Decades ago I remember sharing a concern with my Business Management students about displaced workers. Then the threat was automation which was beginning to replace factory workers. But what I told my students then remains true today.
I said, you can replace those individuals with smart machines but that doesn’t mean those men (and some women) simply vanish. They still live near you, need to buy groceries, send their kids to school, and need medical care.
But far more than those mundane requirements, they need new occupations to give their lives focus and meaning. “Learn to code” was never a sensible response, different mental and physical skills are needed and they won’t simply pop into existence, however much you want them to do so.
Nobody paid attention to me then I suspect, and haven’t since. The threat long since morphed into sending the physical jobs overseas where poor people with lower living costs will gladly do them more cheaply even than robots.
Whatever the poobahs in charge said about caring for the displaced workers was them blowing smoke up your backside. Their behavior clearly showed their true attitude: “This isn’t our problem.” The jobs went away, but many simple (and some highly complex) things became inexpensive which almost everyone enjoyed.
It took awhile for the other shoe to drop. In their tens of thousands, men (and some women) who would have thrived in factory jobs, lived full lives, raised fine children, bought inexpensive homes, coached little league teams, gone fishing or bowling, and retired on union pensions had no way to do those things. No real prospects of utilizing their common sense, work ethic and physical vitality. Of living the American Dream.
So we began seeing blue-collar lives fall apart, marriage and birth rates decline, overdoses accelerate, suicides and disability claims skyrocket. Someone started calling the early deaths “deaths of despair” which in fact they were.
Do you know who has been listening the whole time, not to me but to the working folk? Donald J. Trump, he realizes we need manufacturing here at home. For defense reasons to be certain, but also for a healthy working class living healthy lives, contributing to society instead of being a drag thereupon.
If goods cost a bit more to make here, not having to manage a drugged-out, suicidal, often homeless stratum of society will cost less. That’s a good trade-off in my mind, and I hope in yours.
And we get a defense benefit thrown in as a bonus. Doing so will weaken our most immediate, credible foreign threat: China.
(Thus endeth the lesson. DrC folds his notes, closes his attaché case, looks ruefully at the class, and departs.)
