Another Article of Interest for MillersTime readers, one I have posted in The Outer Loop section of my blog.
In this article, taken in part from his new book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, sociologist and author Arlie Russell Hochschild reports on five years of interviews with a portion of our population who find themselves strangers in their own country and who, though they didn’t start out as Trump supporters, have been people who believe Trump understands them.
Check out the article from Sept./Oct. Mother Jones. (Hat Tip to Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo for leading me to this.)
Respectful comments and reactions are welcomed.
Land Wayland said:
The problem is with jobs. For many reasons, none of which are reversible, the work done by people with an education in the bottom 50% is becoming irrelevant. Some jobs have gone to other countries where these cast off jobs are considered to be excellent. Others have been rendered obsolete by improved technology and automation. (telephone operators, mail carriers, service station attendants).
As the ability of the economy to cheaply produce the basic fundamentals (housing, clothing, food, transportation, basic medical) has grown and the number of workers needed to do this work has shrunk, more and more workers are left to produce the peripherals (entertainment, dining out, leisure services, lots of irrelevant jobs) that don’t require much education and don’t offer high salaries or provide much job security). What was once a stable economic world with everyone doing basic work is now very uncertain and provides very limited room for continuous improvement or advancement in many many fields.
Years ago Law Professor Chris Stone of USC Law School, in a Law, Language and Ethics class, proposed that each time a labor saving device was introduced into a field, the number of jobs it was going to eliminate should be calculated and the company that was going to reap the benefits should be taxed some percentage to raise the money needed to pay something to the workers who were no longer needed, to compensate them for the money the machine was going to make that was not going to be paid to them as salaries.
That is what has happened to the work done by Longshoremen and firefighters, where technology now allows very few workers to do what hundreds used to do….and pays the workers who now do these jobs very very well.
All of the people the author of this article saw are those who are in industries that are slowly dying. If these fine folks weren’t being paid or subsidized by the government, they would be starving to death or marching in the streets. What Trump’s popularity means is that the time has come to recognize that this economic malaise is not confined to the poor States or communities of America but it is the specter facing every student and the parents of every student who is receiving C grades in high school. They may get an entry level job when they graduate but that may be the best job they ever get. And going to college is not going to help much for most because job elimination is creeping upward (at 1/2% a year, twenty five percent of all jobs will be gone before they retire and if they are in that 25%, they won’t be able to ever stop working because they won’t have enough income to retire.)
Government is going to need to tax those companies who are earning money by eliminating jobs or not creating jobs and then use that money to compensate workers for the value of what those lost jobs would have brought to them. This is not capitalism. It is ante-ism If you are a company that wants to use any new kind of technology, you have to pay to play.
This is what Social Security is, where companies and workers with jobs are taxed so the government can pay everyone some money when they are old and worn out and can’t work any more. Government would have to take care of them anyway, but this is a long term program that lets people think they and their employer are putting something aside to pay for that day so there is no social opprobrium attached to the receipt of these funds when that day comes.
Let those who have ears and minds listen to the rumors and moans and distant rumblings that are carried on the wind.
Land Wayland
Anon-2 said:
I might suggest that the folks in the beltway are the strangers in this land. Government can’t solve EVERY problem, only some, and in other cases are counterproductive.
What did the government do 100 years ago when farming started to become mechanized?
Taxing companies that mechanize will only force them to move overseas or be overtaken by foreign companies; capital is rational.
I have no solutions, and I doubt any elected officials have any solutions…in fact, the incentives are the opposite…..politicians benefit when problems AREN’T solved….if the problem is solved, politicians become unemployed.
There are now 680,000 app developers in North America. There was no such thing as an app 11 years ago. I’m not saying that these good people in LA can all become app developers….but give them credit; people learn to tread water pretty easily when there is no other choice.