Part 2:  How will we live?

By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

History doesn’t move at an even pace. Consider England in the 7^th Century, for example. Then revisit it 700 years later. The names of the leaders and political divisions will have changed, but people are pretty much living the same way, wearing the same clothes, and doing the same work.

Come back in another 700 years, and you’ve arrived at the present day – a completely different world. As V.I. Lenin once remarked, “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”

When I was 22, Alvin Toffler observed that people were suffering “stress and disorientation” from “too much change in too short a period of time.” He called it “Future Shock.” But technological change has only accelerated since then. And its continued acceleration ensures that children in school today will live to see a world without jobs for half or more of the population.

Some experts say that will happen within the next twenty years. Others set that benchmark at 2055, “plus or minus twenty years.” Whether sooner or later, technological displacement of workers across skill levels will transform how we live.

Even though 68% of us do not feel engaged in our jobs, we are much less happy when we don’t have them. In addition to providing a livelihood, work provides us with conditions essential to our wellbeing, such as independence, purpose, a sense of competence, and participation in a shared enterprise.

When we don’t have work, we suffer. Princeton economists Anne Case and Andrew Deaton have shown that declining life expectancy among middle-aged white Americans who experience growing “economic insecurity” results from what they call “deaths of despair,” including suicides, overdoses, and alcohol-related liver diseases. They also point to “declines in health, mental health, ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work….”

People in locales that experience high and prolonged unemployment suffer as well, whether they are working or not. Civic spirit declines and social cohesion erodes. Depression, spousal abuse, and violent crime increase. Local jurisdictions lose the capacity to provide basic services and maintain infrastructure.

Throughout our history, many Americans have treated the chronically unemployed contemptuously and attributed their poverty to moral failings. Conservative politicians have exploited this contempt. And condescending liberals have offered a “culture of poverty” theory as an explanation for poverty’s persistence.

But more and more Americans are finding out that if there are 100 workers and only 80 jobs, it doesn’t matter how virtuous or diligent 20 unemployed workers are. And culture always adapts to circumstances.

So the prospect of massive and permanent structural unemployment poses some compelling questions. How will most people pay for the necessities of life? How will they engage in meaningful activity that keeps them and their communities healthy?

Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson suggests “three overlapping possibilities as formal employment opportunities decline.” They are what he calls “consumption, communal creativity, and contingency.”

“Consumption” is essentially leisure, as he explains it. In this scenario, the end of jobs ushers in a golden age in which people are free to pursue activities that most fulfill them. He cites one “post-workist” scholar who suggests that “colleges could reemerge as cultural centers rather than job-prep institutions.” But this vision assumes a large measure of income redistribution, which many Americans oppose, particularly those whose incomes are to be redistributed.

In Thompson’s “communal creativity” scenario, people without formal jobs become artisans, making a living as the middle class did before industrialization put them out of business. Emerging technologies such as cheap 3-D printing would support “an economy geared around self-expression, where people would do artistic things with their time.” To visualize this, think of “maker spaces,” like Somerville’s Artisan’s Asylum. This too would almost certainly require income redistribution.

The “contingency” scenario is one in which people eke out a living by serially performing whatever paid tasks they can find, and bartering services and the goods that they make or grow, while losing labor rights, bargaining rights, and job security. One can see an internet infrastructure emerging to support these arrangements at sites like TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, Craigslist Gigs, eBay, Uber, and Seamless.

Thompson’s scenarios do not encompass the full range of societal outcomes that, for good or ill, are realistically possible. He does acknowledge that, “In any combination, [of these three possibilities] it is almost certain that the country would have to embrace a radical new role for government.”

It’s not just political institutions that will be transformed. A world in which a majority of people no longer have paid employment is one in which they no longer can sustain the consumption of goods and services required to support capitalism itself. Randall Collins elaborates this likelihood in his essay, “The End of Middle Class Work:  No More Escapes.”

Such institutional impacts and what we can do now to anticipate them will be the subject of the last column in this series.