President-elect Donald Trump has promised to wage a war against globalization, to bring back jobs that corporations have sent abroad. But what about all the jobs that simply don’t exist anymore, left behind by advances in technology?
For anyone in the US manufacturing economy Trump has been describing, a job lost to China looks and feels identical to a job lost to technology, making it hard to effectively get to the bottom of what’s happening—and how to fix it for the American workforce.
From Federal Reserve data, it seems relatively clear that scapegoating China and Mexico misses a good portion of what’s going on. Domestic manufacturing sector output (blue line) is at an all time high, back to the pre-recession levels of 2008. But the red line, employment, shows that the output has not created jobs.
“US factories are not disappearing; they simply aren’t employing human workers,” Rice University professor of computational engineering Moche Vardi told Factor earlier this year. “Job losses due to automation and robotics are often overlooked in discussions about the unexpected rise of outside political candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders.”
Compared to tough-talking trade policy, in which a country “stands up” to another, discussions about robots taking jobs don’t have satisfactory ends—yet, at least. But the spectre of significant technological job loss is very real, not just in the manufacturing sectors.
The evening after the election, one tweet went viral that illustrates the trouble the country could be in, having ignored technological job loss in favor of strawmen woven purely from trade and immigration issues. “The self-driving truck is all but in mass production at the moment and I just remembered this map,” the tweet read. Above the text were two maps, a data visualization from NPR showing the BLS’s most common job in every state, and a map of red and blue states.
It doesn’t take an economist to see the implications here. Technology is coming for American jobs in many sectors—and much more aggressively than any outsourcing ever could—and that tweet shows how high of a cliff we could be standing at.
Trucking has provided a go-to opportunity for people to earn middle-class wages without a college degree, and winter appears to be coming. Tesla has normalized “autopilot” on cars (even if it was premature), Ford and other automakers and tech companies have invested heavily in self-driving cars, and Uber-owned Otto became the first robot trucker, successfully making a 120-mile beer run in Colorado.