One of the stories we follow here at COTTonLINE is the California death spiral. How the nation's most blessed-with-natural-wonders state has become a place people flee from, because its politics has become so malignant. Of course the DrsC are a part of the CA diaspora.
Coincidentally, there are two current articles which focus on CA's problems. One in Forbes which describes what's happening there now as an "upstairs-downstairs" story. Upstairs being the college educated and well paid, downstairs being the poor service workers who drive their Ubers, deliver their pizzas, mow their lawns, clean their homes, and tend their children.
As the Forbes column points out, in mid-twentieth century CA the work these service workers do now was then done by CA's middle class citizens for themselves. Truly, nobody had a cleaning lady, or a gardener, and you picked up your own pizza and watched your own kids.
The other is a further consideration of the CA decline by Joel Kotkin who, writing for Sp!ked, calls it "Newsom's dystopia." AI which is closely identified with CA high tech firms looks like it will destroy the white collar jobs of many of the "upstairs" folks and create a political disaster. Looking ahead, Kotkin writes:
Some 82 per cent of millennials believe AI will damage their careers. The displacement could soon reach 30 per cent of the workforce. (snip) As one Marxist writer put it, no power on Earth is more fearsome than ‘the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vice of low-paying jobs’.
Researcher Gregory Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital founders, found little interest in expanding property ownership or entrepreneurship. The preference is for redistribution sufficient for the masses to subsist while the elites luxuriate. (links in original)
Kotkin is far from optimistic.
A Newsomised America would resemble the Golden State, but only far poorer. The rise of oligarchical socialism signals the end of upward mobility for all but the super-skilled or well-connected.
It would be a society much like that portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where ‘controllers’ offer the masses pleasure, entertainment and enough propaganda to accept a new, increasingly posthuman order directed by the very few. It is a future no one should want.
Kotkin of course assumes China would let us decline that far, without waltzing in and conquering us. This I very much doubt, unless they perceive we are defeating ourselves, which they might allow to continue. The enemy gets a vote, independent of our wishes. Hat tip to Power Line for links to both columns.
