Humane Jeremiahs

 Noah Smith was responding the other day on Substack to a number of progressive writers who have made a seemingly intuitive point. In so many words, all these left-wing commentators have been making a version of the same argument: "We all agree that Trump's tariffs are bad policy. They won't actually solve any of the problems they purport to address. But, we shouldn't make fun of the basic idea that America's blue collar communities have suffered from globalization. Changes to the manufacturing sector really have 'hollowed out' the middle class in recent decades. People are right to be angry." 

Smith quotes from a tweet thread that makes this point: working-class Americans really have lost good jobs over the past several decades; the author suggests. The service sector jobs that replaced them really were crummy and inadequate. They never allowed people to recover the middle class lifestyles they had enjoyed before. Wages have stagnated. Life expectancy has fallen or plateaued.

Then add to that the opioid crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in the rust belt—and it really does seem like the last few decades of economic history have indeed "hollowed out" the middle class. The new jobs that neoliberalism promised never materialized. All that replaced the factory jobs of the past were drug addiction and despair. Smith quotes from a Financial Times columnist, telling a by-now familiar yet no less depressing story: "In the 1990s, the factories started shutting down. And when I would go home in the 2000s, half of my high-school classmates were on opioids."

To all of which, Smith replies, in so many words: actually—the working class is doing fine. 

If you look at the statistics, he argues, there was no great "hollowing out" of the middle class. Americans are fantastically wealthy compared to other nations—and this is true even after accounting for the lopsided distribution of that wealth, i.e., the fact that it is unevenly shared. In Smith's telling—if you go by the data—the neoliberal promise of the 1990s was actually fulfilled. The job loss in certain manufacturing sectors was recouped by gains in other fields. In the end, most of the country became richer. 

In sum, Smith concludes: "globalization" did not "hollow out the middle class, because in fact, the middle class has not been hollowed out." 

Hmm! Now that is a rather surprising conclusion. One could have sworn—visiting any rust belt town in America—that quite the opposite was the case. 

The whole exchange smacks of the one Thomas Carlyle recounts—in his 1839 pamphlet on Chartism—between a certain unnamed "humane Jeremiah" and a statistical student of political economy. I was just reading Carlyle's great work of social commentary last night, and it immediately brought Smith's blog post to mind. 

"Twice or three times have we heard the lamentations and prophecies of a humane Jeremiah, mourner for the poor, cut short by a statistic fact of the most decisive nature," Carlyle writes. "How can the condition of the poor be other than good, be other than better; has not the average duration of life in England [...] been proved to have increased? Our Jeremiah had to admit that, if so, it was an astounding fact; whereby all that ever he, for his part, had observed on other sides of the matter was overset without remedy."

So too are the humane Jeremiahs of our age seemingly knocked flat (at first blush) by Noah Smith's statistics. 

They look around, these Jeremiahs—they see the qualitative evidence with their own eyes. They look at the depressed and tattered condition of the factory towns—the boarded-up windows; the unemployment lines. They see the hundreds of thousands of corpses laid to rest in recent decades by people poisoning themselves with opioids. They see entire communities that have dropped out of the workforce and given up even seeking a job, in order to scratch out a meagre existence through pooling the occasional social security or disability check that comes to the family. And they conclude from this that the middle class must indeed have been "hollowed out." 

But then here comes the student of political economy—the neoliberal or the neoclassical or what-have-you—to say that their eyes deceive them. People are actually doing quite well. They have gone from good to better. The economic forces that displaced their factory jobs created new and better service sector jobs elsewhere. "'Go to college' turns out to have been good advice," writes Smith. People who invested in a two- or four-year degree, after the factory jobs left town, were well positioned to find employment in the burgeoning sectors of STEM, health care, etc. 

Of course, obtaining those new replacement jobs required knowing in advance where the highly-paid sectors of the future economy would be. And since none of us actually has the ability to prognosticate this way, the matter came down to making a successful gamble. And, as with any gamble, only some won; many others lost. 

People who bet on a four-year degree in computer science in the 1990s, say, after their local factories closed down, won big. But now, of course, those same people are again facing the prospect of another round of job loss and economic displacement—because AI has automated most of the basic tasks of coding. 

Smith and the other neoliberal writers tell us that automation in this domain, as in others, will ultimately create more jobs than it displaces. Efficiency gains in a given industry always make the whole sector more productive, in the long run, creating more demand for skilled work in the sector.

This is what they told the "humane Jeremiahs" in Carlyle's day too. 

Carlyle (who of course was the "humane Jeremiah" in question) writes in one chapter of the job loss occasioned for hand-loom operators by the arrival of the steam engine and other innovations of the early Industrial Revolution. "The huge demon of Mechanism smokes and thunders," he writes, "changing his shape like a very Proteus; and infallibly at every change of shape, oversetting whole multitudes of workmen [...] hurling them asunder, this way and that, in their crowded march and course of work or traffic; so that the wisest no longer knows his whereabout."

In other words, automation in the early industrial age was already displacing workers and upending their lives—"hollowing out" age-old industries and forcing people to seek livelihoods elsewhere—just as neoliberalism displaced factory jobs in the 1990s, and just as AI again threatens to upend whole sectors of the economy today.

But of course, Carlyle ironically notes, the political economists will be there to tell us that automation will ultimately create new skilled jobs in ways we can't even foresee. To which we say—that may very well be true; I don't doubt it. But if we cannot foresee what those new jobs will be, how are we to train for them? 

Or, how were the blue collar workers thrown out of factory jobs in the 1980s or '90s supposed to have known in advance that they needed to take on student loan debt to study computer science for the next four years? And what are we to say to those who did so—who took on the debts to get the computer science degree—but will graduate just a shade too late—when AI has already gobbled up the jobs that were supposed to be waiting for them? 

How are they to pay off those debts now? How were they to know that doing what they had all been told was the "right thing" by getting their CompSci degree had suddenly become—in the time it took to obtain the degree—suddenly the "wrong thing"; an irresponsible, life-ruining choice? 

Carlyle satirically makes his point by imagining a farmer explaining to his horses that he had no intention to feed them during the off-season, when they would not be needed to pull the plow in his fields. Fear not, the farmer tells them—there is surely work for you elsewhere. "[W]ork exists abundantly over the world: are you ignorant (or must I read you Political-Economy Lectures) that the Steamengine always in the long-run creates additional work? [....] somewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa or America, doubt it not [....] go and seek cartage and good go with you."

This is roughly what the social prognosticators and neoliberals and "AI optimists" are telling people today: surely, these new industries will create new jobs in some inconceivable novel form. After all, this has been the pattern with all previous waves of automation in the past. Do you not know—or must I read you neoliberal blogs—"that the Steamengine always in the long-run creates additional work"? 

To which we can only reply—with the horses—"I doubt it not. But—how are we to know what those jobs will be, if you yourself admit that they are presently inconceivable? How are we to prepare or train for them? And how are we to eat in the meantime? Or are we to starve?"

When the factories started shutting down in the 1980s and '90s, politicians of both major parties—the Reaganite Republicans and the Clintonian "New Democrats"—told the laid-off steelworkers that there would be novel opportunities aplenty for them in other industries. They could don the apron at a McDonalds. They could place on their beatified crowns the paper hats of the Burger King. Or they could go to school and train for jobs in the new sectors that would be created by all the wealth and efficiency gains spun off from neoliberalism—though none could predict just yet exactly what those jobs might be. 

Those who gambled aright—happened to get the diploma in nursing or engineering at the right time—reaped their reward. No one would begrudge it to them. But they were lucky; and not all can be lucky. What are we to say to the people who were unlucky—who took on debt to study the "wrong" degree; or even the "right" degree but in the "wrong" four-year period? Are they to starve as the penalty for their mistaken choice or inaccurate timing? 

It may well be that every wave of technological innovation or automation or globalization ultimately creates more jobs that it destroys—in the fullness of time—jobs to be found "somewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa or America," as Carlyle mordantly puts it. But not every horse can get anywhere in the world; nor every person either. So the question of how to match the people displaced in one sector to those inconceivable "jobs of the future" is a rather difficult question. 

And some neoliberals, neo-classicals, "Benthamees" (as Carlyle would call them) appear content not to answer it: so long as the aggregate demand has increased for work, worldwide; so long as the aggregate wealth has grown—"the greatest good for the greatest number"—then all is well. And if it is demonstrably not in fact well for the people who have lost their jobs, had their lives thrown into turmoil, and been dumped onto the global labor market to shift as best they can and to seek out those mysterious "jobs of the future" that are always being created, though we can't say where or what they may be—if all goes plainly not so well for them as individuals—that is simply the sort of thing that can't be helped. "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." 

But what is one to say to those towering, irrefutable statistics that the neoliberals can quote—which tell us that aggregate wealth really has increased—those many data-tables Noah Smith shows us, indicating that the typical American really has gotten much richer, during the age of neoliberalism? Do they not quite "overset" us, just as they did the "humane Jeremiah" of Carlyle's book? 

Carlyle replies, in so many words: well, perhaps, the statistics do not lie; but perhaps by the same token, they do not tell us all. Perhaps they do not fully convey the precarity of life that has grown up alongside the burgeoning national wealth. 

Maybe, instead of just looking at income per capita (to put it in modern terms) we should look to other indices of despair: gin consumption, in Carlyle's era ("a Dantean Hell, visible there in the statistics of Gin," Carlyle writes); or the multitudes, in our own era, killed by opioid overdoses. 

Or, if one is still not convinced by the fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans in depressed rust belt communities have died—through self-inflicted drug poisoning—in recent years—if one still does not suspect from this fact that indeed there may be a real problem here to consider—perhaps one may be persuaded by the plainly observable fact that these working class Americans are telling us—through polls and elections—that they are immensely discontented. 

Are we willing to take them at their word? Or, Carlyle writes, "is the content itself mad [...] Not the condition of the working people that is wrong; but their disposition, their thoughts[?]" In which case, he asks, wouldn't this be just as concerning? Wouldn't it be just as much of a puzzle demanding a solution? 

If people are poisoning themselves to death with drugs and railing against everyone in political power at every turn—are we to tell them that, in fact, they are all doing just fine? That it's "all in their heads," and cite them statistics to prove it? Or, even if it really were "all in their heads" would that not be just as ominous a sign of the times? Would not it too "predict the ruin of the state"—to borrow a phrase from Blake? 

Maybe, then, to Carlyle's point, the statistics do not in fact tell all. Maybe wages have increased for some, thanks to technological change or neoliberal growth; but they have become less reliable; and so life is reduced to a constant gamble. Maybe, indeed, technological change has brought with it new opportunities for some—but not for others. 

"With all this it is consistent that the wages of 'skilled labour' as it is called, should in many cases be higher than they ever were," Carlyle writes, to the Noah Smiths of his time—"the giant Steamengine in a giant English Nation will here create violent demand for labour, and there will annihilate demand. But, alas," he points out, "the great portion of labour is not skilled[.]" 

And so what are we to do with them? The neoliberals and the "Benthamees" may say: we feel for them; but, it cannot be helped. The current system of the market economy is the best one for generating wealth that has ever been devised. People are demonstrably better off under its benign rule in aggregate than they ever were before—so this current economy we have, for all its flaws, really is just about the best we can do. It's not perfect, but to do any better than this would be literally impossible. So we had best leave well enough alone—and the displaced "unskilled" workers who never find a way to catch up, or who mis-gamble on where the hypothetical "jobs of the future" might be, will just have to take their chances. 

I confess I have fallen into similar patterns of thinking myself. Given the demonstrated failures of most known alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, it does indeed seem at times that the dread letters "There is No Alternative" stand over the entry gates to our own "Dantean Hell," to borrow Carlyle's phrase. Abandon hope, ye who enter here. But Carlyle reminds us that we should never be so quick to assume that a problem is without solution, just because we haven't solved it yet: 

"It is not a lucky word this same 'impossible,'" Carlyle writes, "no good comes of those that have it so often in their mouth. Who is he that says always, There is a lion in the way? Sluggard, thou must slay the lion then."

Indeed, if the way is blocked to a fairer economy—if we cannot see the path ahead; or how it could be any better than the eminently flawed one we have already traversed—that indeed is no excuse. We have at least to try. We must slay the lion.