I was born in 1973, just as the American economy was going to hell. However, we cannot accept all responsibility. It was the twilight of her 20th century manufacturing boom, which had managed to compress the entire country into almost one giant middle class, but for reasons beyond my control, that boom was collapsing. did. Inflation is likely to reach double digits as labor productivity begins to decline, economic growth stalls, unemployment rises, and manufacturing employment tilts toward an eventual decline toward its current share of less than 10 percent. was about to reach.
This shift has devastated workers and communities, even kids like me who went to college to listen to songs like Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the USA” and Billy Joel's “Allentown.” They absorbed their sadness through songs and programs such as “Roseanne.'' As we entered the district, it became a major force in politics as the Clintons sought to steer the economy toward a global, post-industrial future.
Having voted for Bill Clinton, I believed his answer was correct. Trade and automation have made Americans overall better off, even as they have displaced some manufacturing workers. What we had to do was fine-tune the adjustment, primarily by sending more kids to college to take advantage of the increasing wage premium. It was 40 percent when I was born and 60 percent when I graduated from college, and now it's closer to 80 percent. Older workers who are not ready to enter college could be retrained for jobs in the fast-growing service sector.
I still believe that our prescription was largely correct. But as artificial intelligence begins to be adopted into our work, I wonder how well the professional class will be able to take their own medicine. Will we move smoothly into lower-skilled service jobs, as we have encouraged manufacturing workers to do? Or will we preserve what we have for the sake of our children and ourselves? Will we fight tooth and nail to keep it?
Because I think AI will appear in many professional jobs, even though I've heard many people say that machines can't do it. We're used to thinking of automation as primarily displacing the working class, but as economist Daron Acemoglu wrote in 2002, “Advances in technology allow more skilled The idea that workers have an advantage is a 20th century phenomenon. In the 19th century, steam-powered machines replaced many skilled craftsmen, and now AI appears to be heading in a similar direction. When it comes to working with words and symbols, AI can already do a surprising amount of what humans can do, and it's improving at an alarming rate.
As a February Bloomberg News headline put it, “AI is driving more job cuts than companies want to admit.” While this number isn't huge, Bloomberg cites one source who says there have been 4,600 AI-related layoffs in the past nine months, ChatGPT only became publicly available in November 2022. When you think about it, this is a pretty big number. This number will grow even higher. .
As with previous automations, good jobs will be destroyed as well as created, and those who are left out will enjoy widespread prosperity. But that also applies to manufacturing workers who lost their jobs during the China Shock, and people like me kept telling them. A report released last year by the Congressional Budget Office found that from 1979 to 2020, incomes “gained the most for households in the top quintile,” but average incomes rose for all quintiles. .
Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinion
But as they've been telling us, people don't just care about their role as consumers. They are concerned about their role as producers and, more broadly, their relative status in society. For the working class, the place has been in relative erosion for decades. The types of jobs many of them hold today, such as those in retail or the lower echelons of the health care system, have lower social status than the manufacturing jobs of yesteryear, even if the pay is the same. And it often requires a combination of servitude and soft skills not required on an assembly line.
Those people may become happier if AI improves their relative status. This means that a growing proportion of high-status, high-paying knowledge work will take over, leaving humans to do the low-skill jobs that AI remains weak at, such as chopping vegetables and helping the elderly. It will probably happen. Please use the bathroom. Perhaps, in theory, we should all be happier. Because this is what political leaders have long claimed they wanted, a return to midcentury paradise when college wage premiums were modest, opportunity was widely distributed, and incomes were compressed for low-income earners. It's regression. Narrow band.
But if that happens, it is likely that there will also be a revolt of educated people who are losing ground, like the uprising that led the working class to protectionism and Donald Trump. Or at least that's what it seems to me when I imagine the upper middle class offering their children the same advice they've lavished on working-class men. It's time to face reality and look for a stable job in food service or warehousing. ”
“That's OK!'' Every educated parent will write to me and say, “If only I had good health insurance and a strong social safety net.'' I admire these public-spirited people, but realistically I don't think they are the majority. For most upper-middle class families, there is a lot of anger and fear, demanding that the government do something to preserve their position and pass on what they have to their children. I expect it to be deaf.
Because knowledge workers are much closer to power centers than manufacturing workers, we expect that the twilight of the elite will involve even more intense and destructive political struggles than those we currently endure. – The Ragnarok of the rational class, if you will, the Armageddon of the scholar-minded.
