As long ago as Scrooge, there was the question of what to do about the surplus population, that is, the economically unviable. In the nomenclature of Mitt Romney, the ‘takers’ as opposed to the ‘makers.’ Layabouts, welfare queens, lazy people, stupid people, people who refuse to get a job, to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even if there is a bootstrap shortage.
This electoral season, the issue is front and center. Ever since the bust of 2008, employment, income inequality, vanishing jobs in vanishing industries, disappearing opportunity have become burning issues for more and more Americans who have endured stagnant wages for almost four decades.
The responses of the various candidates have been feeble at best. Most have been variations on the old time religion of the various partisan sects. The libertarian, free-enterprise faithful believe wages are stagnant and jobs scarce because there’s too much government. Free the animal spirits of the markets by eliminating taxes, the social safety net and regulations and a happy and prosperous utopia will ensue.
Traditional progressives think there’s not enough government. We need public works, retraining of the displaced, unemployment insurance, income redistribution, curbs to the rapacity of unfettered capitalism. Humane, but possibly just as inadequate to the scope of the current malaise as the laissez faire pie-in-the-sky.
Populists, whether Bernie or The Donald, blame various scapegoats – Wall Street greed, free trade, illegal immigrants, foreign competitors, banks that are too big, walls that are too small, hated minorities. Yet all of these nostrums – left, right and center – are derived from a formulary from a bygone age. The medicine is not going to work because the disease we face may be different in kind, not just in degree, from anything we’ve seen before.
Yes, the change from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from manpower to steam, electric and petrochemical power was huge and disruptive, but human workers were still needed to perform tasks for a wage. What if this time something unprecedented is under way? What if workers are becoming obsolete?
Charles Murray, a controversial, conservative sociological polemicist offered a proposal recently in The Wall Street Journal – a tiny but guaranteed annual income for all citizens. In part, this was a typical right-wing Trojan Horse. In exchange for money for nothing, Social Security, Medicare and the rest of the welfare state apparatus would be ditched. People would be given a minimalist set of bootstraps. If they didn’t pull themselves up, tough luck. Live a minimalist life.
But along the way, Murray admits some alarming trends are also behind his proposal. Technology may really be eliminating the need for people to work. Many, many people. Better to give these now worthless people a stipend than to have them prowling the land like the undead preying on the small minority of makers in their gated communities and penthouses.
Murray cites analysis that suggests if the self-driving car soon becomes reality, four million jobs would vanish overnight – cab drivers, truck drivers, delivery drivers, bus drivers. You get the drift. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Half of my phone calls are now from robots. A machine gives me an eye exam. They perform surgery. They assemble cars.
Murray quotes a study by two Oxford professors who suggest that, due to robotic and AI trends now well underway, within a couple decades 47% of jobs in the United States could be performed by non-human means. That’s a lot of unemployment.
It is fanciful to suppose that 47% of the population will be retrained as doctors, lawyers, hedge-fund chiefs. Or tech geeks, coding away. In fact, even the techies may not be safe. Murray reminds us that a computer recently beat the Asian champion of the ancient game of Go, a game far more intricate than chess. And the machine wasn’t taught to beat the humans. It was provided with the rules of the game, then taught itself how to beat all comers.
If people are obsolete, will the machines take Murray’s advice to give them all an annual stipend, a pension for life? Why would they bother? But even if they do, what will the surplus millions do all day? Write poems? Form gangs and kill each other? Take drugs, if the machines let them? Watch reality TV? What purpose will people have in such a world?
It’s not just Murray and me who find these trends alarming. Really smart people from Stephen Hawking to Bill Gates have begun to get spooked too. What if the tools we have made are less humane than their creators and decide we have no further utility? The solutions to disruptive change coming from Trump, Hillary and Paul Ryan hardly address this contingency.