Don't Dismiss the Reality of Technological Labor Displacement

Let us have done with the nonsense that technological change must always create more jobs than it destroys. After all, the laws of economics--especially what passes for economics in the mainstream--are not the laws of physics, no matter how much the market fundamentalists would like people to think they are--all as I have yet to see any such "law" that "proves" that technological change produces a net increase (or at least, does not produce a net decrease) in employment, and certainly in what people really care about, steady, full-time employment paying what a reasonable person would recognize as a wage or salary permitting the recipient to decently support a family. At any rate, the proposition that technological change cannot be a threat to employment seems especially implausible in an age in which the technology of the moment is explicitly intended to "make a machine in the likeness of a human mind" for the purpose of replacing them.

Moreover, even if we consider the matter more empirically we find that, as is so often the way with what the champions of economic orthodoxy tell us, the reality is quite otherwise. Yes, after all that the Industrial Revolution has wrought, the vast increases in productivity, etc., yes, the vast majority of people still spend their lives working. Yet this fact is inseparable from a colossal expansion in output, throughput, consumption that has pushed the planet to and past its ecological limits, and seems hardly more sustainable socially (certainly to go by the collapse of birth rates). It is also the case that this sustenance of employment has entailed enormous "waste making" as Vance Packard called it (planned obsolescence in its various forms, unneeded product changes, the vile stupidities of advertising's cultivation of dissatisfactions, product "enshittification," etc.) and "bullshit" employment. The result is that, certainly to go by that most basic measure, the difficulty of selling one's labor in return for that living wage, one is less than impressed by any supposed "demand" for labor.

We see it in the ever more brutal educational requirements of employment, with their expectation that a young person will sell themselves into debt slavery for the sake of a "good job," a desperate chase after the Good School in the hope of maximizing the odds of a return on the gamble, the credentialing crisis, with all the obscene parasitism attached to them from the existence of a "college placement industry" to the traffic in derivatives of student debt securities.

We see it in how the student is under ever more pressure not just to "go to school" but to major in "something useful," and how those who have done so so often still end up unemployed and underemployed.

We see it in the exhaustion, brutalities and indignities and oft-time idiocy of the job-seeking and hiring process, from the expectation that the employee will not work to live but live to work for their employer (or at least put on a convincing simulacrum of doing so), to the pseudo-macho head games to which those who write interview questions subject the applicant, to the abuses that the desperation for employment allows, not least those that #MeToo (at least ostensibly) is supposed to challenge.

We see it in how much employers are able to demand from those they hire for as long as they keep them on the payroll, be it the long commutes that often make the ever more burdensome expense of a car a necessity for getting a job in the first place, or the hours they work (which so often combine to make the 9-5 more like a 7-7), or the tokens of submission and petty subordination expected of those who "have a boss," or the surveillance and controls to which the company subjects them (such that even their urine is not their own).

We see it in how little they give the employee in return in an age in which the share of income going to wages, and the purchasing power of those wages relative to life's necessities, have been falling for almost as long as anyone can remember, all as employers ever remind the employee of not just their dispensability and disposability, but of how the time in which their services are likely to "meet their needs" may be short, when they are laid off to make the quarter's bottom line look a little better to their "activist shareholders" and the traffickers in their stock, or individually "let go" just because a hungry young graduate will do the same job a little more cheaply (especially in ballyhooed tech with its "rapid skills obsolescence," "hardcore work culture" and false glamour), or because the boss didn't like their latest essay justifying their presence on the payroll, an eventuality often requiring them not just to find a new job (as at that point in their careers few are likely to want their skills, leaving them looking not just for a new job but a new line of work, which is apt to require an expensive retraining).

Indeed, the way we think about, portray, discuss employment, is telling of how little wanted the worker really is. Not only does a person engaged in a "job hunt" give the impression not of offering their labor to an employer whom they will benefit as an employee, but an alms-seeker, while we speak of an employer "giving" a worker a job as if it were a gift, and a business "creating jobs" as if it were an act of philanthropy, making their pursuit of profit seem like alms-giving. Not only the leftist armed with an understanding of capitalism as founded on expropriation, proletarianization and the extraction of surplus value, but the ardent defender of capitalism who has read their Adam Smith and their Friedrich von Hayek and knows that the system should and does run on self-interest rather than generous feelings should look askance at that.

In a situation where employers really were hungry for labor, we would not see them use it so wastefully--or treat those who do the labor so lightly. And indeed, much as society scorns those who drop out of the labor force (especially if they do not have the excuse of being a caregiver, and especially if they are male, witness the relentless flogging of the mean-spirited stereotype of the basement dwelling video gamer), the reality is that those who drop out generally do so because they are unwanted, that in the economy we have they are "superfluous."

"What about all those shortages of labor we hear about?" some will ask. While the largest part of that is the self-pity of the businessman and the ever-readiness of the media to hand them a platform from which to make as many hear it as possible, I think this much exaggerated, especially insofar as we are speaking of an inability to find the willing and able, rather than something else going on that the talking heads on our screens would rather not talk about. Thus do so many prefer to blame America's deindustrialization on young people studying "soft" subjects at school rather than the lack of a sound industrial policy--while failing to notice, or studiously ignoring, how many of the STEM majors we do produce fail to land employment in their fields, or when they do find such work, find it other than where the would-be defender of hard industry would have us believe they ought. (Thus is it a dirty little secret of the discourse that Wall Street scoops up so many physics majors for the sake of their model-building skills.) One can legitimately argue that we have fewer doctors or practitioners of this or that trade than we ought ("call a professional" when you need home repairs and see where that gets you), but this is not a question of a lack of applicants but rather the professions and trades viciously and grubbily defending their members' interests against those of society by keeping the supply of skilled personnel down, and the price for their skills up, all as even were they to stop doing so it probably wouldn't put much of a dent in the overall picture. Indeed, were it not for the waste making and the bullshit employment and the rest we would need so much in the way of medical services (less exhaustion and stress leaving us healthier, an emphasis on prevention and cure rather than unending "treatment," etc.), and tradesmen (because things would be made to last, and jobs done right the first time).

Why, then, do we see so little acknowledgment of all that? The reason is the familiar one of the recognized "experts" correctly understanding that their job in society as currently arranged consists not in "telling it like it is" so that we can better understand and deal with the realities of our world, but serving their masters' need, with their cheap evasions on the matter of technological employment serving at least two. One is their deflecting any hostility on the part of the public toward business' development of automation (not very successfully these days as the fight over data centers and the booing of AI boosters' speeches at graduation ceremonies show us). The other is denying that the creed of economic individualism, and its expectation that the have-nots take "Personal responsibility" for their fates as the super-rich get ever-richer by making their lives worse, are eternal. After all, even a man so committed to the neoliberal model and so filled with contempt toward working people as Jeffrey Epstein's buddy Larry "What will Goldman Sachs think?" Summers acknowledged, really significant technological labor displacement would, at a minimum, mean the need for government interventions to which business is hostile in the extreme, like a more robust welfare state.

Of course, this does not become our economists either as scientists, or as technicians whose privilege is justified by the service they render to society, but it is in the end what makes the difference between those economists who retain the good opinion of the profession as a whole and the Establishment it serves, who get appointed to seats on Federal Reserve banks and win pseudo-Nobel prizes, and get invited to offer an opinion on the panel shows;, and those consigned to the wilderness, where they tell their truths, but there is no one to hear them; such that when all too predictable disaster strikes the Establishment types are able to get away with the stupid lie that "No one could have seen it coming" one more time.