Stuck in Place

I read this article a while back and it got me thinking a fair amount about this question - why don’t those who lose their jobs when factories or plants close move to where more jobs and opportunities are? There are some economic reasons brought up that might be managed through smart policy, like how to help those whose house goes underwater after property values fall in a now declining town can get out from under them so they can relocate, but there are other things like people’s “rootedness” that are much harder to address with policy.

It feels to me a problem closely associated with the sense of entitlement many complain about with respect to various government programs. People’s complaints about jobs and their own actions concerning work makes me think Americans see life from a passive perspective. Work hard, yes, but at whatever is placed before you. There isn’t much to figure out. Get a job at the plant Dad did or whatever major employer is in your town. If you have the right attitude you can get that job and keep it. Everything should fall into place from that. Get a house, get married, have kids. That’s the “American Dream.” But the American heroes are seen as such precisely because they didn’t do that. They went out and found their own way in spite of the uncertainty and risk. They carved their own place in the world. Such personalities are rare, I admit. Still I believe we should look to them as well as our immigrant ancestors, who worked hard for little so that we their descendents would have much, for inspiration on how to tackle adversity.

    The technological advances of the last two centuries have largely covered up the fact that living is hard. We are in constant need of things to maintain ourselves and prepare against potential disasters. The history of civilization is a tale of how our ingenuity has made it easier and easier to do these things. As such we are provided more time to spend on tasks that do not directly relate to meeting our needs, especially in such a revolutionary era when advances in technology are occurring at a blistering pace. However, we are spending a ton of time on things indirectly related to meeting our needs - our jobs. The availability of those jobs and their pay relative to the cost of goods changes constantly.

While we should all be working less and getting more because of technology, that is not happening. While I think it was true as we moved from the 19th to the 20th century, it appears less true as we transitioned from the 20th into the 21st. Many of the manufacturing and machining  jobs that paved way for the forty hour work week and allowed the average American to earn a comfortable wage for work that required little schooling or education are gone. But they aren’t gone in the way so many believe they are. These jobs didn’t all get moved out of the country. Many of them became obsolete because of newer technologies. The integrated circuit board has completely changed electronics. Those can’t be made with a bunch of people on an assembly line the way various car parts still are. That’s a huge change for an entire industry. And as these components have gotten more complicated such that we have machines building them, so have those machines building them. They’ve gone from  merely mechanical to electronic. Thus the repair jobs that required a little training and understanding of mechanical systems now require a deeper understanding of electronics in addition to mechanics. The number of skilled technicians to maintain and repair these machines may have increased, but that increase pales in comparison to the number of jobs lost to those machines.

That is why in the 90s there was cultural push for more people to get college degrees. It was clear then that the jobs of the future would be ones that necessitated knowledge not provided at the high school level. The problem was that push was rather vague. “Everyone needs a degree” may have created more engineers but it also created more writers, historians, music theorists, and scholars of women. This is not a bad thing so long as 1) resources are allocated equitably such that those who received non-technical non-production related degrees can still provide for themselves and 2) enough people do learn the technical skills the job market demanded. Given the issues many firms are having filling positions and the struggle others are having finding decent paying jobs in their field of expertise, I think it is is safe to say we have failed on both counts here.

So how do we fix it?

There is a radical solution that may be needed, but for now I’ll stick to a more basic solution. We must face the attitude which demands jobs return, that asks government to fix problems that we refuse to face ourselves, that grows out of a sense of complacency for what is.

It’s strange to me that such an attitude would be seemingly so pervasive here. The United States was founded by people who had difficulty living life the way they wanted to and chose to take the chance and opportunity the Americas presented for them. They went out and made for themselves what they wanted. We celebrate their overcoming of the hardships they found in their new home every year for Thanksgiving. But the Pilgrims and other early migrants to America were not the last group to experience difficulties in the hopes of creating a better life than was available in home countries. Again and again people poured out from places lacking in resources or opportunities to take their chances in the United States. The Irish and the Germans, the Poles and the Chinese, and more recently the Mexicans and other Central and South Americans. We call our great country the Land of Opportunity because that’s what it is and that’s part of what makes it so great. We tell ourselves that success is possible for anyone as long as you work hard and put forth your best effort. And people came, and continue to come, willing to do just that. Such a work ethic and the things it has produced has made the US the largest economy in the world and its most powerful nation. Pretty impressive for a country that has only been on the map for 240 years.

    But for those whose families have been here a few generations, that work ethic has degenerated. People have become comfortable with lifestyles that are more leisurely and rooted in places they have lived their entire lives. They like their neighbors and coworkers. The love their house, which may be the one they grew up in. They’ve worked hard, though probably less so than their parents, and hope their children will have it even easier than they did thanks to the resources they were able to provide. They want that trend to continue. They want things to stay the same.

    Things do not stay the same. The world is a dynamic place. Mines dry up. Products become obsolete. Companies, even rather large ones, go out of business. We must stay nimble and adapt to those changes rather than steadfast in our lifestyles. If we do the later rather than the former, we become obsolete ourselves. There is no place in this country for a lamplighter, and we would likely make fun of anyone demanding that job come back to prominence, yet the present demands for certain types of jobs are not far off from such a request. The products those jobs created are no longer wanted or simply don’t need the same workforce to produce. And just like the lamplighter who likely didn’t know much about electricity, factory workers don’t have the knowledge or background to find a new job working with the products that replaced their position. There aren’t many paths that allow them to maintain a middle class lifestyle or better that doesn’t include learning new skills. But these people entered their line of work precisely because it did not require much knowledge or training before hand yet still paid well. That paradigm is disappearing, but the mindset is not.

    I am not saying that wanting things to be better for one’s children is a bad thing. Nor is believing that a hard day’s work should be sufficient for providing not only the necessities of life but some comforts as well. I want these things for everyone. But what once allowed for these things to occur a generation ago, or even a decade ago, may not be able to do the same now or in the future.

There are too many things at play that can create changes in the economic conditions that allowed for the middle class lifestyle many are mourning the death of in their town. People are now demanding that government take steps to harness and control those economic forces so things don’t change. But doing so will in turn make things change. It’s difficult to see the effects of globalization in our daily lives. So many things pass through international markets before arriving in our own towns or that we produce in order to sell on those international markets. Closing borders may force us to build some things here, but it can also mean we can’t make as much of other things because we don’t have anyone to sell to. Trade should occur as a positive sum game, and generally is. Yet, so many are convinced it has been a losing proposition for the US because certain jobs have become less prevalent. The disappearance of those jobs is one of many effects of low trade barriers. The positives are not as easily seen as the negatives so people don’t know what they’ve gained from them. They could soon find out if our President-elect follows through on his protectionist, tough on trade talk. We may be looking at both fewer jobs and higher prices.

    Still, regardless of what changes are made to our trade policies, we must find the industrious spirit of our forefathers. We must work where there is work that needs done and should lean on employers to pay wages sufficient for the American Dream. If the market cannot support such demands by labor, then it may be necessary to take a more radical approach towards changing our economy. I am of the opinion that the more radical solution may be necessary after all, and will write more about it in the future, but I don’t think we can make a case for bigger changes unless we try and make what we have work. Right now our system isn’t working, but we the people aren’t working at it either. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.