The headline unemployment number is not the number of people who cannot find a job. It is the number of people who are actively looking for a job and cannot find one. It does not count people, many in prime working age, who have given up hope of finding a job. The Federal Reserve, the organization that is responsible for using fiscal policy to control the economy as best as possible, has dual mandate: keep unemployment low and maintain an inflation target. The unemployment number they use is the number of people who want a job but cannot find one. As a matter of policy, then, as a matter of law, our society tells people who want to work that their livelihoods are worth less than low inflation.
One of the smartest people I ever met did not have a college degree. She was a young woman (though slightly older than me at the time) who manually scheduled conference calls for the company that we both worked for at the time. I held many, many jobs when I was trying to work my way through college and one of them was as an operator for a company that ran conference calls. If you needed a conference call, you called people like me, and we arranged the call. If the call was small enough, I used her work to schedule it myself. If it was large or needed complicated assistance, like polls or Q & A or specialized language help, etc., I turned it over to her and called you back when she figured out the schedule.
She created the entire scheduling system herself, I believe, out of the bones of a much worse system she inherited. It was entirely manual, as far as I could tell, and the meat of it lived on a series of large pieces of paper that she designed herself. In all the time I worked there, I never saw a conflict and I never saw her turn down a client or offer them something far and away from what they needed. She had no degree, no special training. She was a single mom who needed a job, started as an operator, and worked her way up to the point where she ran, and reinvented, an entire scheduling department.
Her job, obviously, does not exist anymore. I imagine that even if the company hung on for a while the scheduling was eventually computerized (though schedules are a lot harder to computerize than you think, having worked on a couple such systems myself, so maybe not). But regardless, the march of telecommunication technology has made the company she worked for obsolete, and likely did so a few years after I left.
I have no idea what became of her. We were work friends at best, and I never spoke to her after I moved onto a job that fit my school schedules better. But given her lack of credentials, and the hollowing out of working American cities, there is every possibility that she slipped out of her lower middle-class life and into one of poverty.
Technology and policy conspire to change things, often for the worse. I do not think that imitative AI will lead to mass job replacements, for a variety of reasons. But they will do damage to workers before that becomes clear — they will be used to lessen worker power and pay. And there are other technologies that will automate work in a more efficient fashion, leading to job losses. Already today, algorithms spy on workers, demand they act as if they were robots, and otherwise create terrible working conditions. Tech companies use the illusion of efficiency to push workers out of fulltime jobs and into the gig economy. All the while, our safety net gets worse and worse, with bigger and bigger holes.
We vilify the poor in this country. They are lazy. They will just use government child tax credits to buy drugs. They are coddled in a hammock and will never make something of themselves. They should learn to code. They could have a job if they wanted one.
No. They. Could. Not.
By policy and by law, one the one hand we keep people who want jobs away from them. We tell them that is better for the economy, and thus the society, if they, people who want to work, cannot. On the other hand, we call them lazy, losers, Welchers, and welfare queens and shred their safety net. We make it hard for people to unionize and we turn a blind eye when tech companies disrupt industries in a way that accurses all the money to the people at the top of the economic pyramid. It is cruelty almost for the sake of cruelty.
It doesn’t have to be this way. For much of the post WWII era, it was not, at least for white men in the US. Technological advances can benefit everyone in society, if society so chooses. We can do better. And if you think that capitalism requires this kind of performative viciousness, then we need something better than capitalism. An economy should serve society, and thus human welfare, not the other way around. My old friend deserves much, much better than the world we have built today.
We all do.