Robots aren't coming for your shitty job

As the New York Times's Neil Irwin points out, this is not just a left-wing diagnosis -- the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute also recently published studies claiming that growth had been stymied by a lack of investment in automation.

Mr. Mason adds that this idea has some big implications for how to think about growth in worker compensation in the current economic environment. There has been a glaring contradiction around how much American workers’ wages can, or should, be rising.

“On Mondays and Wednesdays, economists argue that wages are low because robots are taking people’s jobs. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, it’s that we can’t have wages rise because productivity growth is low,” said Mr. Mason, an economist at John Jay College. “Both can’t be true.”

In other words, instead of worrying so much about robots taking away jobs, maybe we should worry more about wages being too low for the robots to even get a chance.

You are too poor to save the planet

If you’re not rich, Roberts concludes, the best thing you can do for the planet is get together with other people and try and change policy and elect people to office who aren’t in bed with the fossil fuel industry, among other things. Thinking about lifestyle choices really only makes sense, then, if you add an understanding of class politics into the mix.

To really get this, it’s important to state just how skewed responsibility for the climate crisis—like most other societal crises—really is. A Carbon Majors Report recently found that just 100 companies have been responsible for some 71 percent of global emissions since 1988. 71 percent.
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As the Carbon Majors Report underscores, though, we arrived at the place we are now thanks to the actions of a small and incredibly wealthy substratum of the population and their control over the economy’s modes of production, which define how we live and work and consume. Many people worldwide and in our own country simply don’t consume enough for their lifestyle choices to matter. As climate scientist Kevin Anderson puts it, “By the time the poor have sufficient income to use lots of energy, the transition to a low-carbon energy system will need to have been completed.” That we’re all somehow failing to do our part is a convenient narrative to the small minority of people who are actually responsible for fueling this crisis. Climate change is already hitting the people who’ve contributed least to it, and whose living standards and levels of consumption should increase rather than decrease.

“Eco-consumerism may be able to expiate your guilt. But it’s only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis,” Guardian writer Martin Lukacs argued this week. “This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.”

Danger of exposing the unemployment rate lie

Unemployment in Britain is now just 4.5%. There are only 1.49 million unemployed people in the UK, versus 32 million people with jobs.

This is almost unheard of. Unemployment was most recently this low in December 1973, when the UK set an unrepeated record of just 3.4%.

The problem with this record is that the statistical definition of "unemployment" relies on a fiction that economists tell themselves about the nature of work. As the rate gets lower and lower, it tests that lie. Because — as anyone who has studied basic economics knows — the official definition of unemployment disguises the true rate. In reality, about 21.5% of all working-age people (defined as ages 16 to 64) are without jobs, or 8.83 million people, according to the Office for National Statistics.

We are all passionate quitters now

In the early 1990s, career advice in the United States changed. A new social philosophy, neoliberalism, was transforming society, including the nature of employment, and career counsellors and business writers had to respond. The Soviet Union had recently collapsed, and much as communist thinkers had tried to apply Marxist ideas to every aspect of life, triumphant US economic intellectuals raced to implement the ultra-individualist ideals of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and other members of the Mont Pelerin Society, far and wide. In doing so for work, they developed a metaphor – that every person should think of herself as a business, the CEO of Me, Inc. The metaphor took off, and has had profound implications for how workplaces are run, how people understand their jobs, and how they plan careers, which increasingly revolve around quitting.
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In a way new to the world, and begun by the re-orientation of companies to maximise shareholder value, quitting work is now central to what it means to have a job in the first place. People apply for jobs with the conscious plan to quit, with an eye toward what other jobs the job for which they are applying might help them get. Managers welcome new employees by promising to position them as advantageously as possible to quit in a few years. Co-workers, the ones who like you, are now hoping you will quit – since if you do, you might help them get a good job somewhere else. As is often the case, history brings unintended consequences, even to doctrinaire and theoretical ideas. Hayek’s philosophy has led to workers thinking of themselves as the CEO of Me, Inc; and to survive in the neoliberal world of work, the CEO of Me, Inc must be a quitter.

They didn't privatize hope

Remarkably, this generation—raised, educated, and shaped to neatly fit what Zygmunt Bauman calls “individualized society”—is thinking, aspiring, and acting collectively. They are repudiating spurious but once-galvanizing Reaganite claims to limited government and personal responsibility, turning their backs on Margaret Thatcher’s goal of replacing the “collectivist society” with a “personal society.” In the latest election, the new social democrats/democratic socialists demonstrated that three decades of concerted effort have not changed “the heart and soul of the nation” in quite the way that Thatcher wished for.

They were brought up to be self-seeking entrepreneurs, not to feel responsible for each other. They were primed to accept that every last corner of the world, and their own lives, would be organized by the logic of the market. They were taught to see social contradictions as personal, not political problems—to live by Thatcher’s dictum that “there are individual men and women and there are families…. There is no such thing as society.” Yet, instead of becoming cynical free agents, young people are drawn to the sincerity of Corbyn and Sanders. Against the flashy marketing of their opponents, these men express the humility of old-fashioned values such as fairness and equality. As recent surveys show, young people raised to ensure capitalism’s future have become deeply skeptical of it and many are instead drawn to something called “socialism.”