Many articles pertinent to American employment reach my
desk, and not all of them are on subtopics, such as self-driving cars,
Uber-Lyft-Airbnb, robots, or the minimum wage, which can support an entire
post. Still, they are important, and any
of their subjects could, as the driverless vehicles did last year, grow into a
booming and attention-getting area.
The first, from June 23, is on a subject on which I have
written several times, that of a guaranteed citizen’s stipend. In “Basic Income Revisited” (Project Syndicate, June 23), Robert
Skidelsky, a British emeritus political economy professor, doesn’t revisit as
much as introduce it, naming ever-increasing inequality from automation as a
possible future cause, saying that “unless we change our system of income
generation, there will be no way to check the concentration of wealth in the
hands of the rich and exceptionally entrepreneurial.” As we will see, he’s hardly the only observer
seeing that. I maintain that the
perceived problem with inequality, which indeed will not go away by normal
means, is actually one of insufficient resources for ordinary people, which can
be resolved in a variety of ways, including guaranteed income.
In Forbes, George
Anders, a grade-school friend of mine many decades ago who, like me, loved
chemistry but ended up in business instead, wrote July 26th’s “Is
Tech Killing U.S. Jobs? The Actual Data
Is Surprising.” He correctly pointed out
that relatively few people even now are employed in information technology, but
that many more have jobs connected with business-related services much less
used a couple of decades ago, such as surveys, planning events, and graphic
design. He acknowledged that computers
had ended many positions, such as executive secretaries (down from 1,130,000 to
666,000 from 2010 to 2015), and yet that, Expedia and the like notwithstanding,
there were still 67,000 American travel agents.
His points seem to be that jobs come and go in unexpected places, and
that the effect on information systems on employment has been neither great nor
horrendous but somewhere in the middle. I
think the time we spent together poring over 1966 baseball cards helped him
learn how to understand numbers, as it did for me, and it shows here.
In a counterpoint to last year’s press on the intensity of
their jobs, we found out from the late Scott Eric Kaufman in Salon on August 29th, in
“Amazon to test full-time, full-salaried 30-hour work week” that the online
retailing behemoth will try something I’ve recommended for years. Although that company’s management’s
intentions may be good, I see no chance that their managers will truly end up
working that little. The trap they are
falling into is similar to that of eliminating performance reviews, which does
not end employee assessment and selection for promotions but merely pushes it
underground. As they are knowledgeable
enough to be aware of that, I can’t take their effort seriously.
A new set of temporary employees, “Migrant Workers in
Recreational Vehicles,” made the pages of The
New York Times on October 21. Author
Christopher Farrell described “modern-day nomads” who move around the country,
working seasonal opportunities. They may
take difficult physical jobs, such as bringing in agricultural harvests, but
are hardly poor, with many old enough to get pension, retirement account, and
Social Security income as well. There are
now millions of over-50 Americans with similar work and life characteristics,
who in decades past would have been either fully retired or still in their
earlier careers, forming a growing set of gig workers providing another way for
companies to fill jobs without expensive full-time employees. That is only one more effect of the permanent
jobs crisis.
In Harvard Business
Review on the same date, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox asked “What Happens When
Careers Last 20 Years Longer?” The
article didn’t match the title, a good thing since while lives are getting longer
careers are not, and addressed how companies might deal with those in different
stages of life, from emerging adults not ready for permanent full-time work to
the mushrooming count of those over 60 starting businesses. She made a good common-sense point rebutting
those avoiding nepotism, that “it may prove a lot easier to manage dual career
couples which they both work for you.”
When I was at AT&T two decades ago, 13% of company employees were
married to another one, and that did, indeed, help them continue professionally
and stay together personally.
Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about technology and
innovation? The Economist’s October 22nd Schumpeter column, “Techno
wars,” surveys both sides and how they both get confused about productivity as
opposed to jobs, progress as opposed to lifestyle improvement, and cash income
as opposed to unquantified free resources unavailable scant years before. These are all different things, and this
page-long piece could be expanded to a book in which the author would keep them
straight.
Two November 27th articles, “Q&A: Political economist Eberstadt on men without
jobs” in Fox Business and “Jobless by
choice – or pain?” from Robert J. Samuelson in The Washington Post, addressed the issue of fewer men in the
workforce, which I documented in Work’s
New Age almost five years ago.
Nicholas Eberstadt additionally told us that over three times as many
men aged 25 to 54 are “neither working nor looking for work” for every one
officially unemployed, and that the United States has “had by far the worst
drop in male workforce participation.”
Samuelson also seemed to be just discovering things he could have read
in my 2012 book, such as “the work ethic is such a central part of the American
character that it’s hard to imagine it fading” and that those out of the
workforce “spend about eight hours a day… watching TV, playing video games or
just hanging out.” Though he added the
depressing news that “nearly half of male dropouts report taking pain pills
every day,” he, and Eberstadt, are behind the curve.
“A Dilemma for Humanity:
Stark Inequality or Total War.”
What a title! It’s from The New York Times on December 6th,
on a piece in which Eduardo Porter interviewed history professor Walter
Scheidel, whose January book, The Great
Leveler, will argue that only something as extreme as “all-out
thermonuclear war” can stop our increasing inequality. That echoed my second-to-last Work’s New Age paragraph, in which I
warned that “if we maintain the idea that any decent person has the opportunity
to work” we would choose between various disastrous consequences, including
“vast numbers of our countrymen without hope, health, or possessions.” I disagree with the implication here that
equality should be our goal, and don’t understand why guaranteed income, to
name just one possible comprehensive solution, would not be effective. Maybe that will be in Scheidel’s book.
Two more pertinent articles came out only Wednesday, but
both can be addressed quickly. Dylan
Love’s NBC News “Is Universal Basic
Income the Answer to an Automated Future?” is a short overview of that idea,
punctuated by recent automation-related news.
Samuelson’s Washington Post
“What’s really to blame for the productivity slowdown” starts with “our thinking
about productivity is cockeyed,” which it is, if we refuse to realize that so
many of our new positions are in areas such as restaurants, retail, and home
health care where employers don’t get even $25 per hour value from their
workers.
I’ll end on a more forward-going note by mentioning
“Luxembourg boldly goes into asteroid mining” (Financial Times, May 5th). There is almost unimaginable mineral wealth
on those things between Mars and Jupiter, and if you see science fiction writer
Larry Niven’s Future History series, you will get an idea of the prosperity,
the culture, and, yes, the jobs that harvesting it could create. Full marks to little Luxembourg with its
second-in-the-world GDP per capita, which, if they get somewhere with that,
will become even richer. If they’re not
big, at least they can think big – and so can we.
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