"The coastal elites were fine with exporting all the blue collar jobs. 'Learn to code,' they said. What they meant was, 'We're killing your way of life. Become like us or die.'"
Michael Trigoboff, Professor of Computer Science, Portland Oregon
Six million people unemployed this week. Too bad they couldn't afford to live even back when they had jobs.
Michael Trigoboff has a suggestion.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans had really faced the problem of jobs in America.
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| 47% are "takers." |
Republicans made inroads with the working class with a message of solidarity between the white workers and their bosses. The real problem was them, those outsiders, i.e. by blacks spoiled by Great Society largess, by Latinos who wouldn't assimilate, by immigrants. Things would be great, GOP leaders said, if you weren't burdened by those "takers."
Democrats considered themselves future oriented. They had a solution: education. Teachers fit the ideal profile of a Democrat: educated middle class people. Democrats said the avenue to a secure middle class life was to leave the working class by getting getting advanced skills unavailable to foreign worker competition.
The Democratic coalition shifted under this approach. Blacks and Latinos heard the Republican message, knew they weren't wanted, and became Democrats. White women, the ones who could sit still in the classroom, got the education they needed and became Democrats, especially in college towns. Charismatic moderates like Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama won victories. They were a narrow majority, racking up big wins in urban coastal states.
In 2016 Bernie Sanders' nomination fight and Donald Trump's election laid bare the limitations of the Democratic approach. White male workers were pissed. They voted for Trump, not Hillary. They, too, knew when they weren't wanted.
Michael Trigoboff, is an Instructor of Computer Science at Portland Community College. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers and had a successful career as a software engineer. He commented on an earlier blog post. He wrote that there was a reason Democrats were losing working class votes in the American heartland. He said the coastal elites were fine with exporting all the blue collar jobs and they were telling everyone their way of life was over. "Learn to code."
"Be like us or die."
Trigoboff teaches people how to code. It isn't for everyone, he wrote this blog. It may only be suited for a very small percentage of the population, people with the right intelligence and mindset.
He expanded on that thought in this Guest Post:
The Democratic coalition shifted under this approach. Blacks and Latinos heard the Republican message, knew they weren't wanted, and became Democrats. White women, the ones who could sit still in the classroom, got the education they needed and became Democrats, especially in college towns. Charismatic moderates like Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama won victories. They were a narrow majority, racking up big wins in urban coastal states.
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| 75% of white truckers voted for Trump |
Michael Trigoboff, is an Instructor of Computer Science at Portland Community College. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers and had a successful career as a software engineer. He commented on an earlier blog post. He wrote that there was a reason Democrats were losing working class votes in the American heartland. He said the coastal elites were fine with exporting all the blue collar jobs and they were telling everyone their way of life was over. "Learn to code."
"Be like us or die."
Trigoboff teaches people how to code. It isn't for everyone, he wrote this blog. It may only be suited for a very small percentage of the population, people with the right intelligence and mindset.
He expanded on that thought in this Guest Post:
Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff
I think that we have been making a horrible mistake since the 1970s, or perhaps since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
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| Trigoboff |
The people with high IQs are doing pretty well for the most part, except for liberal arts majors who want to be professors. When I worked for Xerox in the 1980s, we were producing office machines that eventually eliminated almost all of the secretarial jobs. Very efficient. Even beneficial for the high-level people who had secretaries. Maybe not so good for the secretaries.
I think we should configure our economy so that it has good positions for the people we actually have. And that includes the half of our population which (by definition) has IQs below 100. That might require less automation, and things might be more expensive, but I would totally support that.
Another thing I think we should do is to place tariffs on every product that's imported to adjust its cost of labor to what it would have been if it had been manufactured in America. I think that forcing American labor to compete against labor in the rest of the world is unconscionable. With these tariffs in place, we would all be spending more to buy things, but the tradeoff would be that everyone in this country had a decent job that they could be proud of doing.
8 comments:
Right on, Michael!
There are so many low IQ ers here in Amerika. Cannon fodder for the front lines. They know how to pick up a gun and shoot rag heads. And then they come home and breed more low IQERS , NEVER ENDING TRICKLE OF DUMBASSERS. That’s why we need industrial manufacturing and high tariffs , jobs for Dopes! The high IQERS know what’s best for the DUMB BUNNIES. RIGHT ON, MICHAEL.
I agree with Michael, I'd happily pay more for stuff if I knew the workers were living a decent life. There are times I refuse to buy stuff if it's so cheap I know it must have been made with near-slave labor.
I'd pay $200 for a Liz Claiborne jacket if it was US made with a union label. I don't buy $200 Liz Claiborne jackets made in China.
Uh, Ralph?
I was very serious in my comments. You don't seem to be, particularly.
Do you want to have a conversation, or are you just taking the opportunity to be sarcastic? If there are some ideas behind that sarcasm, it might lead to a good discussion if you just expressed them in a straightforward manner without the sarcasm.
Trigoboff has an interesting point but I think there's more to it.
At the turn of the 20th century an industrial engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote a tiny book called the Principles of Scientific Management. He promoted the idea that maximizing work efficiency was not only useful, but a kind of moral imperative. He taught that reducing waste through resource-optimization would lower costs for goods for everyone; improve profits for shareholders and eliminate difficult and (sometimes) dangerous manual labor. This would free the labor force from drudgery so they could perform higher-value and better-paid work. It was a win-win-win version of "trickle-down" economics before Reagan, and it was uniformly embraced by industrialists.
His unquestioned premise was that the sole reason for people to work is to be paid in exchange for goods and services. But it turns out that work not only provides for worker’s financial needs, but also provides a profound sense of identity and meaning. After all, what’s one the first questions we ask when we meet someone new? “What do you do?” We all want to matter and what we do is part of that meaning-making. It is more than just money.
Several years ago, Dr. Mary Kaiser who was the Head of Human Systems Research at NASA shared with me that early astronauts needed to be a combination of expert aerospace engineers, pilots and scientists. They also needed to be physically strong and resilient (kind of “space athletes”); and have exceptional emotional stability and good judgement under stress. They were the elite of the elite. As the space program matured and systems became more complex and automated, the need for some of these attributes became less important. They were sending schoolteachers into space. These changes had a profound impact on the sense of identity of senior astronauts who had spent their lives being groomed and trained on a model that no longer existed. They were kind of modern-day Ronin warriors without a war to fight.
So, the elite of the elite are also not immune to obsolescence.
One theory is that the economic effects of automation and offshore manufacturing is only part of working-class angst. At a much deeper level, what’s been lost is the sense of personal dignity of being part of a tribe, doing something meaningful and where families can flourish. Those who point to just economics are missing a big part of the hope that Trump offers.
To John C:
I totally agree with you.
Michael,
I was objecting to use of the classification high IQ and low IQ. AUTOMATION is replacing low IQ workers. They screw objects together and tape boxes and pick fruit. High IQ PEOPLE use math skills and have deep insights that help them make money. What will low IQ PEOPLE DO? OH MY GOD! They will wander the streets with shopping carts and wipe your ass when you are old. They flip burgers by day and break into your house by night. They crawl under your house to fix leaks and cut your grass. Jiminy Cricket. Oh yes they drive fork lifts and write the great American novel on lunch breaks. And when they become president they blow the hell out of Iraq. In other words, what in the heck are you talking about?
I’ve seen lives ruined by those classifications. Kind of like auto shop for brown kids and calculus for white boys and Home Ec for girls. Only the bogus IQ test score is much more penetrating., long lasting, and violent. Smart people are average and average people are smart and handicapped people are handicapped and sometimes are smart and average.
Thanks for your contribution to Peter’s blog. It made me think and react.
Ralph
Ralph,
Thanks for responding in a way that made a good conversation possible.
Although you seem to want to object to talking about people of different IQ levels, it's still a fact that there are those levels. I don't see what good it does to purposely ignore that, especially given that it's very relevant to how people will or won't be able to fit into the economy.
Half of the population has, by definition, an IQ of below 100. I am not trying to say something bad about those people or be mean to them. I want this society to purposely create good economic places for people all along the IQ range, including them.
Maybe we should decide not to automate all of the blue-collar jobs. Maybe we should not move to self-driving trucks that will put 5,000,000 truck drivers out of work.
I am not coming at this out of condescending scorn for people with IQs below mine. When I got a job at Xerox in Palo Alto in 1980, I encountered the geniuses who had invented all of the things we have on our computers now: windows on the screen, mice, networks, and laser printers.
I had a pretty high opinion of my programming abilities when I was in grad school and on my first two jobs. I sometimes thought of my mind as a starship that I got to fly around in a very interesting universe. Then I got to Xerox, and I went to talks conducted by the real geniuses, and I got the feeling that I was actually a little kid with a toy starship sitting on the curb watching a parade with the real starships going by.
So I know what it's like to be around people who are orders of magnitude smarter than I am. Some of them were kind to me, some of them were condescending. I know which way I liked better.
I do not condescend to the people I know or to my students. I treat them with kindness and do what I can to help them learn whatever they are interested in.
Sometimes I can tell that a student just doesn't have the mental horsepower to get good at coding. I don't ever tell them that, because it would probably be emotionally destructive for them. Instead, I give them the opportunity to figure that out for themselves, the way I had the opportunity to figure it out at Xerox.
All through graduate school I figured I was headed for the top or someplace close to it. My experience at Xerox was very good for me, because I saw what it was like at the higher levels and it was easy for me to tell that I was not capable of getting up there. That allowed me to stop trying and become satisfied with my high skill level and the things that I actually could do. I wish this for everybody.
Thought provoking discussion and commentary. Thank you all who contributed. As a now retired Truck Driver, I agree with Michaels suggestion that maybe we shouldn't replace all the drivers with Robots. I think of that as reqiring a paradigm shift which will place more emphasis on human needs, not necessarily putting "efficiency" out there as the Holy Grail of Capitalisms benefits.
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