Can you explain why we should assume that current technological disruptions aren't qualitatively different than in the past? And why we should assume technology or the "free market" will sort everything out, beyond just asserting that it will?
For example, in the US, Truck Driver is by far the most common job in most states.
It's a brutal job that is almost inherently unhealthy; it keeps families apart; and labour code violations are endemic, such that drivers are almost compelled by the competition to take drugs to stay up for the required shift lengths, and many don't even feel they have time to stop to use the loo.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...ave-to-defecate-urinate-in-vans-a7411001.html
It is also practically the only thing left that allows people without uni to earn a living wage. There are about 3.5 million truckers in the US, almost 3% of its full-time work force. And within the decade, we might have the ability to replace all of them with machines. What happens to their families? Where do they go? What do they do? If McDonalds and friends automate to crush the Fight for 15 Movement, they won't even have that left. So how does this actually play out, such that it's "
the best thing that can happen to [them]"
At this point most economists will remind us that Malthus was ultimately wrong, that Paul Ehrlich was ultimately wrong, and that technology we don't even understand yet will magically save us. Some say the same thing will come into being and prevent global warming. I can't be bothered to track them all down, but there's no doubt a litany of Mughal, Qing or Ottoman texts projecting the same certainty. But it seems to me that these views are based more on quasi-religious Enlightenment-era views of never ending progress more than anything actually concrete. We know that in fact, things get worse, economies collapse, states fail, and problems go unsolved.
"Lassez-faire" was initially more a religious doctrine than an economic one. How dare puny mortals interfere with the wishes of god, expressed via the "free market." This is why during the Irish Famine, for example, Trevelyan and friends refused to prevent the Irish from starving. Ireland throughout the period was a net
exporter of agricultural products to the UK. The Famine, as Trevelyan put it, was not the result of human error but rather, "the judgement of God." "The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine," he wrote, "but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people"
We are a secular society now, but the logic still holds. Free market hardliners can accept just about any outcome regardless of the human toll so long as they deem it to have been "freely" derived. Like Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, it represents "the best of all possible worlds." And this is the cold comfort that we offer to those (never "us") whose lives have thus been disrupted or even destroyed. Of course, the idea of a "free market" actually being allowed to run in practice is laughable. No country has ever industrialized or "modernized" without careful state nurturing through tariffs and research and investment, from Germany, France, Japan and the US in the 1800s, to Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and maybe now China, Malaysia and Vietnam after the war. Some are competently run and succeed, others are mismanaged and fail. Private enterprise invests a negligible amount in R&D compared to government. Virtually every major postwar technological innovation in the US has been government funded to some degree or another, usually by the Defence Department. There isn't a single iPhone part developed or iPhone developer trained without extensive government support. Where would Silicon Valley be without the internet and NSF grants? And we don't even care enough to get them to pay taxes anymore.
TLDR, I know, I know. But even as we intervene to protect our corporate cartels and strike trade deals to give them extra-legal privileges and monopolies abroad, we in the Anglo-Saxon world also just discard the abruptly unemployable on the curb with the trash - truckers and McDonalds workers. It isn't so much that technology and markets make everything better so much as that we decide in advance that their outcomes - however destructive they may be - are inherently just. This is a political as much as a market-driven phenomenon. Technological changes are inevitable to a large extent, but we do have the ability to manage the pace and intensity of their impact. But Informed by the same "free market" ideological convictions, we've been driving up the cost of education, making home-ownership a luxury, reducing the quality and increasing the price of health care, crushing worker representation, eliminating basic public services, and, icing on the cake, pathologizing and humiliating the victims, as though it's simply a problem of motivation, and the scientifically-documented trauma of long-term poverty doesn't exist. We did this in the US when even white people began to suffer (
http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump) and I expect we'll do the same when it's the truckers' turn.
I think Brexit and Trump are extremely counter-productive and will only make things worse for their proponents, but at the very least they suggest that it's time to take them seriously, and stop assuming that political decisions and outcomes that serve us and hurt them are merely "free" or "natural" processes. "Laissez faire" is not going to solve this problem, unless we define it a priori as
the solution, come what may.
Right, that's enough... it's embarrassing how long it turned out to be. I'm just... more skeptical of blasé liberalist teleological optimism.
