The good old days? In many ways, yes
minneapolisfed.org
minneapolisfed.org
For a while, "services" employed more people. Then came cheap computing and the Internet. No more file clerks. Much less paper-pushing. Fewer retail salespeople. Fewer bank tellers. Both retail and finance are dropping in headcount.
That's what happened.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
That's impossible. A couples of times in the past when we evolved major new technologies (e.g. industrial revolution) new jobs were created. This means there will _always_ be new jobs, it's like a contract with history.
/s -- but also how many think, taking 2-3 historical cases as some kind of necessary eternal motif.
Well, I think I supplemented the commenter above -- I was arguing with him only ironically. I don't think it's impossible for something that happened in the past to stop happening, because the situation re: automation, robotics, and AI are qualitatively different than past evolutions (plus we're already grasping at non-productive straws to keep people occupied, e.g. the rise of bullshit jobs).
(In fact, the fully realized endgame of AI+robotics revolution would be the elimination of the need of a human involved for anything, including even creative endeavors. Why some believe "human jobs" are something that's inevitable to always exist in new forms and always enough for most of the population -- as opposed to e.g. just a 10-20% at some point, if not 0% --, is beyond me).
Previous technological advances have caused individual output to rise because individual humans were able to harness more energy. A human with a tractor does more work and consumes more energy than a human without a tractor.
Some new technology is letting us do more work with less energy input, but a lot of new technology is just automating the human out of the process and using just as much energy to do the work. One person can supervise multiple CNC mills, but those mills' power draw isn't much different than old manual Bridgeports (hell, they might actually be old manual Bridgeports with a few mods).
Unlike previous industrial revolutions, the current revolution in automation has not seen economic growth result from doing more work by unleashing more energy. Economic growth has generally been a result of using existing energy sources more efficiently but also from reducing labor costs.
Microsoft sells Windows licenses with zero marginal costs.
Edison made his fortune by licensing his patents. Selling tickets to a show also has zero marginal cost.
Radio is a Big House.
There is no cost for MS to sell a license. Yes you could say that most Windows licenses come with computers that did have a marginal cost. So let’s use an Office subscription as s better example.
Something I haven't seen written about is that it wasn't that long ago that if you were middle class, you'd have a maid or other servants. I don't know anyone who has a maid. Those jobs haven't been automated, either. There's something else at work.
OTOH, Hollywood isn't a major employment sector, and has massive winner-take-all dynamics. We no longer have regional acting companies, of any note.
When I was a boy, there were 3 TV channels, much of which was filled with cheap crap like Jack Lalane's show and dull soap operas. Saturday was filled with retreaded WB cartoons. Once a year the new shows were rolled out. Maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks a new movie was shown in the local theater. I don't need statistics to believe there's been a DRASTIC increase.
And that's not counting all the people who make a living creating and posting youtube videos, none of which is possible without automation.
> regional acting companies
There are a lot of stage productions in Seattle. I haven't noticed either an increase or decline in them over the decades. Burlesque, of course, died out in the 1930's or so.
By regional acting; I'm referring to pre-cinema, pre-radio, and to a large extent, pre-amplification. Also pre-rail, which meant that entertainment through much of the 19th century was local, at best regional (steamships ... or river rafts ... in Huck Finn's period).
The turning point was probably between 1880 and 1930. I suspect you were very young at the time ;-)
Mark Putnam's compilation of hit songs from 1840-2013 has a slightly different focus, but captures quite a bit of the dynamic. The tanitions in the 1920s, 40s, 50s, and 60s are particularly sharp.
Amplification, the war, electrification, mass media, and rock music, largely. The last driven by cheap vinyl and ubiquitous radio. Several following transitions were also tech-driven; synthesizers, mixers, tae, music video, CDs, and most recently, professional-quality home/personal production equipment.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/27/weekinreview/the-nation-t...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/decline...
Is it? I would think audio and video recordings compete with local musicians and actors, taking away lots of jobs there.
Before recordings and amplifiers, a musician or acting group could serve, maybe, a few hundred people at a time; now, they can serve millions.
(Likely, a lot of that work historically was unpaid, but I don’t think that matters much for the point I make)
It's actually way lower than that, both by output and by headcount.
> and dropping
Not under Trump it's not: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/manufacturing-employment-i...
Quote: "Last year, 264,000 new manufacturing jobs were added, representing the highest number of new workers since 1988. As a percent of the total workforce, manufacturing rose for the first time since 1984."
Must be the "magic wand".
We would need another decade of record growth just to offset the losses from 2009. Let alone offset 2008 and all of the loss from 2008-2010 and return to even minuscule net growth over a 2 decade period.
One might think "okay, great, so deliver another decade of growth without a period of recession". Which sounds reasonable until you dig into the reason behind the recent job growth numbers. As the article that you cite points out:
> Baumohl said companies have come to the conclusion that the likely 3% growth the U.S. enjoyed last year was a “sugar high.” With reduced expectations for growth — even with the new incentives to write off depreciation in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — CEOs have concluded it’s better to meet the additional growth opportunities with new workers than pricier machines. “Workers are viewed more like inventory,” he says. “If you need them, you can hire them, and if the economy really turns south, you can let them go. CEO have taken a very realistic approach,” he said.
I.e., if you don't produce sustained growth, employees will be laid off. But if you do produce sustained growth, then incentives shift and capital investments in automation are easier to justified. Either way, and regardless of trade policy, don't expect manufacturing employment growth over the next decade to even offset the 2008-2011 losses, let alone return us to net growth over a 20 year window.
That's how they have been viewed for many hundreds of years now. Nobody will keep you on the payroll if costs more to have you than to not have you. I don't see how this is in any way new.
What is new, however, is that Trump is rejecting the ridiculous notion that we could just let someone else manufacture everything, and actively harasses large manufacturers so they don't take the easy way out and manufacture everything in China. With productivity gains over the last few decades labor cost is not a dominant factor anymore, even though US workers cost more than some sweatshop in China.
I don't get why this is not a bipartisan thing, BTW. Democrats are supposed to be the workers' party, right? Fighting for the downtrodden and stuff? Well, millions of those downtrodden are getting decent jobs now, thanks to Trump alone.
My favorite example uses mining and energy.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Coal_and_jobs_in_the_U...
Per the second table, American coal miner productivity more than tripled between 1970 and 2000. US coal production tonnage peaked in 2008 with about 85,000 miners while employment peaked in 1920 with about 785,000 miners.
Primary energy consumption per capita in the US peaked by 1978 and has been roughly flat for 40 years:
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec1_13.pdf
We're producing more energy per worker and not consuming any more energy per capita. My personal interpretation: we are bumping up against the Limits to Growth, and finding they are more on the demand side than the supply side.
https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
And specifically their point that statistics on high tech are overestimating our industrial output because of certain questionable assumptions:
"The problem is, the processor released in 2017 is superior to that sold in 2016 in many tangible ways. But how do you account for the fact that a 2017 processor provides users with more value? In general, statisticians assume the difference in value between the two models is just the difference in their prices. If, say, the 2017 processor costs twice as much as the 2016 one does, then selling one 2017 processor counts as selling two of the 2016 versions in the statisticians’ books."
First, the graphs for "manufacturing less computers" out form a more-or-less flat line. However, employment in "manufacturing less computers" declined precipitously. Even if we zero out the effect of computers and chips on manufacturing output, we still see constant output with precipitous decline in employment. Note that we see this even in countries that don't manufacture microchips.
Automation clearly is effecting manufacturing employment in manufacturing outside of chip fabs. That's patently obvious even from the graphs purportedly used to prove the opposite.
Second, the IT revolution is/was real. Most of America's largest companies are built on the back of silicon and the chips powering those market cpas were manufactured in highly automated factories. So, even setting aside (1), it's still clear that automation caused a decline in manufacturing employment. If chip fabs had required as many human workers as car plants, US manufacturing job growth would've been robust.
So not only is old manufacturing automated, but growth sectors in manufacturing are also automated. So that "new industries" don't offset automation in "old industries".
(Finally, as an aside, the rhetoric about this hidden fact that everyone ignored is IMO mostly bullshit storytelling. US economic growth in the last 30 years (and especially the last 10 years) was powered by semiconductors and information technology. Also, semiconductors have powered growth in the manufacturing sector. I don't think there is a single economist alive who doesn't know both of these facts, and many of the studies critiqued by the "semiconductors explain everything" crowd explicitly address these two facts...)
I'm not convinced it ends well.
Related discussion / background: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/74dm5o/seeking...
Then there was a strong dollar policy, leading to a massive trade deficit.
It's weird to blame the decline of US manufacturing on automation when almost every physical object around you is imported from a country with higher manufacturing employment, in a plant with the maximum automation currently possible in that industry.
Automation isn't cheaper than meat. There are far, far higher initial costs, upkeep involves extremely specialized skills, and robots are dumb and have to constantly be babysat by meat. Also, under capitalism, meat is expected to fend for itself and self-repair, whereas robots are babies that need to be babied.
One interesting thing worth watching for here is selection bias. If the average education level increased during this 20 year period, then we aren't comparing similar cohorts when we select for a particular level of education at the two different times.
Graduation rates are easy to boost: Graduate bad, failing students. SAT scores are not so hard to fake.
Seems to get cause and effect backwards. Isn't it more likely that an increase in labor supply (women entering the workforce) had, simply by the laws of supply and demand, decreased wages?[1] [1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/NEWSTATS/facts/women_lf.htm#one
The paper is full of complicated-looking economic models and nice graphs-- but if you don't get the basic assumptions right it's hard to trust the fancy models.
Imagine writing software that never had to work in the real world.
I at least have some formal training in economics to feel confident in making this statement.
A new worker (or 50 million new female workers) does on one end increase the supply of labor, which should lower the price (wages) of it, but s/he also starts spending an income, which increases general demand in the economy and acts to push up wages.
It's not obvious what the net effect is. Economists probably have a (or several :) well thought out and validated answers to this, but my gut feel is that it all evens out.
I don't have the answers to these questions unfortunately.
Social cohesion is down and communities are dying. The social fabric is being torn apart.
The other point they make is that men's wages declined more than women's, which might explain why women are more likely to work. (Assume couples need to make $X per week in the labour market; when male wages drop, the tradeoff between male and female employment changes in favour of the latter.)
I agree that increasing labour supply would also decrease male wages.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53mcxn/backwar...
Welfare losses, measured as a one-time asset compensation, are 12.5%, 8%, and 7.2% of the present discounted value of earnings for single men, couples, and single women, respectively. Lower wages explain 47-58% of these losses, shorter life expectancies 25-34%, and higher medical expenses account for the rest.
The "good old days" did exist but they were an extreme anomaly following the largest war in human history. I think people have a hard time realizing this because the mores and culture from that time period were encoded, broadcast and digested by the rest of the world. We still live orbiting around 20th century mass media cultural concepts.
Doesn't this conflict with the teachings of free trade? That other countries growing their industries and rebuilding themselves left the US worse off (if that is the reason)? If you buy that logic, then shouldn't you be very worried about moving production abroad?
Note I keep putting "good" in quotes as a reference to the term. I'm not making a value judgement.
Gains in productivity and corresponding automation account for the lion's share of job loss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...
It feels we need to do a better job quantifying this problem before we come up with a solution. For example (1) how much money would it take to fix health care? (2) how much money would it take to fix welfare? (3) what is the impact of low savings rate on people's economic condition. For example appearance of credit cards coincides with the timeline in this article (4) How has immigration impacted unskilled workers? (5) Does UBI work? (6) How is Europe doing it? (7) Is Europe really as successful at dealing with these issues as everyone seems to claim?
Europe is a lot of countries, the US-Europe alliance is old enough that there have been at least three or four distinct time periods where the answer to this question fluctuates (cold war, post cold war, post-9/11, post Syria)
Furthermore, defense is not some sort of measurable good; especially for countries in the EU who are surrounded by non-enemies, how much they choose to spend on defense is in large part a political question.
It's really hard to say e.g., whether Germans would have chosen to spend more on defense if the US decreased its defense spending in Europe. And the answer would probably be different in the different time periods I mentioned above. E.g., given the German attitude toward US military presence in Europe over the past 20 years [1], I suspect the answer for that period is "no".
But ultimately the answer to this question will be different from country to country and from decade to decade, and a truly nonpartisan answer would be "there's really no way to give a definitive answer for all of Europe across that time period.".
> do we americans overestimate our contribution to the defensive posture of the west?
Americans underestimate (or often simply don't even know about) their contribution to many of Europe's most pressing security and welfare expenditures. The 15 year war in the middle east is now taking an enormous economic and political toll on Europe.
It's not too far-fetched to say that Europe might have been both safer and richer today had the US spent substantially less money on its military over the past 15 years (read: not waged wars in the middle east).
[1] https://www.thelocal.de/20180711/almost-half-of-germans-want...
What this means in practice is that something like "Russia assassinated the leaders of France + Germany and conquered Poland in the ensuing chaos" isn't enough of a justification for France to use nukes. That's because the payoff matrix looks something like this:
peace * conventional war * nuclear war
France 10 * 5 * -10,000,000
Russia 5 * 10 * -10,000,000
Now, there are exceptions here! One is insane government leaders. It takes a special kind of person to light the world on fire because someone took their toy, but... no one takes that guy's toy. And so since they can credibly rule out column #2 above, they never leave column #1. The other exception then is when a sane government credibly precommits to the use of nuclear weapons in some situation. But it's rather hard for a liberal democracy to do this, and if France said that they'd kill Russia with nukes (and thus indirectly themselves, Poland, and everyone else) in response to Poland being invaded - well, I don't think I'd believe in their ability to follow through.
Moreover, people became more educated over that 20 year timespan, so comparing people of equal absolute educational attainment across the two periods could be a case of comparing a higher socioeconomic group to a lower one.
There will eventually be political consequences for the erosion of the USA standard of living. The Economist magazine had an article, which was discussed here on Hacker News, with the title “The link between polygamy and war“ to which I responded:
"This suggests that political stability depends on young men being able to pursue their romantic dreams. This would apply in any country, not just African countries. In nations in the West, an important limiting factor is the ability to get one’s own apartment. That is, the ratio of average male wage to average rent. In the USA, the happiest year for this ratio was 1958, when people were spending 22% of their income on rent, on average. Not by coincidence, this was the peak year of the Baby Boom. In some sense, it was the best year in history to be a young white male in the USA. It was the year when it was easiest for an 18 year old male to get out of high school, get their own apartment, marry their high school sweetheart, and start a family. And of course, young people did this in huge numbers, which is why 1958 remains the peak year for teenage pregnancy in the USA."
More here:
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike...
It might help us stave off a great amount of unrest if we shift this frame of reference. A new perspective and a new way of doing things where we view our economies as ecosystems or networks might clarify why these changes are occurring. For example, we can look at excessive economic inequality and understand why it is bad by looking at natural ecosystems and how they are a closed loop.
For e.g. Consumers are like plankton. They are the injection of biomass (money) into the system that ensures money changes hands when they buy goods and services. A single entity, no matter how rich, cannot provide equivalent mass to the greater ecosystem than a large set of consumers. Or, in other words, a billionaire requires only so many pairs of sunglasses and Netflix subscriptions. Ergo, a broad base of wealth where people can afford the products around them is essential for a capitalistic ecosystem to function, as these plankton keep feeding entities higher up in the food chain through an accumulation effect.
For whatever reason, just like we have decimated our natural environment, we have also decimated our economic ecosystem. The number of entities with high purchasing power is rapidly decreasing, and this signals a significant problem for the future of the ecosystem. And it also suggests how automation can end up eating itself economically unless we institute measures - artificial or otherwise - that inject capital back into the building blocks of the economy.
I suspect that as computing gets better, we will eventually create models that will make the current economic debates and models we have obsolete. Our arguments over taxation, immigration, regulation, reform etc. will seem quite quaint to people in the future if we manage to make this transition and if we can help policymakers and thinking individuals see economies in real-time, and simulate outcomes of individual, highly variable, irrational agents at unprecedented scales.
But we're not there yet. But we could be. We can fix this. And we will. I am sure of that because brilliant people are working on this problem and eventually, we'll get it right.
I hold out hope for a better future no matter how bad this news gets and I remember that we're in a state of flux and things always appear darker in these times.
It amazes me how much people will vote against their own self-interest. Also, something a lot of the SV and educated crowd don't understand, but immigration disproportionately affects uneducated workers by dramatically increasing the supply of labour with workers willing to work for low wages (they are partaking in wage arbitrage vs. their home country). Lots of industries that are dominated by immigrants and illegal migrants today used to offer far better income and living conditions 2 generations ago.
If people truly cared about the plight of the uneducated working class, there'd be taxes on wealth, incentives against rentiers, far higher minimum wages (to discourage wage arbitrage by immigrants from poorer countries) and maybe even basic income. Or a limit on the supply of labour (ie. slow down immigration) and tariffs to combat outsourcing. The first is a better outcome IMO, but the second is a perfectly rational reaction.
But hey, bringing up actual economic effects of social policy is racist and bigoted, right? That's why the current bourgeoisie doesn't understand movements like Brexit, populism, etc...
Edit - for the record, I like left-wing solutions better. I very much admire and agree with economists like Piketty. But most left-wing parties in the west have really dropped the ball. They're beholden to the same rich donors, and gloss over economic policy by championing social justice instead.
Edit 2 - some back up for my assertions: https://www.nber.org/papers/w3761
In the civil war era, “Johnny Reb” was a poor white devalued by slavery. Racial superiority and disdain was the bread and circus that kept the system going. In the north, the Irish and other immigrants were often virulently racist as their labors threatened by it. That’s a big part of why you had riots in New York that escalated to the point of near insurrection.
Can you back these arguments with some evidence? Otherwise they are just empty claims.
https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/docs/IllegImmig_10-14-10_430pm.pd...
Highly skilled, educated, legal immigrants are going to be a net positive.
I’m not sure what other evidence you’d be looking for.
Tldr is that immigration can explain 40% of the effects on relative earnings for non-educated workers.
No, it's basic economics actually.
All other things equal, if you increase the supply of labour, you're going to see lower prices.
Of course, the economy is not 'all things equal' i.e. more bodies means more consumers etc. but the logic is fairly sound.
In Northern Alberta, for the Oil sands, the lingo they use to push for more migrants is 'labour input costs': "We're seeing risks due to labour input costs" etc.. It's a slightly extreme case given the isolation up there but it's real.
So in the 'long run' things might work better out but the short run economics are pretty straightforward.
But it's really hard to argue in any circumstance that 'more workers = higher wages' because wages will be a function of available labour.
The 'rub' in the data really is the fact it doesn't take into consideration the black market. Wages paid under the table are 100% part of the real economy, and those are wages, but they generally don't go into the equations.
Imagine if the 'average us wage' were calculated with a few million extra people earning below minimum and with zero benefits?
When there is full employment though, and not tons of undocumented workers, one could argue that economic expansion could pick up the slack, surely.
Now imagine an island with 100 million. On this island, some huge fraction of jobs dont contribute positively, or at least value is not > pay. A lot of this comes from anticompetitive markets or from highly regulated ones.
Then imagine on that big island, a central bank prints out a significant portion of that island's GDP in cold hard cash and trades it only with Wall St (they could at least buy healthcare, education, housing or food, but they buy bonds or "toxic assets"). Or maybe they make a sneaky argument and claim to buy housing by buying CMOs, MBSs, etc, as a way to hide the fact that they are paying Wall St.
Now are the problems anything but obvious?
The article only studied whites, for homogeneity. Maybe the good ole days for some, but the world is drastically better today for most of the people living in it than it was in the 40s, or 60s.
It might help the entire situation of pride and social hierarchy if people who wear dickies and work with their hands weren’t getting constantly shit on, for no other reason than they wear dickies and work with their hands. Plenty of people in liberal white-guilt circles too whose entire self-worth is built around race - let’s call these people racists.
Dunno, when I did my econ degree economic development was still talked about. It seems that everyone has given up on economic development and would rather plunder a nation's workforce to benefit their own capitalist class.
This is actually a case of toxic empathy: that view isn't the one that leads to the best outcome, because it destroys your capacity to help for short term improvements, leading to long term negative outcomes and an increased number of victims. Tempering raw empathy with rational evaluation increases your capacity to help and leads to a greatly improved outcome.
To use a cliche: during a rescue, don't become a victim.
An overabundance of immigration disrupts the host culture, which is the feature of the world that is causing the good outcome -- that the host culture causes more human thriving than the culture being emigrated from. When you draw too much from the resources of healthy cultures to try and fix systemic problems in other cultures, you end up damaging the healthy cultures, not fixing the problem. This simply degrades the situation, whereas a slower rate of change would remain stable, and lead to a genuine improvement in the world.
It's a cancerous idea, caused by failing to regulate your emotions: you're not being genuinely empathetic, you're shirking responsibility to get high on good feelings because look at how woke.
You're criticizing the opposite scenario.
Ironically Democratic policies regarding education, environment, and labor would give a better deal to working-class folk of any background, and Republican posturing about education has more to do with image than with preventing unskilled work from entering the country (after all, business loves Republicans and business loves low wages). But so much of politics is an image game, and once Nixon pioneered (ew) the implicit politicization of race, the Dems never controlled their narrative again. They more or less embraced the role defined for them by their enemy, which is a classic strategic blunder. I'm not sure how they can reclaim the narrative upper hand.
And yes, I agree. By sticking too moral principles in the immigration fight, Dems are losing that too. But the alternative is to be logical, which doesn't tend to work with a loosely informed electorate that votes on feelings. Curious if anyone has thoughts on a better strategy there. It almost seems like the left needs an orator who can precisely walk the line between acknowledging and speaking to lower-class white outrage and also acknowledging all peoples' humanity.
I’m going to sound like a broken record on my HN comments and he may end up being completely full of shit, but right now I think that description fits Pete Buttigieg to a tee. You can find plenty of flattering coverage of him if you Google, so I won’t link to any of that. Instead I’ll link to a take down of Buttigieg that you can contrast against the flattering coverage of him.
Kerr, S.P. and Kerr, W.R., 2011. Economic impacts of immigration: A survey (No. w16736). National Bureau of Economic Research. Dustmann, C., Glitz, A. and Frattini, T., 2008. The labour market impact of immigration. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 24(3), pp.477-494.
By contrast, there is plenty of evidence that trade with China harmed US workers' wages, starting with:
David, H., Dorn, D. and Hanson, G.H., 2013. The China syndrome: Local labor market effects of import competition in the United States. American Economic Review, 103(6), pp.2121-68.
I don't say academics are guaranteed to be right, but they have looked pretty hard for labour market effects of migration, and not found them. There may be some specific groups of workers who have suffered a lot - but you don't see broad overall effects.
And that's the point. Obviously plenty of people in the US are very well off, that won't make poor people any happier.
Also, outsourcing labour and bringing in migrants have similar effects on wages because in both cases domestic labour is being replaced with lower-cost labour.
No, the data supports it, especially over the time period outlined by the original article.
Card, D., 1990. The impact of the Mariel boatlift on the Miami labor market. ILR Review, 43(2), pp.245-257.
Borjas is an interesting guy and I respect him, but I don't think the overall literature supports his negative view of migration's effects on wages.
I stand by my claim, not because I'm a huge expert, but backed up by the two literature reviews mentioned above.
Labour economists have spent thousands of hours analysing data to understand the effects of migration. There are thirty years of papers. Some are quite good. It would be better if the public debate were more informed by this effort.
Maybe there would be those things in certain countries now, if the uneducated working class focused intently on voting for parties calling for those things instead of being distracted by political forces that wish to blame immigration for their problems. If I were a lower-income person, I would much rather live on basic income (and have the time to seek training and employment for better prospects) while letting gastarbeiter do all the shit work, than to have to do the shit work myself.
Why can't we have a more nuanced discussion and acknowledge both: a. that globalism, free trade, and automation have negatively impacted blue collar workers b. that much of blue collar quality of life in good old days did come at the explicitly racist policies, starting with slavery and continuing through federally enforced redlining in which has been the main source of wealth accumulation [1]
It's also worth noting that many working class gains in the "good old days" excluded black workers due to historical racial divisions in labor movement and unions explicitly opposed economic liberties for racial and ethnic minorities. [2] MLK was murdered while working to unify the racial and labor struggles. This division continues to be exploited by populist politicians.
> If people truly cared about the plight of the uneducated working class, there'd be taxes on wealth, incentives against rentiers, far higher minimum wages FWIW, I agree with these items and grew up on a farm in the white american heartland
The GI bill is another good example of economic support for the working class from the "good old days" that like much of the Jim Crow era primarily benefited whites at the expense of other racial groups [3]
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-unf...
2. https://racial-justice.aflcio.org/blog/est-aliquid-se-ipsum-...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I....
There was much less of it in states where slavery was legal.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/labor-unions-and...
(note the date)
I wanted to disagree with that one specific point.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/632/transcript
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/633/transcript
Companies do in fact discriminate against Americans for low wage workers because they can pay them less and some companies do skirt worker verification requirements when hiring low skilled workers.
Of course seeing that I am a minority, I don’t approve of the demonization of foreigners. They are using the same tactics that use to be called the Southern Strategy.
Why 66? Why not 50 or 60 or 70? What was special about 66 that it was chosen, and why wasn't it explained?