So, whenever the subject of technological unemployment comes up, neolibs tend to gaslight people about it. They'll say something like "sure, technology eliminates jobs, but technology also creates more jobs so people always have stuff to do", pushing the same old "tides raising all boats BS they've been peddling since the 1980s. Now, I'm going to be honest, to some extent, they are correct. When people talk about how technology destroys jobs, they're talking about the luddite fallacy, which is the idea that technology eliminating jobs leads to more unemployment over the long term. It's considered a fallacy because this is considered wrong or fallacious. And I generally want to discuss the idea that this is, in itself, a fallacy, while also criticizing the religion of jobs.
Because let's face it, jobists love to trot this out whenever technological unemployment is mentioned to try to gaslight people into believing that it's a good thing and blah blah blah. And that's how we got an angry country full of trumpers upset at losing their living standards while these same neolibs tell them to "JuSt MoVe!!11!"
The luddite fallacy fallacy
First of all, the only reason this is a fallacy is because jobists dominate our culture and dictate our policy on employment. Our government ACTIVELY INCENTIVIZES creating as much work as possible, to pump economic numbers as high as possible, only stopping as the economy approaches "full employment" (4% or so unemployment rate). They control this via the federal reserve via interest rates. Lower interest rates or sometimes outright stimulus leads to making the pressure from the faucet stronger, and leads to more business formation and the creation of new jobs. Higher interest rates, like we're seeing now, are introduced to try to put the brakes on inflation and slow down the job creation process, potentially driving the economy into a recession and spiking the unemployment rate a little bit. This leads to a general boom-bust cycle in economics where every 5-10 years we have a recession followed by a period of steady growth. We've talked about this before. It's actually one of my arguments for why jobs will never be the answer to our problems and why we need a basic income. We are on a treadmill as a society of trying to keep people trapped in the sisyphusian hell we call "employment" in a never ending cycle to make number on graph go up. And it's the core reason why this fallacy is a fallacy.
No one really questions the dogma of jobs in this country. Only weirdo extremists like me really are willing to take on this stuff. Most people just treat work as an unquestioning aspect of our reality, and only people like Andrew Yang even raise the possibility for technological unemployment being a threat. And they're largely ignored due to this so called fallacy, because conventional logic is "oh well, we'll just create more jobs." This is where I take things further than Yang. I really have to ask...why? Why should we create more jobs? More work? Why shouldn't we instead choose to work less? And while there are a couple practical reasons, the best of which is that GDP is a rough analogue of our ability to wage war and having the strongest economy means we have the best military which means no one can screw with us, for the most part, these reasons are more cultural than practical. it's the logic of plato's cave. The idea that America is "the land of opportunity" and that jobs are in our DNA. I mean, we've so gaslit our population that one of the worst things you could do is come out and say "I dont want to work", they'll call you lazy, wag their finger at you telling you that you're not entitled to anything and need to get a job and blah blah blah. We Americans dont like nice things. We believe people must put in the proper amount of suffering before they're entitled to the essentials to live. Much of the rest of the world isn't much better. For as progressive as I consider Europe, when Phillipe Van Parijs proposed his real libertarian theory for basic income, he often gets a lot of weirdo social democrats going on about reciprocity. I think Italy went as far at one point to circlejerk about how they're a "work based republic" and how UBI is unconstitutional. So, yeah. The biggest obstacle to UBI and reducing working hours is literally that there seems to be an implicit religion around work. I know I seem to be calling everything a "religion" lately as if I'm some fundie christian, but in some ways it's true, everyone has their sacred cows that they freak out if you try to slaughter. And the circlejerk about work seems to be one of them.
But hear me out. What if we, instead of creating jobs, and then insisted on forcing people to work who don't want to spend their lives working, we instead insisted on using automation and technological employment to eliminate work, without creating new work to be done? Yes, growth would be lower, but honestly? it used to be a sci fi type vision of the future, but I feel like back in the 1930s and the Keynesian era, we seemed to forsee a future in which we worked a ridiculously little amount, while still being insanely productive. Keynes indicated that we could probably have the same living standards as the 1930s and work like 15 hour weeks, something I've more or less proven on this blog from a raw GDP perspective. I've also explained how our incentive system doesn't allow us to voluntary cut work hours, and how workers are trapped on a cycle of working the same amount of hours instead, with no realistic way to cut back for the most part. Then mainstream economists turn around and given the forced choices capitalism forces us to make, claim that people CHOSE to work longer and blah blah blah.
And then people turn around and claim "well, having people not work in the distant future sounds like a possibility, but we're way off from that, and we need people to work today." Sure, we need SOME people to work today. We've never gotten rid of the need for ALL labor, but we I like to say, we can probably afford to work a lot less if we wanted to. We could reduce our necessary work load via automation, NOT create new jobs, and instead invest all of that extra productivity into reducing how much we work. We could then choose to allow people to not work, via a UBI and the freedom to say no, while maintaining the incentives to work for those who want to, we could reduce the work week, we could reduce the retirement age, etc. In general, we could work far less as a result. But instead, because we keep insisting that some need to work, we insist everyone needs to work, and then we create as many jobs as possible to fill, while keeping us on this cycle of employment and being forced to work to survive. It really is a sisyphusian grind.
My point is, the luddite fallacy is only a fallacy because our cultural ideas around work keep us chained to the concept, where we literally create new jobs, and new rocks to roll up hills, when we could instead just decide to..stop doing this. We could instead decide to invest our newfound productivity into working less for about the same amount of output, but instead, we insist on working and creating new output.
Put another say, say we have 100 million people putting out $50,000 GDP per capita a year. Each worker works 40 hours a week. We discover a technological breakthrough that increases productivity by 50%. What do we do with this?
Well, under our current sisyphusian idea of work, we will work the same amount for $75,000 GDP per capita per year. People are expected to work just as hard as before, often with the rewards of this productivity going to the people at the top, and there's no reward for society discovering these breakthroughs to advance our productivity.
We could instead insist that 1/3 of workers now no longer have to work, and we get the same $50,000 GDP per capita per year. We could cut working hours from 40 hours a week to 27 hours a week. We could reduce the retirement age from 66, to around 49, reducing the amount of time the average person has to work from 50 years (assuming they start at 16), to 33 years.
Compound those kinds of breakthroughs over time and if we have been doing this all along, it's not unrealistic we eventually hit John Meynard Keynes' original prediction of 15 hour work weeks and stuff like that.
If we keep going as we are, I suspect we'll have $300k GDP per capita around 2120 or so, and we'll still insist that people can't stop working and that this is a long off thing for the future. 2220, we could be at $1.2 million GDP per capita per year (this is all accounting for inflation btw). Nah man, maybe in another 100 years. 2320, $5 million GDP per capita per year. And so on and so forth. Point is, it's never enough, because we have a system predicated on infinite growth, with no slowing down or stopping because our social structures and cultural ideals keep us on a treadmill.
I'm not saying all growth is bad. But....honestly, there are things more important than growth. Like leisure. Freedom to self determine. Environmental sustainability. Etc. Maybe the true fallacy in the long term is the fallacy of infinite growth and infinite jobs, and how we'll hit a hard limit at some point that leads to ecological collapse. Leftists will claim this is the end result of "capitalism." Sure, IDEOLOGICAL capitalism predicated on infinite growth, but all systems are equally susceptible to this behavior, and all of them have the potential to put the brakes on. I'm not advocating for an end of capitalism mind you. I'm advocating for an end to our sisyphusian work culture.
What technological unemployment actually looks like
The problem with the luddite fallacy fallacy is that it tends to ignore the effects that technological unemployment has on people. People often expect some sort of job apocalypse that comes along like a tidal wave throwing millions of out of work in a short amount of time, and that the effects are so catastrphic and unavoidable that we will need a policy like basic income to solve the problem. This is the problem Andrew Yang presented when pushing for his case for UBI in the war on normal people. We've read these reports for years now going on about how over the next 20 years, we're gonna see like half of all jobs automated, but still, despite this, we're currently sitting at "full employment" and have sound economic numbers. Heck, since covid, the narrative is we dont have enough workers to fill the jobs that are available. We keep acting like America has a "worker shortage" when from my perspective, I'd argue we have a "jobs surplus." (see what I said above about the federal reserve).
But, technological unemployment is more subtle and insidious. It's more like a frog in a pot slowly being brought to boil, we don't really notice it as it's happening, it's only when we look back and go "oh crap."
Yes, you can have a world where technological unemployment makes people losers in the economy at large, while still having an economy with roughly full employment, or acceptable levels of unemployment, and here's why.
First of all, everyone doesn't lose their jobs overnight. Take the mall topic we've discussed recently on here and how malls are a bellweather for our economy at large. Malls aren't dying all at the same time, it's a slow progress over the past decade or so. You might see some stores go out in your local mall. Then a few more stores. Maybe once every 3 months on average you see a store going out. You don't notice the effects immediately, you see it over a few years. Then suddenly you're going into the mall a decade later, you're wondering, gee where is everyone? Where are all the stores? Why aren't there any customers? How does this place keep the lights on? And then you notice, it doesn't pay to keep the lights on. These malls have been struggling financially for years, and then they eventually close. It's a common thing going on in hundreds of communities across the US, maybe thousands. And it's not just malls. A lot of big box stores have died over the years. Factories have gone overseas and have been automated. You might notice the big tipping points happen in recessions. I remember I didn't realize how bad our economy actually was until the realities of the great recession set in. You start noticing that your community no longer has the jobs it once did, and that the economic prospects going forward start looking bleak. Neighborhoods become blighted. You see urban decay. As the economy "recovers", you notice that your community isn't bouncing back. Sure the numbers are getting better, but you also realize that there's some nuances to the numbers. A lot of people are underemployed. A lot of people take jobs that don't really fit them and their aspirations, but hey, it pays the bills as they say. They might work multiple low paying jobs just to survive. And some people might just drop out, to not be counted at all. In terms of labor participation, we never really recovered from the great recession. To some extent this is baby boomers retiring, but it's also millions of discouraged workers, like the 5 million young men who left the work force to never return. The millions more who somehow found their way onto disability. Yang talked a lot about how we're already feeling the effects of this over time. So, you can have this system just hobbling on, just doing a "good enough" job to convince people that the system works, while entire communities are decimated by technological unemployment.
Long term, we've seen the effects of job loss on areas as previous waves of technological unemployment gripped communities and they never recovered. Some of the poorest areas in the country today are so because of these previous waves of technological unemployment. Jeremy Rifkin talked about this in his book "The End of Work." For example, the mississippi delta region. Back before the 1960s, that was a relatively prosperous area as people picked cotton for a living. But then in the 1960s they automated that, and suddenly, all of these African Americans who had jobs...suddenly didn't. Yay? Would be great if we had a system of basic income to give to these people, but we Americans don't have nice things, so the area fell into deep generational poverty instead. Those lucky enough to "JuSt MoVe" moved up north to midwestern cities like Flint and Detroit Michigan to get jobs in auto factories. And we know how that's going for them now, with those jobs being automated. Another example, West Virginia has INSANE poverty. We used to have these people work on coal mines. Then we shifted away from coal and guess what? All these appalachian regions in Kentucky and West Virginia are poor as crap! And they never recovered, and they probably never will recover because in laissez faire capitalism, your value in society is determined by your ability to do work. And given these guys no longer have jobs and good paying jobs, and because new jobs never moved into the area in large enough numbers to matter, these areas just declined and is, much like the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest regions of the country. I'm basically saying that current trends continue, the rust belt is going to get this next. As factories go out, as we transition to a service economy, and as that service economy also starts declining as we trend toward a Walmart and Amazon dominated economy with a large portion of the marketplace being digital, people are going to lose their jobs, and be increasingly worse off. Any low unemployment numbers are going to come either from the proliferation of more service jobs, or from people just dropping out of the workforce altogether, living on welfare services that are highly conditional or unreliable, or living off of family, if that's an option at all. We might also see a lot of homeless people start going around, which is a common problem in many areas these days. The negative effects of our economy are plainly visible if we really look for them, we just prefer to close our eyes to them and pretend the system works.
It's possible that Andrew Yang is right in that this wave will be different than the previous ones. But I honestly think that the problem with our devotion of work and jobs in this will have us kind of hobbling along trying to hide the defects of our economy like a dying mall puts up plaster walls with art on them to hide the fact that it has that many empty stores. We'll just keep going on like everything is fine until the problem gets so bad we can't ignore it any more. It might never get bad enough where we tend to acknowledge the problem. Rather, we'll just have people relocate to the prosperous large cities and outvote those who live in the more run down kinds of areas. That's what's happening now, actually. There's a lot of calls for populism on the left and the right, but the left is mostly dominated by those urban neoliberals who ignore the problem and are hostile to the progressive left who pushes for at least some sense of better treatment of workers, while the right descends into the insanity that is trumpism, originally suckered in by the promise of making america great again, and ultimately stay because of the social media echo chamber and cult of personality. Meanwhile the forces that drove us to the breaking point in 2016 go unaddressed and we tend to move on as a country engaging in superficial culture wars rather than addressing the very real issues at hand.
That's what scares me, and that's what's happening. Americans are just too divided, and focused on superficial circuses (I would like to say bread and circuses, but again, americans dont like nice things), and they're just distracted.
So it's very well possible that we just see another generation of americans descend into poverty while the rest of the country looks the other way and pretends it isn't happening. Those areas will never recover, things will never improve, and the cult of jobs and work and laissez faire capitalism will go on like before. Half the country will scream into the void wondering what is happening to our country while not understanding the problems, and the other half will be unaffected as they live in the more prosperous areas, and life will just keep going on.
I mean, what will happen to all of those middle aged truck drivers? We cant teach them to code. What about the cashiers being replaced by self checkouts and the cleaners who are replaced by those giant roomba things in grocery stores. Sure, new jobs will pop up, but those jobs will be highly technical jobs in specific areas that require specific skillsets. Maybe some zoomers who go into computing and robotics and work for tesla or whatever will get by just fine, but the rest of us...won't.
It's a mess.
The point is, the luddite fallacy isn't really a fallacy. Technological unemployment, outsourcing, etc., it does affect us. And no matter what numbers on graph say at the end of the day, and no matter how successful we like to think the economy is, there are losers to any changes. There are winners too mind you, and you could argue in the grand scheme of things it's a net win for americans. We like to think that a growing economy with low unemployment is. But when that economy is also gripped with extreme income inequality, with massive regional differences in terms of who benefits from these changes, let's not act like the trumpers screaming DEY TUK R JERBS are really that dumb. I don't think they are. I think that while they ignore the big picture, they're speaking to real pain that exists that is being felt in the american economy at large. And while they might not be the most eloquent or educated in approaching the problem, let's not act like that pain isn't real.
Conclusion
That said, I addressed two major points in this article. First of all, I pointed out that to some extent, our belief and obsession with jobs and work is ultimately a matter of cultural preference and our social systems rather than an ironclad reality. if we decided on redistribution and working less rather than growth, we could have a prosperous economy in which we all work less yet all reap the rewards of our ever growing economy.
Second of all, I addressed the point that no matter what the economic numbers look like on the macro level, the war on normal people is here, it's existed for decades and the effects are more insidious than we realize. Rather than being a massive crisis like the great recession that throws millions of people out of work all at once with no jobs to replace them, it's more a slow, rolling crisis in which entire communities economies are decimated by the slow and steady pace of progress. It takes the form of malls going out, stores going out, factories being automated or moving overseas. Jobs drying up in localized areas, poverty rates going on, labor participation going down, and people taking on multiple job to survive when in previous eras they could get by on one. Honestly, we're already seeing the effects of andrew yang's war on normal people. It's been impacting us since at least 2008. And it's been impacting much of the country in decades past, as many regions like the mississippi delta region and west virginia never really recovered from the past waves of job loss.
So let's stop acting like the luddite fallacy is really a fallacy. It's a neoliberal talking point like a rising tide lifts all boats, and that trickle down economics somehow works. I mean, it might be true to some degree, but it misses a lot of nuance, and these arguments only really make sense if you're a believer in neoliberal or right wing capitalistic ideologies. Job loss is a real thing, it affects real people, and many communities and people never recover.
Honestly, my solutions to this are obvious. UBI, medicare for all, free college, student debt forgiveness, and addressing the housing crisis in some way. A green new deal might work too, but I'd rather work on actually getting the benefits of that, without insisting on employing millions of people for the sake of keeping this system based on employment hobbling on longer than it needs to. Just rip the band aid off. Work sucks and isn't that great anyway.
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