Guest post week: Neo-neo-Luddites

Last updated on: July 27, 2017 at 8:47 am by Jane the Actuary

Guest post week: Neo-neo-Luddites 2017-07-27T08:47:09-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Hey, everyone! I’m on vacation this week and have invited a few people to contribute blog posts. Here’s the first, by “Jane the Librarian”:

It seems to be pretty widely agreed that part of the explanation for Donald Trump’s election is the perception that globalization and automation have left large percentages of Americans without any realistic prospect of a good job.

Economic dislocation, of course, is nothing new. A lot of history grows from that seed. Once upon a time—in 1779, so it’s said—an English worker smashed two stocking frames in a fit of rage, and his name became a byword for a couple decades afterwards, with new incidents of smashed machinery jokingly attributed to Ned Ludd in a kind of cultural meme of the era. That meme was why a group of English weavers in Nottinghamshire called themselves Luddites a few decades later, when protesting that newly introduced machinery was being used in a “fraudulent and deceitful manner” to avoid established labor practices, and smashing it.

Ever since then, it has been assumed that new jobs will always spring up to replace the old, inefficient ways which, while they were labor-intensive and therefore provided a source of income for large numbers of people, caused a higher cost of living that made everyone relatively poorer. And new jobs springing up has just about always happened, even if they required moving. That they will is taken as a basic economic tenet by nearly every elite of every Western country.

But universal, immutable truths are true only until they aren’t. What if Trump’s supporters, the modern Luddites, are right this time? What if this time, things really are different? There are major differences this time, in community and cultural capital as much as economics. What if we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit of making people richer by making the cost of living lower? And new needs by society for most people—that is, jobs—have not materialized yet.

What if we’re making most people obsolete?

Almost simultaneous to receiving this post, I came across an article in City Journal on a similar topic; discouragingly, it suggests that the future of work will be that of personal services — that is, being cynical, the have-nots will become servants of one sort or another to the haves. Ugh.

Readers, your thoughts?

Image: Luddites. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFrameBreaking-1812.jpg; By Chris Sunde; original uploader was Christopher Sunde at en.wikipedia. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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