When Adam delved

The brief sparring in the last Democratic primary debates over the question of automation has had the effect of filling my podcast queue with episodes from various shows on the subject of the "robo-pocalypse." The consensus among most seems to be that fear of automation is a red herring. Looking at the broad sweep of recent history, the true source of our economic malaise is if anything a marked decline in the rate of productivity growth (viz. Robert Gordon), which is precisely the opposite of what we would expect to see if the great menace to employment in this country were really that machines are becoming capable of performing our jobs so quickly and efficiently that they are putting us all out of work.

The Silicon Valley "Transhumanists" may delight in scaring the rest of us with their utopian, dystopian, and quasi-religious prophecies about the coming reign of machine intelligence - when we will all be reduced - or elevated, depending on your point of view - to a condition of splendid idleness by our new robot overlords. The bigger story in technology in modern times, however, is how little it has managed to affect our daily lives. While developments in information technology have transformed communication and entertainment, they have - as Matt Yglesias and others noted in this round of the great robot debate - left mostly untouched our other core industries.

Our podcast hosts also point to the fact that, while displacement through technology has been a feature of capitalist economies since the beginning, the loss of work to automation in a particular industry has never before led to a permanent decline in employment in the economy as a whole. Over on The Weeds, they point out that in the 1970s, the great fear was that the rise of ATMs would put bank tellers out of work; yet there are more bank tellers in the United States now than there were before these machines were introduced, in large part because banks have become more profitable due to increased efficiency, and are therefore able to open more branches.

On Slate Money, meanwhile, they point us to the various industries of the past that once employed thousands of people, yet whose passage now we do not mourn - or even remember. People were worried, they remind us, back when turnstiles were installed in subways, because they put out of work the innumerable ticket-collectors who previously had to check each person before they entered.

While such work provided some baseline of remuneration, it was also the quintessential form of repetitive drudgery, before it was finally replaced by machines. It was in the role of ticket-collector on the New York subway, we recall, that the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson toiled in misery and obscurity, before finally being rescued by Teddy Roosevelt through the offer of a plum civil service job. (I guess for the great Progressives patronage was only bad when Tammany did it, and it didn't redound to the benefit of Harvard-educated poets.)

For Mr. Ramsay, in Woolf's To the Lighthouse, subway employees are the embodiment of the question of whether civilization depends upon inequality. "The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity," he reflects in dismay (a view that was also being defended around this time by Woolf's brother-in-law, Clive Bell, if memory serves.)

Of course, the liftman in the subway proved to not in fact be an eternal necessity, and Oscar Wilde writing on this subject was a better prophet. Projecting a future technological utopia in his "Soul of Man Under Socialism," Wilde sides with Mr. Ramsay (and against Marx's romantic notion of a future in which we will all be hunters, fishers, and "critical critics" at the same time) in claiming that unless there is someone to do "the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible." Wilde finds it morally indefensible to compel humans to do these tasks, however, and rests his hope for the future in the dawning of the machine age. "Machine slaves," he says, ought to do all this work for us.

Wilde was right; Mr. Ramsay wrong. The liftman was replaced by machine labor. Is that good, or is it bad? Does it prove that civilization can exist without inequality and wage-drudgery? Or did it push inequality to still more desperate extremes, by driving a whole industry's-worth of people out of employment? Are Wilde and our podcast hosts right that technological displacement is mostly to the benefit of humanity? Should we celebrate the passage of labor-intensive industries as a sign of increased efficiency, increased productivity, and the creation of an eventual technological utopia, when we shall be rid of the curse of Adam?

I for one count myself on the side of the podcast hosts in being skeptical of today's information technology revolution. For just this reason, however, I cannot follow them in their neoliberal optimism that the economy will virtually always plug the gaps in employment created by technological displacement, through the engendering of new desires and hence the rise of new employment-intensive industries.

I agree with Robert Gordon and our podcast hosts and many others who have pointed out that there is no necessary reason - apart from mere dogmatic assertion - why the rate of technological innovation that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century (and the enormous gains in productivity that resulted, and along with it the enormous rapidity of technological displacement) should continue forever. This may be hard for us to believe, in our national optimism, for, as Edna St. Vincent Millay sardonically put it, "it is a bit, like the rising of the sun,/For our country to prosper." Gordon, however, has pointed out that key technological innovations of the past may well be unique and unrepeatable - we have no airtight reason for thinking otherwise.

In that case, however, there is no infinite growth, no perpetual rise of new industries and expansion of existing ones, to catch people who have been displaced by previous technological innovations. This is a problem that goes well beyond the usual "friction" and temporary dislocation acknowledged by neoliberals as a tragic concomitant of technological innovation.

We will leave aside for now the question of whether it is morally tolerable for economic policy-makers to strike whole industries out of existence, through the signing of trade deals, etc., without the people in the affected industries having any say in the matter. My point is that even on its own terms, in which future growth for some always justifies the present suffering of others (those others, let it be noted, never counting among their numbers the neoliberal policy experts themselves) - even then, the neoliberal theory of growth is not keeping pace with reality.

Technological innovation and productivity growth have slowed; wages are stagnating. Low wage-growth, the deliberate breaking of the power of organized labor, the outsourcing of manufacturing in the Global North and the mass-scale displacement of subsistence farmers in the Global South (due to the flooding of their markets with cheap, subsidized agricultural products produced in the United States and elsewhere) - all of these things contribute to the epidemic rates of inequality we see in this country, and around the world.

Adding to this inequality is the fact that, when innovation has stalled, profits can only be gained through cutting wages and pushing costs further down the supply chain. This means that a narrow band of people enjoy access to ever-more capital, but with no productive place to put it (thank you Anna Szymanski of Slate Money for this insight, though you may likely agree with very little else in this post). Hence we find these roving clouds of capital searching for a home, and investing themselves in scams, in financial crazes that add no value to the economy, and in parasitical industries like private equity that actually siphon off resources. These in turn fuel the boom-and-bust cycle that virtually guarantees our current economy, for all its red-hot expansion, will eventually enter another recession.

It is as if capitalism, after pauperizing labor, has finally succeeded in pauperizing capital as well. It must keep on migrating, being constantly displaced, seeking new industries in which it can shelter for ten years or so until they go belly-up. Congratulations, capitalism - even finance has now been proletarianized.

For all the atomistic conceits of neoclassical economic theorists, the truth is that the mainstream acceptance of capitalism (during the brief periods of its life as an economic system when it has been broadly accepted) has always depended on an implicit social contract. Temporary displacement due to technological change, outsourcing, and other means of seeking out greater efficiencies and profitability will in due course be remedied by the creation of new jobs - jobs made possible through the very economic growth that this innovation and displacement has engendered (Yglesias' bank teller example comes to mind).

If the innovation dries up, however, and profits are gained purely through lowering production costs and investing in financial instruments that will eventually turn out to be hollow and without value, the social contract is shredded to pieces. Moreover, the cycle becomes self-perpetuating. With resources being taken out of the pockets of workers and put into the investment accounts of capitalists, there are fewer and fewer people with the means to buy consumer goods. Thus, there is even less incentive to innovate in broad sectors of the economy. We try to adopt the unsustainable solution of powering the growth of an entire modern economy (the majority of which is in fact still based on consumer spending) through business investment in unproductive schemes. Whatever legitimacy capitalism enjoyed has been forfeited.

I can't say I know precisely what the solution to this is. At some point in my early twenties, I ceased to regard socialism as the answer. The dangers of reposing all economic power in institutions that also control all a society's political power came to seem to me too obvious to ignore. Even if such political institutions start out as "democratic," I don't see how they would remain so, without any centers of private power to provide a check, in a Toquevillean sense, on the excesses of centralism.

If I am not a democratic socialist, however, I may be a democratic capitalist. It seems to be that democracy should be the check and counterweight to capitalism. And the greatest evil of neoliberal policies - the way in which they have gotten us into this mess - is that they collectively serve to weaken democratic checks on economic power. If people cannot vote to protect an industry that matters to them, because it would violate the terms of a trade deal, in what meaningful sense have they retained a degree of democratic control over the decisions that affect their lives? If peasant farmers in the Global South cannot vote in tariffs that would shield them from mass displacement through competition with U.S. crops, in what sense are they living in anything other than a dictatorship? If bosses can decide to replace workers without their having a voice in the matter, in what sense is that not economic tyranny?

I don't particularly believe in utopias, technological or otherwise. I don't think the endless innovations that will bring infinite growth are inevitably on their way. To opt for less growth but greater equality seems like it may well be the best hope. A contractarian capitalism that chooses protection over displacement, even when it leads to lower overall growth, seems on the whole a form of life that would be better than our present reality. Some of us might lose some percentage points in our investment accounts. But it would be well worth the price to live in a world in which the forces that determine our future would be at a scale we can understand - and of a nature we can influence.