However, I do generally agree with your diagnosis that the anger isn't so much about automation per se, as about changes in post-war economic structures finally starting to reach some tipping point, whether perceived rightly or not.
Wage growth for example has been flat overall:
https://frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker/?panel=1
Half of Americans make under 30k a year:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/goodbye-middle-class-...
Yet the cost of goods has been increasing steadily:
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infla...
I suppose the US's experience is not typical of the world's... after ww2, the US alone was something greater than 50% of global gdp, and its manufacturing base equally huge in comparison. Life is good when you are so far on top, even for the common worker, who with minimal education and no experience could find a job that supported an owned home, a homemaking wife, kids, a car, and two vacations a year. A couple of decades of that, and it starts to seem normal. But it was always abnormal, a result of fortunate post-war circumstances, and now that the rest of the world is catching up, perhaps we are returning to normality.
Nota: steel is cost-effective in the US given a modern (and automated) enough plant. As of 2015 the US are the #4 largest steel producer in the word[0], #2 being Japan (the top 10 is China, Japan, India, USA, Russia, South Korea, Germany, Brazil, Turkey, Ukraine). Though part of that may be existing tariffs (US steel production is mostly internal, it's the #11 exporter and #1 net importer of steel)
Global steel employment has fallen like a brick since its heydays, even China's rise in steel jobs and production since the augths haven't compensated for the jobs lost to automation and efficiency increases (at mostly constant production outside of China).
[0] country-specific, excluding the EU block
(You also need a lot of coal, but you can produce it locally if you have enough room to plant a big forest nearby.)
When you have to move iron around, you'd calculate how much it costs you to move the iron vs steel, since steel would have more value. Or if would be better to produce a car and move the car...
So higher tariffs will be a boon on robot-makers, not necessarily the working-class people that expected to take those jobs.
That reality seems more likely to me in the present climate than a maybe more ideal solution like basic income - though I think the most likely outcome is huge (and increasing) swaths of the population languishing in permanent poverty.
Economically, it's equivalent to those rich people and their robots just not existing at all and their estates being filled with impassible mountains.
Do you believe the "not rich" wouldn't want to cross the wall?
In Elysium (the movie you are referring to) the answer is clear: Earth is full of sick children, Mexicans and lovable criminals. For reasons I didn't quite understand, those Mexicans are unable to build a functioning economy (perhaps because the lovable criminals cause too many problems).
Do you believe that this is an accurate reflection of reality, namely that the non-rich can't organize themselves into a livable society without the aid of the rich?
Why didn't the people on Earth start their own farms? Because the robots came and killed them if they tried.
I don't recall robots preventing people from starting farms or providing medical care to the sick children, and that's missing from the wikipedia summary of the movie. Why would they do that? How would it benefit the space station to prevent earthers from building a functioning society?
In reality we generally just ignore our low productivity areas, and perhaps make sure the folks from there can't cause problems elsewhere. The NYC and SF elites occasionally try to feel good by pointless throwing $100M at local problems that money can't fix [1], but mostly they ignore Newark. The Mumbai elite don't impose social control on the rural hinterlands, they just don't go there.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-failed-100-m...
This is wandering dangerously close to the definition of social control. It might be efficient, disinterested social control, but it's control nonetheless.
In any case, this is very different from what you postulated happened:
Why didn't the people on [Newark] start their own farms? Because the [NYPD] came and killed them if they tried.
But I agree, your scenario doesn't match up well with my interpretation of the movie.
Tell me why the farmers in north korea can't just start a functional economy?
Or african refugees that pile up on italian islands?
Why is america walled off? Literally towards the south and figuratively towards the rest of the world? Why is america so afraid that I may actually contribute to society that they can't allow me to type out a single line of code while I'm on their continent?
Why is china wrapping all their seaside cities into special economic interest zones while a billion farmers have to be subjected to quasi stalinist idiocy?
Why are mexicans trying to enter the US? It surely cant be that difficult to start a reasonable economy on their own terms?
Why did the east germans try to jump the wall? East Germany was shit by comparison, but it certainly wasn't compared to other parts of the world?
The people in Elysium depended on earths resources. They turned all earthers into de facto slaves. This may be a bit of a stretch compared to reality, but in principle, it is what we are doing all around the world.
You wake up, drink your gluten free soylent, take a shower, sit down and begin to type words into a computer that literally change the world. They will be deployed on machines you've never seen and maybe don't fully understand, but in doing so you can take important jobs away that feed families, build spacecraft that will colonize mars, etc.
Your instacart delivery will pop up around 2pm. You call an uber to get to the gym because you would turn fat if you didnt regularly exercise. You spend an hour in the bathroom to groom your hipster beard and then head out to have an ironic pabst with all your hipster friends who live similar lifestyles.
And you didn't even realize how many people you virtually ran over that day.
Maybe not you, but that could be a typical day in the life of your average hackernewser.
Do you really think you have all that much in common with a Louisiana coal miner who fears for the well-being of his family? We may as well be aliens to them.
We are already walled off. We are masters over the machines. They are not. We have already "won". People are free to enter our society, we won't judge, but all those people out there who voted trump because they're scared of US are real. People who drink pabst because they can't AFFORD non-ironic brands of beer.
Its not that the poor can't organize themselves. Maybe they can't, I don't know - but throughout history, the poor were usually oppressed into varying forms of slavery.
In the US, for example, the womb you pop out of decides whether you're going to public school or real school. Maybe in principle, these people have a fair shot at social mobility, but what if modern society requires a level of education that they just never had a chance of achieving? I wouldn't be so quick to judge.
Once the elites have ascended, they have no reason to care much about pesky non-elites using resources outside their enclaves. Observe how little effort contemporary humans put into keeping monkeys from enjoying monkey resources.
Recall that we are discussing a high inequality situation where a tiny fraction of humanity walls itself off into robot enclaves where they satisfy their own needs without human labor. I.e., not enough people to crowd out anything.
I don't think so. You cannot only outsource manufacturing labor to robots. You can do with policing as well. So you don't have to worry for uprisings. These people will simply starve or being killed by robots.
China is a currency manipulator for example, which is well known, but I learned it in the free documentary 'Death by China'