Jobs in America: What Obama Could Say, and Start

We’ve moved past attacking Syria, are once again shouting at each other about gun control, and are apparently heading toward some kind of partial government shutdown.  Many are dead-set against Obamacare, which has already been discussed, approved, and found constitutional.  The country’s problems look more and more intractable, with little cooperation in sight.  It seems doubtful that our president will achieve much more in his second term, which still has over three years to go – unless he changes his focus to a massive issue which has once again drifted to the back burner.    

So where can Obama go?  Here is a speech he might give:

“My fellow Americans, I come to you with a problem.  We have something which needs our attention, more than any other challenge we face.

“The last recession ended four years ago.  Unemployment is now 7.3 percent.  That is an improvement over the past few years, but is still much higher than it has been for most of our lifetimes.  More and more Americans have been leaving the labor force, choosing different lifestyles, and giving up on the possibility of supporting themselves and their families.  The American dream of work and prosperity, which has been admired worldwide as well as by our citizens, is in serious danger.  The reason is that the jobs crisis is permanent, and will not end with better economic times.  That is hard to swallow, and so is what I am telling you, right now – we do not know the best way to deal with it.     

“I could explain further about why, without major changes, we will never see five percent unemployment again, but it is time for me to talk less and lead more.  So I will take less than ten minutes to explain where we are with this 250-year historical shift, some steps we might take, and how we can go forward.

“On the jobs crisis, conservatives are wrong.  Joblessness is not confined to those less worthy or successful anymore.  Companies cannot tolerate a general lack of money being spent.  Markets will not work unless people can buy as well as sell.  Liberals are also wrong.  The problem is not inequality, it is people not having an opportunity to support themselves by working.  And businesses are not at fault – squeezing and shackling them are not answers either.  Some things both sides have suggested, such as reducing immigration, removing destructive regulations, and subsidizing housing, may be good, but are not nearly enough. 

“So what could solve the jobs crisis?  We Americans need to consider and debate at least four possibilities.  The first is a guaranteed income.  Under this plan, each United States citizen would receive a stipend to cover basic levels of food and shelter, along with guaranteed medical care.  Second is shorter working hours.  Our productivity has improved so much over the past decades that we could make 8 AM to 1 PM our new normal business hours, reduce salaries, and hire more people.  Third, we can start charging for information contributed online.  When our personal data, ideas, and creative work help companies amass fortunes, we could be paid for that.  Fourth, our corporate income tax structure needs to change to reflect how many American jobs are being created and maintained.  A restaurant chain hiring hundreds of thousands of United States workers should, other things being equal, pay much less than a high-tech company with a few hundred.

“I propose looking at these, and other, possibilities in two ways.  First, I am starting a commission, with experts conservative, liberal, and in between, to assess the technical and financial side of these ideas, and report on if and how they would work in real life.  Second, I am calling upon city mayors, county commissions, authors, newspaper writers, bloggers, radio and TV hosts, and communicators of all kinds to hold discussions, online, through other media, and in person, to brainstorm ideas and collect the views of any Americans who want to contribute them.  Citizens, you will be heard! 

“The jobs crisis is a national problem which calls for free discussion and multilateral cooperation.  I have no axe to grind about what solution, or combination of solutions, would be best.  That is for us to determine together.  The only firm position I have about the jobs crisis is that it needs to be solved in some way.  If it is not, conservatives will be damaged by companies crashing from a sheer lack of customers, and liberals will be disgusted by the poverty caused by too few work opportunities – and those are far from the worst things that could happen.  Americans, we have made it through world wars, depressions, wrenching social changes, and intense hostility elsewhere in the world – we can negotiate this great transition as well.      

“Thank you, and may God and our efforts bless the United States of America.”

Continuing the Stimulus Is Not Perfect, But Clear-Cut for Now

The big financial news this week was the decision by Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve to carry on with its current, or QE3 (Quantitative Easing #3), stimulus efforts.  That may not seem like such a large event, but with Bernanke saying two months before that he expected to reduce or even stop the ongoing monthly Fed purchases of $85 billion in United States Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, both stock and precious metal markets treated it as a major pleasant surprise, and both jumped – the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard & Poor’s 500 index both reached record highs, and gold rose over $60.  Commercial interest rates, which had increased more than 1% since June, also dropped.  

Although the $85 billion amount may not last long, as the Fed will consider a reduction as soon as next month, the collective decision on the stimulus will be based at least in part on unemployment rates.  In June, Bernanke had said that if unemployment went below 7% QE3 would end, but he did not confirm that this week.  Instead, his messages were that “conditions in the job market today still are far from what all of us would like to see,” unemployment was “well above acceptable levels,” and that the Fed was “looking for overall improvement in the labor market.”   His organization also indicated that very low base interest rates would not increase until unemployment went below 6.5%, and maybe not even then. 

So what has happened in the year since QE3 started?  Much of it has been good.  Official unemployment dropped from 8.1% to 7.3%, and the AJSN, showing the number of jobs that could be quickly absorbed, fell from 22 million to just under 21 million.  Labor force participation, however, has decreased from 63.5% to 63.2%, its current level a 35-year low. 

During the past year, the stimulus has added about $1 trillion to the amount of money available.  The result of that, though, is not what many would expect.  Although its two most common measures, M1 (notes and coins in circulation, traveler’s checks and checking accounts) and M2 (all of M1, plus savings and personal money-market deposits) have indeed risen substantially, 9.1% and 6.8% respectively, inflation has not followed along.  The monthly rate has actually decreased, from a 1.7% annual basis in August 2012 to 1.5% last month, with the highest intervening figure 2.2%.  Meanwhile, the official annual economic growth estimate is now 2.0% to 2.3%, down three tenths of a percent from June’s prediction, and the Fed expects it, along with inflation, to be low for years.  The number of jobs created or saved by the current stimulus is unknown, but a USA Today editorial, which was actually against continuing QE3, credited that and the previous effort, over three years, with 6 million.  Income inequality has been reaching long-time records, with the share of national income from corporate profits reaching a 90-year high and the share of that going to workers at a 50-year low.  More and more money is pooling up in a shrinking number of places, and a spectacular story from this week claimed that the richest 400 Americans had more in net worth than the entire economy of Russia. 

So is the stimulus worthwhile?  It clearly injects a distortion, and, as the USA Today editorial pointed out, it makes bubbles more likely.  We don’t know what our largest companies would do if their cash reserves got well into the trillions, but we may find out it is nothing good.  However, QE3 is clearly healthy for the economy the way it is.  We are getting no help from Congress on such things as a public works program that could provide millions of jobs doing things ranging from highly beneficial to utterly necessary, or on reforming corporate taxation to reward companies hiring and retaining American workers.  Although the amount of press on the possibility that the jobs crisis is permanent has increased at least tenfold since Work’s New Age was released in 2011, no House or Senate bills, to my knowledge, have been introduced to mitigate it.  As long as unemployment-rate drops are offset by lower labor force participation, there is no sensible reason to think the economy is substantively improving, modest increases in housing prices notwithstanding.  Accordingly, the stimulus must continue.

Could Payments for Online Information Replace Jobs?

Three months ago I posted a review of sorts of a book that perhaps unwittingly took on the jobs crisis.  Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?, published in May, blamed both our employment situation and the Great Recession on computer networks, which made many middle-class jobs unnecessary.  I noted that he saw many of the same causes and effects, such as markets not working unless they had buyers as well as sellers, as I had in Work’s New Age.  His solution was for people to be paid for their online contributions, including data about themselves they unwittingly provided when they obtained free resources from “siren servers” such as Google and Facebook. 

Lanier’s scheme would call for the following:

-          Payment to those who provide information used by others, be it demographics, data about their own online activities helping sites make money by gathering more and more focused advertising, or ideas that others see, enjoy, implement, or otherwise benefit from.

-          Royalties lasting a long time, dependent on the number of people gaining from these online products or information.

-          Tracking of these resources through their sources to others passing them on or mashing them up, to provide these royalties to their originators.

-          Charges for products or information which are now free, to cover the above.

-          A “universal online identity,” preventing accessing sites anonymously, under government auspices.

-          Nationally provided computing resources, such as storage space and algorithmic capability, their extent to be determined and debated.

Such a setup could still be superficially similar to what we have today, with the addition of the structures to be added below the surface, and of course the payment systems.  So what are its advantages and disadvantages?

Its best point it that it recognizes the value of information.  We have read for decades about how hardware and software are declining in significance, and how data itself is all that ultimately matters, yet at the same time information is increasingly becoming free.  Such a scheme can be sustained through further technological progress, and would prevent problems such as the loss of personal data that would happen if, say, Facebook went out of business.  It is in tune with the real sources of value, in which it is clear that Twitter does not get its value from either its operating system or its several hundred employees, but from the billions of tweets provided by others. 

The disadvantages of such a payment scheme are also large.  We are used to free Google searches, free Wikipedia listings, and free LinkedIn business networking, and paying for these things, or their equivalent, would not be a popular change.  For anything beyond providing personal data, as in Lanier’s rather optimistic example of a beach sand bridge idea generating “a nice day’s earnings,” it would force anyone to be in effect an entrepreneur, which as I have shown is a course unsuitable for the majority.  Since vast numbers of people provide data about themselves free as it is, those charging for it would find few takers, as even if the largest servers got only half, a quarter, or 10% of what they have now, it would have nearly the same statistical value, which could result in such payments becoming legally mandated.   

Even if this system would work, it would raise one huge area of concern.  It would put government in charge of something new, possibly complicated, and very large.  Such a large and slow-to-change entity does best with tasks that can be explained simply, such as “guard the coast” and “deliver the mail” (“track the data” may or may not qualify”), and that is not to mention the chance of Big Brother-ish government acquisition of even more personal information.  But, as Lanier points, out, with conservatives wanting national IDs for voting and employment, and liberals wanting a universal health care program requiring the same, both sides are moving there as it is.  It could still be limited;  the best comparison, he writes, might be with social security numbers, which are permanent even if individual banks using them fail.   

So how could compensation for online data fit with another possible jobs solution, guaranteed income?  The largest disadvantage of the latter would be its cost, which at a very casual, back-of-the-envelope guess for a bare-bones no-requirements stipend would be well over $1 trillion per year, even after subtracting both the stimulus effect and the cost of then-unneeded programs such as welfare and food stamps.  A great deal of that could be harvested through extra taxation of advertising revenues collected by Google, Yahoo! and others, where money has been pooling up unproductively, making monitoring data movements unnecessary.    

Would this work?  I don’t know.  There is enough cause, though, to add online payments to the list, previously to my knowledge containing only guaranteed income and shorter work hours, of potentially permanent jobs-crisis solutions.  What more are there?

August AJSN Down 500,000 – America Now Fewer Than 21 Million Jobs Short

The new employment and unemployment data has arrived.  As other headlines will tell you, the jobless rate has improved again, to 7.3%.  August is a neutral calendar time for employment, so the seasonally adjusted data, most of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning, differs little from the AJSN (American Job Shortage Number) results that follow. 

The number of unemployed Americans dropped last month from 12,083,000 to 11,462,000, the largest factor causing the AJSN to fall 489,000.  Those not looking for work in the past year, but saying they still wanted a job, plunged a remarkable 418,000, and the similar “discouraged” category dropped 122,000.  Yet just a hair short of two million more said they did not want employment at all.  Most of the AJSN’s partially offsetting gain was due to a larger gap between U.S. Census Bureau data and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, now up to almost 11 million in the estimate of those in armed services, institutions, or not accounted for at all. 

Here is the breakdown:

AJSN AUGUST 2013	Total	Latent Demand %	Latent Demand Total
Unemployed	11,462,000	90	10,315,800
Discouraged	866,000	90	779,400
Family Responsibilities	215,000	30	64,500
In School or Training	233,000	50	116,500
Ill Health or Disability	145,000	10	14,500
Other	884,000	30	265,200
Did Not Search for Work In  Previous Year	3,386,000	80	2,708,800
Not Available to Work Now	563,000	30	168,900
Do Not Want a Job	83,697,000	5	4,184,850
Non-Civilian, Institutionalized, and Unaccounted For, 15+	10,890,526	10	1,089,053
American Expatriates	6,320,000	20	1,264,000
TOTAL			20,971,503

The three major secondary BLS measures were split; those out for 27 weeks or more stayed steady at 4.3 million, those working part-time for economic reasons (want full-time work but can’t find it) dropped 334,000 to 7.9 million, and labor force participation declined once more to 63.2%.

So how good was this month’s jobs report?  Not bad.  It fits in quite consistently with recent months’, with another seasonally adjusted net increase in jobs, 169,000, above the 125,000 to 140,000 needed to cover population growth.  Once again the unemployment rate dropped – both adjusted and unadjusted are now 7.3%.  It has now been one year since the first monthly AJSN was announced, so let us start comparing AJSN data with that of the year before.  How does August 2013 stack up with August 2012?

A year ago, unemployment was 1.2 million higher, at 12,696,000.  Those not searching for work in the previous year, but still wanting it, then counted to 426,000 higher.  The numbers in all marginally attached categories, except for those discouraged (up 22,000) have decreased since.  Those not wanting a job are up over 2.4 million. 

In all, these are good times, with employment continuing to crawl forward.  With the labor force continuing to shrink, though, improvements will be overstated.  Given the political climate, the government, with its measured stimuli, may be setting the stage as well as it can, barring the national infrastructure project that may end up waiting until after the 2016 elections.  The reason unemployment is as high as it is is not that we are being misgoverned – it is due to the job shortage, which is permanent and will not end even with economic times as otherwise good as these.    

Civil Rights: Fifty Years Out, and Two Paths to Choose From

Wednesday was the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the greatest speech in American history.  Martin Luther King Jr. told the nation he had “a dream” about a colorblind America, which, with laws forcing racial segregation and some remarkably ugly responses to demonstrations, was much farther away than now. 

The centerpiece of the country’s great transition since, our black President, affirmed on this anniversary that he too is a world-class practitioner of the speaker’s art.  He superbly recapped those 1963 events, and explained how and why the efforts of those involved brought the United States into the modern civil-rights world.  He also brought up something that has seemingly been lost from our collective memory:

In some ways, though, the securing of civil rights, voting rights, the eradication of legalized discrimination – the very significance of those victories may have obscured a second goal of the March.  For the men and women who gathered 50 years ago were not there in search of some abstract ideal.  They were there seeking jobs as well as justice – not just the absence of oppression but the presence of economic opportunity.  For what does it profit a man, Dr. King would ask, to sit at an integrated lunch counter if he can’t afford the meal? ...  And Dr. King explained that the goals of African Americans were identical to working people of all races.

Indeed, the complete official name of the 1963 rally was “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”  According to William P. Jones, writing in The New York Times on Tuesday, the demonstration originated with the Negro American Labor Council.  Long-time trade union member A. Philip Randolph, who had had a similar idea 22 years before, sought an emphasis on the weaknesses of then-President John F. Kennedy’s economic programs, and only later did that lose out to King’s primary cause of removing legal discrimination.  Yet the issue of jobs remained closely related.

Over the half-century, along with the removal of legal sanctions against blacks and those in other groups, the civil rights movement has itself changed, and not for the better.  Shelby Steele, an author and senior Stanford fellow, last month wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “The Decline of the Civil Rights Establishment.”  In it, he explained how those who might now compare closest to the likes of contemporaries King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, specifically Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, are not even close in “moral authority” or the pursuit of true justice.  Modern issues such as the acquittal of a white man shooting a black teenager who had just broken his nose cannot compare to the routine impediments around workplaces, buses, lunch counters, and other daily life settings legally sanctioned against millions.  Steele also mentioned the lack of the likes of Jackson and Sharpton to address what might be called self-inflicted abuses, such as the three-hundred-plus black teenagers annually killed by other blacks in only one section of one city, or the current 73% black illegitimacy rate, and calls today’s civil rights leadership “irrelevant.”

Whether you agree with Steele or not, it should be clear that today’s bigotry-caused racial problems, while still present, are much milder than they were in 1963.  That means the aggregate of organizations working to reduce racial discrimination cannot possibly be as significant as they were when King spoke.  So what can they focus on now?

We know the answer, from above:  Jobs.

Here, though, we have two possible paths.  One is represented by other news from this week – the fast-food workers’ demonstrations.  (I hesitate to call them “strikes,” because the people involved are not unionized.)  There has been a growing national movement by these low-paid laborers to earn more, usually in conjunction with a higher minimum wage.  Unfortunately, forced pay increases would cost jobs, driving the national shortage well over its current 21.5 million, and would widen a less publicized but very real type of inequality, that between those working and those who only want to be.  Although few if any of the Burger Kings, McDonalds’, and Wal-Marts would be seen dropping positions immediately after a large raise in the minimum, they would later have innumerable opportunities to cut their numbers, through staffing of new locations, articulation of ever-growing automation and efficiency, and simple attrition.  Local businesses, usually less profitable, would do proportionally even worse. 

The second path was described by Obama in Wednesday’s speech:

The test was not, and never has been, whether the doors of opportunity are cracked a bit wider for a few.  It was whether our economic system provides a fair shot for the many – for the black custodian and the white steelworker, the immigrant dishwasher and the Native American veteran.  To win that battle, to answer that call – this remains our great unfinished business.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves.  The task will not be easy.  Since 1963, the economy has changed.  The twin forces of technology and global competition have subtracted those jobs that once provided a foothold into the middle class – reduced the bargaining power of American workers.

Raising the pay of fast-food and other low-wage workers from its current almost $9 per hour to $12 or $15 will not get us “a fair shot for the many.”  Middle-class lifestyles with new cars and owned standalone houses will not come from higher minimum wages.  We need to look at some real solutions – guaranteed income (advocated by, among many others, none other than Martin Luther King), shorter working hours, payments for electronic information, and other possibilities people want to describe and defend.  Among them, if it is anywhere, is the way to the original dream of that 1963 event.  The jobs crisis is not a black or white issue, it is an American one.  As Obama said, from the same speech:

The March on Washington teaches us that we are not trapped by the mistakes of history, that we are masters of our fate.  But it also teaches us that the promise of this nation will only be kept when we work together. 

Four Casinos in New York State – A Winner for Jobs and Beyond

In elections, people must usually choose from two or more political sides, each with its own philosophy.  We must therefore choose an ideology before filling out our ballots.  A chance to vote directly on an action to be taken or not taken, not hidden within any political view, is much less common, and an opportunity to weigh in on something that will clearly and directly affect the number of jobs in an area is rarer still. 

That, though, is what New York state voters will have on November 5th. 

New York State Assembly Bill 8068, also known as Proposition 1 or the New York Casino Gambling Amendment, calls for a total of four full-service gambling houses to be built in three upstate areas:  the Catskills,  the Binghamton area, and around Albany or Saratoga.  After seven years, three additional casinos would be approved for the New York City area.  The measure passed the Statehouse March 18^th and the State Senate on June 4^th, with unanimous approval both times.  Since the bill would involve revising the state constitution, it must now be approved directly by the voters.  So what are its merits?

A pro-amendment organization, operating under “Vote Yes for NYS Gaming Amendment” and similar phrases, named “property tax relief, job creation, and more education funding” as reasons for passing the proposition.  The case for casinos in the areas mentioned, though, goes much deeper.

First, the increased tax revenues, from income as well as corporate profits, could be quite large, and could go beyond either dedicated education support or lowered property taxes.

Second, even just one casino-hotel in each of these areas would help tourism considerably.  It is now almost mandatory for tourist areas catering to adults to have at least one full-service gambling outlet, and racinos, with limited scopes and without table games are not sufficient.  Casino gambling need not be the primary attraction, as it is in Las Vegas, but it needs to be available, as in, for example, New Orleans.

Third, casinos offer recreation to local residents.  Not only do they offer gambling propositions vastly more fair than pari-mutuels and lotteries with their 20% and almost 50% player disadvantages, but the concerts, restaurants, headline shows, and nightclubs would be valued by many. 

On the other side, all of the disadvantages commonly named by detractors are less significant than they may seem.  It is true that about 5% of the population cannot handle gambling, but between lotteries, illegal online propositions, and racinos, they are not nearly as shielded from it as they were before the Internet and the spread of gambling outside Nevada.  Some local businesses would suffer from new competition, but others of similar or greater economic impact would appear.  Casinos are no longer destinations, so we could not expect truly massively increased numbers of visitors, but that same factor cuts down the amount of associated crime.  In all, the proposition’s $500 tax on each slot machine or gaming table earmarked for problem-gambling-helping organizations may make Gamblers Anonymous and similar groups less overwhelmed, not more, given how many people in the area need their services as it is.  Even police involvement may be more than mitigated by the opportunity for larger budgets.

Not every large business venture for Broome, Saratoga, and Sullivan County should be accepted.  Hydraulic fracturing was rejected in almost every township in the latter, in large part because those wanting to bring it in were not able to show how it would help local residents.  The people of every community with as great natural beauty as these three must reject plans that would disturb that too much. 

In that context, the case for casinos, which would involve tearing up only a matter of acres of landscape, is as strong as any we are likely to see.  Old resort areas need new reasons for people to come back.  Full-scale casino-hotels average one full-time employee per guest room – a new or reopened 500-room facility near Liberty, as has been proposed, would mean that many new jobs, in a county with fewer than 32,000 of them now.  Gambling, government sanctioned or not, has loomed large in the histories of both Saratoga and the Catskills, and today’s players want clean, legal casinos where their rights are consistently protected.  New Yorkers living in these areas will gamble whether the proposition is passed or not; if not locally, much of their action will go, as it does now, to Pocono Downs, Foxwoods, Atlantic City, and therefore to the benefit of other state governments.  In exchange for real but generally small and mitigated amounts of non-natural disturbances, we would get more freedom, and, in the case of Sullivan County, a conservative 1% unemployment-rate drop from one such facility all by itself.

Overall, we have to decide what we want.  We can stay with what we have, which has a lot going for it but too few economic opportunities, even for current residents.  Or we can bring in money and jobs in ways that will be unobtrusive to the massive majority of those who do not want to be involved with them.  The choice, in this case, is clear.        

Vonnegut as Jobs Prophet

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was one of the great 20^th-century American novelists.  Even though much of his writing was science fiction, he wasn’t contained by that genre.  In the late 1970s, when I was in college, his books were staples of English literature classes, yet some professors considered his work too casual, and maybe too popular, for university study.

In 1952, only the year after the first UNIVAC computer, boasting almost 2,000 instructions per second, was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau, Vonnegut published Player Piano.  This novel was set some time in the future, after a war which had somehow pushed automation so far forward that the vast majority of people were not needed for work.   That predated by 12 years the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution’s letter to President Johnson alerting him to upcoming mechanization-caused joblessness, and was 21 years before the start of the Work’s New Age era in 1973. 

So how prophetic was Vonnegut?  Here are some structures of his future American society:

-          Cities were divided into three parts, one where the former workers lived, one for companies and those still employed by them, and one almost exclusively for the nearly-all-producing machines themselves.  Only rarely did people from the first and second sections travel to the other one.

-          The former workers were officially employed by either the Army or the “Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps.”  Most soldiers had no access to weapons, and the “Reeks and Wrecks,” as they were called, had job titles but little if any real work to do.  Boredom was a real social problem.

-          The idle people, often quite hostile to others, were engaged mostly in drinking and various small-scale recreational activities.  Many spent time talking wistfully about the jobs they had had and the trades they had practiced, with a lot of pride in their work.  Those not working often sought out ways in which they could contribute, such as by offering to repair a damaged car driven by one of the first-part residents.

-          Everyone was provided for, with “warm clothes” and “a place to live,” and there was no starvation.

-          The advent of widespread machine takeover of jobs had been followed by riots, which were suppressed.  Eventually there was also a nationwide revolution in which the former workers destroyed many of the machines, which failed as well.

So how do our current situation, and where we seem to be headed, match up with Vonnegut’s world?  One thing he did not anticipate.  Many of today’s job-cutting machines, in contrast to that Univac I which took up 943 square feet of floor space, can be held in a hand, so there is no need for large districts dedicated to them.  How about the other features?

-          Cities are, in a sense, becoming divided between modern-day business zones where many remaining cubicle workers report, and where people live.  It, strangely, has not happened that those employed in offices live nearby, even though their home neighborhoods also have high aesthetics, generally new buildings, and low crime rates.  Yet unemployment now varies greatly between residential sections, from 3% to 70% or more, so we could say our cities indeed have two divisions.

-          Government jobs without real work were a feature of the Soviet Union, but that has not seriously happened much here.  Unless you count a tiny minority of those in the Occupy protests, we have seen remarkably little public hostility from the unemployed.  That may change.

-          In Vonnegut’s story, joblessness came more suddenly than it has in real life, with our 40 years since work was easy for most to get, plus the next 10 to 30, compressed into five or ten.  As a result, stories of good jobs are now passed mostly from generation to generation.   On contributing skills, communities currently provide some outlets but not enough.

-          The social safety net, stronger now than in 1952, is designed to provide clothing, food, and shelter for everyone, and usually succeeds.  As more and more people are unneeded by the workforce, though, the number needing such benefits is increasing, and, with costs rising, we are already seeing discussion about who should be helped and how. 

-          Few have rioted against machines, though the Luddites in the early 19th century did.  Although I have written and spoken about the possibilities of unemployment-driven roving gangs and civil disorder, a broad-based organized attack on automation, or globalization or efficiency for that matter, seems very unlikely to me.  In Player Piano, all seemed to agree that joblessness had one cause, which people could put their hands on and physically destroy.  As per last week’s post, we are only in the stage of proposing explanations for the lack of work, which in fact has multiple causes of which many are unsuitable to rebel against.

Despite these differences, on one thing Vonnegut would have agreed.  The historical transition he foresaw has materialized.  We know neither how it will play out nor how can we make the most of it.  In the meantime, his books should be considered just fine for college courses – especially in the business department.