investment and consumer spending have suffered in the busts of recent decades, and government spending has not picked up the slack, leading to chronic shortfalls in demand for goods, services and employees. One sign of the downshift is that much of the recent job growth has been in lower-paying occupations. Worse, there is little evidence of a turnaround. In the past five years, postings for jobs that do not require a college degree have steadily outpaced postings for those that do.
The result is lower-quality jobs and lower pay for college graduates. Take, for example, the roughly one-third of college graduates who spend their work lives in jobs that do not require a degree. 

I have been worrying about this forever, it seems like.  As I noted recently, quoting from my op-ed from four years ago, "I try to make students understand that any job that can be sent to a different country will be sent, and that any job that can be automated will be automated."  But, who listens to me,  right?

In fact,  in the summer of 2007, I attacked the college hype itself--the first of my op-eds along these lines was published, and the title says it all: "Does U.S. oversell college?"  To which an academic in town authored in the same paper a knee-jerk response filled with cliches about the virtues of a college degree and while attacking me.  Oh well ...  Apparently he listened to me!

Reading those sentences in the NY Times convinces that me all the more that if I, a nobody at a podunk university, have been correctly reading the tea leaves for years, then certainly the truth was right there, staring at all of us.  Either we chose to ignore it--denial--or it was one heck of a conspiracy to hide the truth that is finally coming out into the open.  "I told you so" is of no use at this point!

I do a full-disclosure of sorts in classes and when talking with students.  I tell them that earning an A in my class would not even get them a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  It will not directly lead to a job, I tell them.  But, if they paid attention to my approach, which might seem like Mr. Miyagi's "wax on, wax off" instructions to the kid who wanted to learn karate, then it will all work out, I assure them.  But then--you know what is coming now--nobody listens to me!

Source

On the road again. Heck, at least once!

Every once in a while, when discussing the economic future, I ask students who are pretending to listen to me whether they would consider moving far away from Oregon.  "What if you have much better employment opportunities in North Dakota?" is my favorite way to get them to think.  I like beating up on North Dakota because back when I was a graduate student, I used to tell people, "hey, if the teaching job is in North Dakota, then that's where I will go."

Moving far away from home because of productive, gainful, and meaningful employment is not an alien concept to me.  As a young man, my father headed all the way to a remote part of India, from his roots way down in the country's peninsula, and that was back when transport was slow, and there were no phones.  From door to door--from his place to grandma's--was a five day travel.  Ten days out of a month's vacation were merely for the travel.  My grandfather would have taken up a job in Ceylon if it had not been for the elders in the family who blocked his plans.

I intentionally asked for a posting in Calcutta at the campus recruitment.  And then I came here to the other side of the planet as a 23-year old, before the Web was invented and when international calls severely dented my graduate student budget.

Even now, old high school friends are in different parts of India and around the world.  Geographic mobility has been very much a part of my life. I have even written op-eds exploring these (like this one.)    Which is why the students' responses always surprise me--most of them do not want to move far away!

I then remind them about how people immigrated from European countries, fully knowing that they might never ever be able to visit their homelands, and might never be able to even talk with any of the ones they were leaving behind.  After all, the large scale European immigration to the US was before telephones and air travel.  Yet, they moved.  And they even moved to godawful North Dakota!

In some classes, I have even joked that they--and the American youth--have become wusses compared to their grandparents and great-grandparents.

I am not the only one who thinks about all these.  For instance, here is Arthur Brooks in his column in the New York Times:

Through census data, we know that Americans are less geographically mobile today than at any point since 1948. Other scholarship suggests that the decline stretches back further. This might help explain why our country is having such a hard time getting out of its national funk.
Mobility is more than just a metaphor for getting ahead. In America, it has been a solution to economic and social barriers. If you descended from immigrants, I’m betting your ancestors didn’t come to this country for the fine cuisine. More likely they came in search of the opportunity to work hard and get ahead.
Even for those already here, migration has long been seen as a key to self-improvement.

It is not merely the economic opportunity issues.  I worry that the young increasingly shy away from taking chances. 

The mobility decline since the Great Recession has actually been the most pronounced among millennials. As the first rungs of the economic ladder became more slippery, young adults began to delay major steps into adulthood and became less likely to relocate for college or careers.

Yep!  

I can think of a number of reasons. Like the over-protective parenting of today where free-range kids are not possible.  The umbilical cord that continues via the constant texting and phones with the parents. The education system that has made kids into subservient and unthinking adults.  Whatever the reasons are, we need to get the young to get moving again.  

Let them eat cakes ... made only by us!

Consider this:

[The] decision to manufacture in the U.S. isn’t solely about dollars and cents. Rather, it’s a function of the quality of the U.S. workforce—its noteworthy productivity and its easy familiarity with lean-factory principles—as well as the need for companies to react quickly to changes in domestic consumer demand. As Jeff Immelt, the C.E.O. of General Electric, put it in 2013: “Today, the product is the process, more or less. If you look at an aircraft engine, the content of labor is probably less than five per cent. We have two hours of labor in a refrigerator. So it really doesn’t matter if you make it in Mexico, the U.S., or China. Today it’s really about globalization, not about outsourcing; it’s how do I capture markets faster than the competition?”

Two hours of labor into the making of a refrigerator.  Just two hours of labor?  If you are like me, you have never thought about how much labor goes into the making of a fridge, right?  The fridge that has revolutionized our lives.

America manufactures a whole lot of stuff, yes.  It is not the strength of the manufacturing sector that is the problem, but the fact that the strong manufacturing sector does not generate the kinds of jobs that it used to in the past.  A point that Dan Drezner makes with data:

The problem isn’t that the United States doesn’t have a vibrant manufacturing sector. The problem is that sector does not generate the job numbers that used to be associated with manufacturing:

I wish politicians will make this distinction clear.

Both Trump and Sanders downplay the enormous economic benefits of globalization for American consumers of all incomes, and their proposed solutions are vague and could well be harmful if implemented. But their words resonate with many voters, because they articulate an important truth: free trade has created major winners and major losers in the U.S. economy, and the losers—mostly blue-collar workers—have received little or no help.

I have often blogged about my own stand on these: to a developing country, manufacturing and exporting provides the economic ladder going up.  To tell them that they should not "compete" against us seems like a variation of let 'em eat cakes.  Thus, if they manufacture stuff that then displaces workers here, then what is required is a new social contract that reflects a new reality, as much as the New Deal was in response to the economic situation of those times.  However, reworking the social contract requires thoughtful and responsible politics, which apparently is rarer than a unicorn!

May we please stop pushing college degrees for all?

Consider the following, which are the concluding sentences from James Surowiecki's "Financial Page" column in the New Yorker:

We should also rethink our assumption that college is always the right answer, regardless of cost. Politicians love to invoke education as the solution to our economic ills. But they’re often papering over the fact that our economy just isn’t creating enough good jobs for ordinary Americans. The notion that college will transform your job prospects is, in many cases, an illusion, and for a while for-profit schools turned it into a very lucrative one.

Now, read the following sentences from the concluding paragraph in Rebecca Schuman's column at Slate:

The university classroom benefits from a diversity of backgrounds, including first-generation students who absolutely should get any support they need with college readiness. Every American who wants to attend college should be able to (and for a lot less money than they’re currently laying out). But those who don’t want to shouldn’t feel like they have to

Here is the problem: Surowiecki and Schuman are not higher education "insiders."  Yes, Schuman, is an adjunct faculty after earning her doctorate.  After being on the doctoral path at Yale, Surowiecki became a journalist/writer.  For all purposes, both are "outsiders" looking in at higher education when they conclude that the push for college degree for all is not worth the talk, leave alone the money that we invest.

It is an open secret anymore that we are unnecessarily pushing college degrees down the throats of young, and older, adults.  All we have managed to achieve through this is an enormous level of credential inflation.  Which is what Schuman notes as well:

the solution is to stop requiring a bachelor’s degree to be an office assistant, or a paralegal, or any number of professions that up until recently could be staffed—successfully—by the holder of an associate’s degree or high-school diploma.

The first ever op-ed of mine that was published along these lines was about two decades ago.  Yep, back in California, not too long after earning my doctorate, I argued in that opinion piece that we were committing a double crime of pushing college degrees and undermining vocational education.  Nobody cared then because I was an outsider--I was not in academia at that time.  (Well, ok, there was one wonderful benefit from that--a Mike contacted me after reading the column, which later led to dinners as well.)

As an academic, of course, I have written quite a few op-eds by now criticizing the overselling of college degrees and the under-investment in vocational education.  The only time that a fellow academic responded to it, well, it was pretty much a personal attack.  Otherwise, the higher education professionals remain silent as ever.  Why?  It should not surprise you by now--this college degree issue is merely one of the many examples for why I loved the George Bernard Shaw quote as the title for this blog itself: every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.



(BTW, keep in mind that the criticism is against the push for college degrees; having a degree is not the same as having been educated, wherein lies a huge part of the problem.)

Why am I thankful that my dream job did not happen?

When I was a kid, as it happens to most kids, I too was asked every once in a while "what do you want to do when you are older?"

One of my earliest aspirations was to become "an engine driver," which I have to translate for my American readers as a "locomotive engineer."  I loved trains; which kid doesn't!  Upon noticing that most engine drivers had on their heads handkerchiefs or small towels knotted in a way that held it in place, I tried to emulate that too.

I suppose my parents and the grandmothers and the aunts humored me with their comments, but I don't ever recall them telling me,  "what a great idea.  Yes, you can do it. Make that dream come true."

I am now older. I sometimes ask students what they want to do.  Or, those rare moments when a student comes to talk with me about career plans.  I encourage them and their ideas, however bizarre and strange they sometimes sound to my ears.  But, I add a whole bunch more that makes them aware of many aspects that they might have overlooked.  Because, I don't believe it is productive to merely tell young adults "you can be whatever you want to be."  It does not work that way.  I then might even provide them with evidence--from studies and news articles.  Of course, most students do not visit with me again after that and I wonder why!

It was, therefore, encouraging to read this essay with which I have nothing to disagree.  The author quotes Richard Bolles, who authored What color is your parachute?

Bolles bristles at the suggestion that he’s telling people to be ‘anything’ they want to be. ‘I hate the phrase,’ he says. ‘We need to say to people: Go for your dreams. Figure out what it is you most like to do, and then let’s talk about how realistically you can find some of that, or most of that, but maybe not all of that.’

Which is no different from what I tell youngsters.

The dangers are legion. Unrealistic plans lead to a waste of time and money. When a C‑student spins her wheels planning on medical school, other, more lucrative and realistic careers – say in business or education – fall by the wayside. And the ambition gap has led to increased dissatisfaction across working life.

Boy have I encountered students with expectations that simply did not match their abilities nor their work ethic.  It frustrates and worries me when faculty and staff continue to feed those false expectations instead of giving them a reality check.

At what point do we abandon possible for probable, and encourage our children to do the same?

When do you tell a kid, "son, you are not going to make it to the NFL. So, figure out something else."  Or "princess, I don't think you are the next Taylor Swift."

As parents, teachers, elders, we will be doing our children and youth a great disservice if we fail to provide them with such honest feedback.  Mere positive and wishful thinking won't do it.  I know it all too well; I am in the twilight of a mediocre career! ;)

So, any bottom-line?

‘[Adults] should say: be what you’re capable of,’ says Gwenyth, ‘not you could be anything. I’m not very good in dance. That’s like telling me I could be a professional dancer. No. No, I couldn’t be.’

Come to think of it, I am not at all capable of being an engine driver.  I am so thankful that I didn't try to become one!

I should learn to stop worrying and love the bomb

The New Yorker has a lengthy essay that profiles Marc Andresseen and his venture capital firm a16z. It is a piece in the New Yorker, which means it is not some dumb biography, of course.  No, sir. Of the many troubling aspects there, here is one:

Last year, a programmer named Alex Payne wrote an open letter to Andreessen in which he observed, “People are scared of so much wealth and control being in so few hands. Consequently, wherever you and other gatekeepers of capital direct your attention—towards robots, 3D printers, biotech, whatever—you’re going to detect a fearful response as people scramble to determine the impact of your decisions and whims,” which only compound “lingering structural unemployment and an accumulation of capital at the top of the economic pyramid.”
Payne addressed his thoughts to Andreessen because Andreessen represents the Valley—both in its soaring vision and in its tendency to treat people as a fungible mass.

The gazillion dollar issue of our time.

Andresseen is a sharp thinker.  What was his response?

Andreessen waved away the criticisms as the ravings of “a self-hating software engineer.”

Just like that!

This being the New Yorker, the writer is no dummy either:

I told him it seemed paradoxical that some of his other babies, such as Instacart and Lyft, make their profits off blue-collar drivers and pickers who must freelance without a safety net to make ends meet. Unsurprisingly, he strongly disagreed: “Maybe there’s an alternate way of living, a free-form life where you press the button and get work when you want to.”

In many previous posts, I have expressed my angst that the remarkably rapid technological advancements are creating very few jobs anymore and many of those jobs are pretty much variations of the freelance types.  Andresseen doesn't seem to care.

One 2013 paper argues that forty-seven per cent of all American jobs are destined to be automated. Andreessen argues that his firm’s entire portfolio is creating jobs, and that such companies as Udacity (which offers low-cost, online “nanodegrees” in programming) and Honor (which aims to provide better and better-paid in-home care for the elderly) bring us closer to a future in which everyone will either be doing more interesting work or be kicking back and painting sunsets. But when I brought up the raft of data suggesting that intra-country inequality is in fact increasing, even as it decreases when averaged across the globe—America’s wealth gap is the widest it’s been since the government began measuring it—Andreessen rerouted the conversation, saying that such gaps were “a skills problem,” and that as robots ate the old, boring jobs humanity should simply retool. “My response to Larry Summers, when he says that people are like horses, they have only their manual labor to offer”—he threw up his hands. “That is such a dark and dim and dystopian view of humanity I can hardly stand it!”

A lengthy piece at that other favorite magazine of mine, the Economist, is all about the rise of machines and artificial intelligence, which also refers to this 2013 paper and automation:

The worry that AI could do to white-collar jobs what steam power did to blue-collar ones during the Industrial Revolution is therefore worth taking seriously. Examples, such as Narrative Science’s digital financial journalist and Kensho’s quant, abound. Kensho’s system is designed to interpret natural-language search queries such as, “What happens to car firms’ share prices if oil drops by $5 a barrel?” It will then scour financial reports, company filings, historical market data and the like, and return replies, also in natural language, in seconds. The firm plans to offer the software to big banks and sophisticated traders. Yseop, a French firm, uses its natural-language software to interpret queries, chug through data looking for answers, and then write them up in English, Spanish, French or German at 3,000 pages a second. Firms such as L’Oréal and VetOnline.com already use it for customer support on their websites.
Nor is this just a theoretical worry, for some white-collar jobs are already being lost to machines. ... Forecasting how many more jobs might go the same way is much harder—although a paper from the Oxford Martin School, published in 2013, scared plenty of people by concluding that up to half of the job categories tracked by American statisticians might be vulnerable.

Maybe reading these essays on a Monday wasn't a good idea.  Especially when the sun has hid behind the clouds.  But, I suspect reading these on a sunny weekend would not have been uplifting either.

One day, perhaps, something like the sort of broad intelligence that characterises the human brain may be recreated in a machine. But for now, the best advice is to ignore the threat of computers taking over the world—and check that they are not going to take over your job first.

Sure, the machines are not threatening my very professional existence at this moment.  But, they are an immense threat and competition to the jobs that my students will want after graduation.  Given that I don't like to bullshit, I am at a loss anymore when that rare student stops by my office asking for advice.

To wrap up this lengthy post, I wondered whatever happened to Alex Payne, who wrote that open letter to Andresseen.  A Google search led me to this Oregonian news story that Payne has returned "to Portland as tech mentor and vegan restaurateur."  In his blog, Payne writes:

Democratic socialist politics are my politics. I’m a socialist because I want to live in a just society. More than that, I want to live in a survivable society. The form of capitalism we live under does not present a viable future ecologically, economically, or socially. It is a system designed for the creation and preservation of capital, not human life. I’m a socialist because I believe that the wealth of society can best be harnessed through cooperation, not competition.

My problem is this: I agree with Payne and I disagree with Payne. I agree with Andresseen and I disagree with him.  Maybe I am rebelling without a cause after all :(

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