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Indeed. And when all those truckers lose their jobs, that's not just going to affect their lives. They're going to be retraining and competing for your jobs next. And they don't have to be nearly as skilled as you, if they're willing to do the work for half the cost. Which they will be, because they'll be desperate to feed their families. And thankfully for employers, us programmers have been doing our best to make programming easier and easier. The people looking to take our jobs will certainly appreciate that.

We need to start talking about a post-work economy and how that will work. Because that's going to happen. If automation pushes us there without the appropriate policies in place, it is going to be absolutely devastating.

And as this article touched on, the working-class generation is going to be deeply troubled by the idea of anyone getting anything without working hard for it. The concept of "if you don't work, you don't eat" is deeply ingrained into their psyches. So it is going to be a very uphill battle.

I tend to doubt that truckers will turn into programmers. If anything programming is going to continue to be more about burning out college grads, and it'll be difficult for 40 year old established programmers to find work, much less 40 year old retrained truckers--even at half the cost.

At any rate, that would be the optimistic viewpoint, that they could actually get retrained and get jobs and compete for wages. What is likely to happen is that they'll have extreme difficulty finding any work, the income gaps will widen and there'll be even more disaffected workers.

> programming is going to continue to be more about burning out college grads

This is the product of a particular culture that goes back to how the places currently employing the most programmers are currently funded. When the bubble bursts, the macho candle-at-both-ends death march bullshit will give way to professionalism.

There also will probably be a glut of programmers by then so it doesn't help the hypothetical retrained truckers.

I mean programming was just an example for us here. I think some will go for programming, but certainly not all. They're going to be competing for every job they can get. There's going to be increased pressure on every job opening everywhere. People are going to be competing against way more candidates. And that is going to drive those wages down even more.

The safest jobs, at least for another 20-30 years, will be things like doctors, where you can't just retrain to do it. If you didn't start right out of high school in college, you're not getting that job.

> Which they will be, because they'll be desperate to feed their families.

This is one of the things we'll need to solve. Nobody should be desperate to feed their families. If someone still is, it's because our civilization still gets a failing grade.

Very much indeed. What I'm not sure is understood in these jobs calculations is that there is always a domino effect. The paper mill closes down one of their machines. This lays off 100 people. All the truckers that supplied wood for that machine also lose their jobs. There's another 25 jobs. All the logging contractors that supplied that machine have to either find other contracts or lose their jobs. There's another 25 jobs. The businesses that supplied parts and repairs for the loggers, the truckers, and the mills, lose that business. There goes some more jobs. The sandwich shops, gas stations, restaurants and everything else in the community takes the hit because of the hundreds of other people that have now lost their jobs, and some of those people lose their jobs. People leave the area. School districts downsize, the road departments and the police forces and the hospitals downsize because the population has shrunk.

It's a vicious circle.

We'll find new works. In the 1800s ~70% of the workers were employed in agriculture. Someone noticing the progress of technology would have predicted just like you. (In fact Keynes did make a similar prediction.) It didn't come true because they failed to see the evolution of new jobs like programmer, animation designer, cinematographer etc. Why this time is different?

The first wave of automation covered the use of our muscles, so jobs migrated to work that required the brain. Now that the brain's being automated, what do we have left to fall back on?

Our looks.

Two things could make this different, depending on exactly what the prediction was.

One would be that, in the 1800s, they would have been predicting _fewer_ entry-level jobs in a given field (e.g. replacing bunches of manual workers with machinery to allow one person to do the work), not _no_ entry-level jobs in said field.

The other difference, here, is that the job shift you're discussing (except, arguably, for "programmer") is into jobs which require prior training to have any likelihood of getting a position.

One additional problem - even assuming that new entry-level positions in other industries existed, that's going to be a huge loss of income for the families affected, and anything that causes that drastic a reduction of income across any significant population of people is going to have huge ripple effects.

Unless something completely unexpected happens in the next decade or two, it seems clear to me that there are only a couple of possible outcomes here:

1. Stay the course and endure further entrenchment of inequality and rising under/unemployment due to capitalism's innate tendency to concentrate wealth by favouring capital over labour (unearned vs earned income) and technological changes leading to reduced opportunities for low skilled work.

2. Bite the bullet and accept that a political solution is needed to reduce inequality (most likely through some kind of redistribution mechanism). There are plenty of historical precedents for this (Bismark's social contract, rise of the labour movement, the New Deal).

A few commonly discussed solutions are: 1. Universal Basic Income 2. Governments introducing money into the economy directly through spending on infrastructure (or UBI) rather than through assuming debt. 3. Shifting taxes away from income to assets. An example of this would be Land Value Taxes.

Personally, I am in favour of (3), with the focus being on taxing unproductive investment first. Lower income taxes and and more incentive to invest in actual businesses (rather than say, flipping houses or other speculative activity) would do a lot of good. It would be great if we had an economy where money was a bit easier to make and a little bit harder to keep. A higher velocity of money is good for an economy.

> with the focus being on taxing unproductive investment first. Lower income taxes and and more incentive to invest in actual businesses (rather than say, flipping houses or other speculative activity) would do a lot of good. It would be great if we had an economy where money was a bit easier to make and a little bit harder to keep.

Totally agree with this. People on welfare aren't parasites, unproductive rent collectors are parasites.

here in CA, All you have to do release the tens of thousand of square miles of undeveloped land (95% of CA is still undeveloped) and build houses and roads on it. That would generate a huge number of jobs. Since housing prices are through the roof, I bet the economy could support an enormous construction increase. And, even much more if building regulations were removed to allow for really low cost housing. Kill 2 birds with 1 stone: solve the housing problem and massively increase blue collar jobs.

A couple of questions come to mind: how much of the undeveloped land is conducive to development (e.g., too mountainous)? Having green space, undeveloped land also has value. What are the long-term trade offs of removing the green space?

I think it's somewhat helpful to take the author's angle to "raise awareness", but the root problem is still education. If I'm starving to death in a wheat field, teach me to make bread. Retraining programs and better k-12 are the solution, not assuaging a bunch of literally too-stupid-to-help-themselves white dudes.

I get that they don't like being too stupid to help themselves, it sucks. But cheap access to a community college and some kind of "displaced worker" program that helps keep families fed while someone gets a degree would be so much more beneficial than trying to reboot a bunch of dying industries.

Education and retraining are useful, but only if there are jobs for people to do with that education and skillset afterward. Otherwise it's largely pointless, and serves primarily to make the unemployment stats look better than they really are.

I don't believe that education is the root problem here. The root problem is the vast scale of job losses. Education can benefit some of the people affected, who can then move to other jobs and careers. But it can't help the majority if the opportunities simply don't exist. And I think that harsh reality isn't properly acknowledged. A vast number of people have been essentially abandoned without hope. The alternative jobs and careers simply don't require enough people to make up for the losses.

(I'm writing this from the UK, but there are a lot of parallels in the massive industrial decline here as well, and I don't think any good long-term solution has been found here yet either.)

You're starving to death because it's not your wheat.

You go to the bakery and offer your shiny new breadmaking education and they say "sorry we got all we can use."

Retraining for what?

I'm not who you're replying to but I'll interject anyway:

Retraining for millions of jobs in the skilled trades. This is the program championed by Mike Rowe [0]. It also happens to dovetail perfectly with Trump's so-called $1 Trillion infrastructure plan. If he actually puts his money where his mouth is, he stands a good chance of being the most popular Republican president in history (while simultaneously being the most hated).

[0] http://profoundlydisconnected.com/

> he stands a good chance of being the most popular Republican president in history (while simultaneously being the most hated)

Trump isn't hated because he is Republican. People are afraid of losing hard won rights like marriage equality or the right to healthcare if they are unfortunate enough to have a preexisting condition. The violent rhetoric he used during his campaign doesn't help at all - condoning crowds chanting "kill her/hang the bitch/lock her up", saying that he wishes he could "smash the shit out of protesters", and offering to pay the legal costs of people who assaulted protesters. That is not normal in a health democracy and sets a dangerous precedent.

If Trump is a moderate on issues such as gay marriage and somehow manages to control healthcare costs without people losing their coverage he could be popular.

Small correction: Trump is now keeping the most popular provisions of the ACA, such as no exclusions on pre existing conditions, after his discussion with Obama at the White House.

I see Trump as a necessary evil to shake up the establishment, and I believe he will be tempered as he adjusts to the gravity of the office (as he has already started to do).

What gets you into office is it what you say once in office.

I'm sorry I am from a working class background and know plenty of skilled tradesmen. In good times they get enough work, in bad times they spend a lot of time on furlough. It simply isn't true that we need millions of more people in the trades, the supply is meeting demand just fine.

Actually many highly skilled trades were absolutely decimated by the collapse of American industry: machinists, tool and die makers, boiler makers, to say nothing of all those plant supervisors and other blue collar management positions.

And it can and probably will eventually happen to us digital tradesmen too.

The whole argument behind Donald Trump's infrastructure pledge is to create the demand for millions more of these jobs. To build or rebuild untold numbers of road, rail, plumbing, sewage, water treatment, electrical, and on and on and on. Trillions of dollars worth of this stuff, creating millions of jobs and modernizing the country's infrastructure!

Yeah Trump's infrastructure project will great for tradesmen while it lasts. Obama had a similar program if you recall, the stimulus. It was also great while it lasted.

10 years (Trumps projected duration) should be sufficient runway to match infrastructure work required with labor. Remember, millions of Boomers, especially in the trades, are headed to retirement over the next decade.

Are you referring to the 'cash for clunkers' boondoggle, or something else?

>Retraining for millions of jobs in the skilled trades.

Are you under 40? I assure you that it's really quite challenging to undergo retraining after 40 and then essentially start your career all over again as a fresh graduate. Yes, having had life experience helps somewhat but not all that much.

It's easy to say "Just do X" but pretty much everything becomes harder to do after 40 or so.

Are you under 40?

Yes.

I assure you that it's really quite challenging to undergo retraining after 40 and then essentially start your career all over again as a fresh graduate.

You don't have to retrain everyone. Retrain younger people as machinists and toolmakers. The older people can have their old jobs back, working in the same supply chain as the newly-retrained tradespeople.

> not bathrooms.

Ironically, if the right weren't making a big deal about bathrooms we could just let people use the bathrooms they want and fight about how to protect workers.