The Despair of Learning That Experience No Longer Matters

" “Hurt my back at work, lost my job, got evicted, couldn’t get another job.” "

This is the key here. We need to create safety nets that allow people to get back on their feet and become productive members of society. Whether you are rich or poor, this is in your long-term best interest.

I think a lot of these "deaths of despair" are the result of America's racist mythology running up against the realities of wealth inequality in a Late Capitalist society. For a long time, the white working and middle classes have been duped into believing themselves in solidarity with the (predominantly white) wealthy elite, only a few steps way from achieving their rank and status.

But as the vicissitudes of our economy make this delusion more and more untenable, instead of freeing themselves from the racist mythology, they internalize the circumstances of their economic position as a failure to achieve what is "expected of them." This of course leads to all of the despairing acts described in the article.

The situation reminds me a lot of the arguments made by first wave male feminists, about how patriarchical structures are as oppressive to men as they are to women. Considering we haven't moved the needle very far in that domain, I'm not optimistic that we can shed the burden of our racist mythos any more easily.

The article is a bit light on substance. The author is writing about a hypothesis that the researchers have emphasized is still in development, and includes (to his credit) what seems to me a pretty strong critique of their work from a statistician at another university. And throws in some anecdotes (which I find more compelling - the "got injured at work, lost my job, lost my home" story is one we hear all too often in the US, because there's no safety net).

They're right. The ones that are in despair, I mean. As much as I love computers, they have been involved (I do not believe them responsible, being only tools) in a great swindle. Around 1980, computers entered the workplace. Around 1980, median wages froze. And they have remained frozen since. Cost of living has not frozen.

Between 1950 and 1980, the median wage of the lower 90% of the US economy rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, that median wage rose by 1%. Meanwhile, the median wage of the top 10% during that period rose by 495%.

Every single iota of productivity enhancement which was realized through computers, software, and automation technology was sequestered by the upper class and trapped in the financial services market, never to re-enter the economy.

When your workers productivity increases by 3-7% every year, it is very easy to be amenable to raises which keep apace with the value of the work being done. When computers show up and your employees experience the productivity multiplier of software, leaping 50 or 60% or more in a year... what then? Giving a 50% raise sounds like patent madness. Yes the work they did produced 50% more value, but if they claim to be entitled to any of that value they created, well, you can just say 'the machine did the work' right? So that's what was done.

We've seen this before. When large factories and assembly lines sprang up. Society and employers told workers 'the machines are doing the work' and the fact the workers were creating more value was not reflected in their pay. Eventually there were situations where when a law was proposed in New York which restricted bakeries not permitting them to work people more than 60 hours per week (10 hours 6 days a week), people balked at the radical progressiveness of such an idea. Many businesses were getting entire families (children included, laws against child labor were similarly overturned and said to infringe upon the rights of both employers and workers) working 16 hour days 6 days a week and paying them so little that the family could barely afford housing and food.

People eventually, of course, got fed up and we got labor laws and other protections via the New Deal. For some businesses, that amounted to their labor costs raising 600% overnight. And they were fine.

The idea that 40 hours of work in a week should be paid enough that that single income should be able to raise an entire family on comfortably, including saving for retirement, medical care, leisure activities, education, etc was seen as the bare minimum of sensible fairness. Somehow, despite the widespread adoption of technology which enables 1 person to do the work of 20 or 50 workers just a few decades prior, the number of hours people work is ballooning. Raising children without multiple incomes is tantamount to economic suicide.

Because of the radical jumps in productivity, combined with social forces in the executive management class, compensation has been completely divorced from any relationship with the value of the work performed. This is seen in especially outsized ways in the technology industry itself. A small company can make a new product that costs a few hundred thousand to create, but which creates tens of millions in value shortly after its release. Would any executive in the world consider paying the workers in that company anything other than market average rate?

We are still largely mired in the patterns and systems developed to deal with manufacturing work. That mental work is a profoundly and fundamentally different animal has not been integrated into either the work world or society at large. We still presume people to be capable of 8 hours of exertion, despite mountains of research showing human beings not capable of that with mental tasks without severe degradation of their work product. We still presume that dumping people in the same open floor plan office, rife with interruptions and noise, shouldn't negatively impact productivity despite research showing it is pure poison. Management still presumes that employees which become invaluable become expendable. Aside from the costs involved in finding and hiring a replacement, they see it dangerous to permit an employee to become 'important' to the organization. We still presume that we are dealing with tasks which the vast majority of people in society would be capable of doing simply by following instructions, despite this not being the case for any creative or deep technical work.

I think we might not see another New Deal, however. It would be better for the companies, no matter how they would wail and cry, if we did. Instead, I think the fact that all this technology which makes people individually very productive and capable of creating great value is all very inexpensive and ubiquitous will eventually cause the lens to be turned upon the companies themselves. What are THEY bringing to the table? What are THEY offering workers? When it comes increasingly tenable for individuals or loose confederations of individuals coordinated via software and the Internet, and as the myth of employer loyalty finally dies with the Millenial generation, people are going to realize that companies have screwed themselves. They spent the 1980s abandoning every single benefit they provided to workers (welching on pensions, leaving behind providing insulation from market fluctuations by reflexively laying off workers, shrinking vacation time, abandoning raises that outpaced cost of living increases resulting in required job-hopping, etc) while computers were spreading everywhere, and while the Internet was growing in its nascency. At their very fundamental core, companies exist to do one thing: distribute. Distribute work to workers, and end product to customers. But the Internet and software solved distribution. It's a worthless problem to solve now. All that overhead of office buildings, multiple layers of inefficient management, etc which could be paid for by the large price anyone used to be able to command for solving those problems of distribution are now pure dead weight.

When the tide turns, it will probably happen so fast that people won't be able to believe it. Things tend to do that with software and the Internet. Lumbering corporate giants certainly won't be able to adjust to compensate. They will see their employees abandon them in legions, and things will reorganize. Businesses which actually critically rely upon physical co-location of workers (a much, much smaller number of businesses than most people expect) or physical proximity of workers to customers will fare the best. Maybe. Uber is already showing how even in an industry which absolutely requires physical co-location of worker and customer, the right piece of software is all that is needed.