October 22, 2015
Yes folks, back in the good old days we just had the Soviet Union and the U.S.:
“I was born into the Cold War era. It was a dangerous time with two nuclear-armed superpowers each holding a gun to the other’s head, and the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” kept both in check. But we now know that the dictators that both America and Russia propped up in the Middle East and Africa suppressed volcanic sectarian conflicts.”
But now we have ISIS and Al Qaeda and so many other small radical groups. It is all so complicated. And when we get to the economy:
“Robots are milking cows and IBM’s Watson computer can beat you at ‘Jeopardy!’ and your doctor at radiology, so every decent job requires more technical and social skills — and continuous learning. In the West, a smaller number of young people, with billions in college tuition debts, will have to pay the Medicare and Social Security for the baby boomers now retiring, who will be living longer. ‘Suddenly,’ argues Dobbs, [Richard Dobbs, a director of the McKinsey Global Institute] ‘the number of people who don’t believe they will be better off than their parents goes from zero to 25 percent or more.’
“‘When you are advancing, you buy the system; you don’t care who’s a billionaire, because your life is improving. But when you stop advancing, added Dobbs, you can ‘lose faith in the system — whether that be globalization, free trade, offshoring, immigration, traditional Republicans or traditional Democrats. Because in one way or another they can be perceived as not working for you.'”
Okay, we get it, Thomas Friedman is very confused. But that’s not new. Let’s try to look at the substance.
First, back in 1992, in the middle of Thomas Friedman’s happy days, a very eccentric billionaire (I’m being generous) got more than 18 percent of the vote running as a third party candidate. That’s more than any other third party candidate in the last century. This would seem to indicate some serious discontent even back then. Perhaps this was because people did not perceive themselves as advancing, which they weren’t.
Now we get to the really good part, which Friedman does like no one else:
“Robots are milking cows and IBM’s Watson computer can beat you at ‘Jeopardy!’ and your doctor at radiology, so every decent job requires more technical and social skills — and continuous learning. In the West, a smaller number of young people, with billions in college tuition debts, will have to pay the Medicare and Social Security for the baby boomers now retiring, who will be living longer.”
Let’s keep our eye on the ball here.
“Robots are milking cows and IBM’s Watson computer can beat you at ‘Jeopardy!’ and your doctor at radiology.”
This is the story of massive displacement. Robots are doing all these tasks that used to require human labor. This is a story of very rapid productivity growth. The robots are doing everything, we have no jobs.
But then we get:
“In the West, a smaller number of young people, with billions in college tuition debts, will have to pay the Medicare and Social Security for the baby boomers now retiring, who will be living longer.”
Alright, we don’t have enough young people and us damn baby boomers are going to live in retirement forever. Now we don’t have enough workers.
How is that for a real crisis? We don’t have enough jobs and we don’t have enough workers! No wonder people are turning away from the conventional wisdom and seeking out populist demagogues like Donald Trump. If we didn’t have people like Friedman writing in the pages of the New York Times, we would never be able to figure out what was going on.
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