Nostalgia for obsolete jobs isn’t smart

The populist nationalism promoted by President Trump, Tucker Carlson, Michael Anton, Breitbart and others has many virtues, but welcoming the upgrading of the division of labor through trade and technology is not one of them. Trade and technology are the engines that drive the productivity improvements on which improvement in wages, standard of living, and national security depend. Nostalgia for obsolete jobs isn’t smart.

Populist nationalists in the Republican Party and socialists in the Democratic Party both believe that government should intervene to protect society’s members from the disruptive effects of economic development. They both believe that government can do a good job at this. Both share a delusive nostalgia for a bygone manufacturing era that cannot possibly return — as manufacturing becomes more capital-intensive and dependent on fewer but better educated workers.

Tucker Carlson on cable t.v. and his eulogist Michael Anton in the current Claremont Review are both guilty of feeding this delusive nostalgia. Anton enthusiastically reviews Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 2nd, 2019 cable tv indictment of America’s ruling class and its

destruction of the family, skyrocketing out-of-wedlock births, the opioid crisis, rampant male unemployment, the sleazy effort to anesthetize the dispossessed with payday loans and pot, increasing financialization and technification of the economy and resultant wealth concentration, and foreign war without purpose, strategy, victory, or end.

Much of that indictment is well deserved, but Carlson and his reviewer Anton descend into demagogic jargon in their denunciation of “increasing financialization and technification of the economy and resultant wealth concentration.”

It gets worse. Anton, echoing Carlson, writes

Why are we still making trade deals, three decades (at least) into a manufacturing decline that has devastated entire American industries and hollowed out many of our communities, all the while enriching some of our most determined foes?

We certainly need to thwart Chinese theft of US trade and defense secrets, but if China wants to take over and subsidize the production of our low-tech manufactures so our workers can move up in the division of labor, so much the better. It’s the Chinese theft of US trade secrets in advanced and military-related products that should concern us and their attempts to thwart the marketing of these products where our companies attempt to do so in China.

But forget China for a moment…

Consider how, as US agriculture became more productive, farmers and farm children moved to the cities and became factory workers. The former agriculturalists already had or easily acquired the skills that were required for this new line of work. Then textile mills in New England closed down and moved to the South where labor was cheaper. The New England workers, better educated than their Southern counterparts, moved into higher-skilled electronics, defense, and other technologically sophisticated jobs. Can any reader recall a New England politician calling for tariffs to keep out Southern textiles and protect the threatened local mills?

Similarly, in the 1980s during the Reagan years, manufacturing workers displaced by automation and the modest increase in foreign trade that occurred then just moved on to other jobs with little loss of income.

So what happened later, in the early 2000s, as automation, robots, and foreign trade increased manufacturing productivity and reduced labor requirements? Admittedly something different than in the previous disruptions. This time, a considerable number of unskilled and semi-skilled factory workers could no longer find comparable factory work in other industries because now the jobs required a higher educational level than the workers had. Discouraged, many fell back on disability payments, drugs, and alcohol and, in so doing, became further unemployable.

The tragedy was not that their jobs became obsolete but rather that they didn’t have the skills to move on and up. Trade with China was blamed, but only one-quarter of the losses came from that source. Twice the number of job losses came from new technology, robots, and increased capital-intensivity.

Tariffs and quotas can temporarily save the workers’ jobs in threatened industries like steel, the populist nationalists argue, but they ignore the huge cost passed on to steel-consuming industries, consumers, and the productivity of the national economy. Capitalism — under the code word “globalism” — is denounced as the villain, devoid of caring for the people. In this, the populist nationalists aren’t much different in their rhetoric than the socialists.

The truth of the matter is that those former jobs are gone forever. Agriculture, industry, and even large portions of the service sector are becoming more capital intensive and capable of accomplishing more tasks with fewer employees. Even Uber drivers and truck drivers — in such shortage today — will need to move on to new jobs once self-driving vehicles roll off the assembly lines. Wages and job satisfaction will increase in most cases, provided the workers quickly acquire the skills necessary to perform the new higher-quality jobs that are or shortly will become available.

The tragedy of the dying towns of the Midwest and other venues hit by factory closures has been workers’ lack of the necessary skills to move on and up. This is a tragic situation, but it’s less likely to repeat itself if the economy maintains its present growth pattern, public education improves, apprentice programs are introduced, and young workers stay longer in school.