Peter Frase

A recent article in the *New York Times* reports an [encouraging victory](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/technology/foxconn-to-raise-salaries-for-workers-by-up-to-25.html) for the workers at Foxconn, the gigantic Chinese manufacturer that makes products for Apple and many other companies:

> The announcement by Foxconn, which said that it would raise salaries as much as 25 percent, to about $400 a month, came after an outcry over working conditions at its factories. In recent weeks, labor rights groups have staged coordinated protests in various countries after reports that some of Apple’s Chinese suppliers operate harsh, abusive and dangerous facilities. To stem criticism, Apple hired a nonprofit labor group to inspect the plants it uses.

It seems that this move came in response to the efforts of the workers themselves---including the martyrs who [committed suicide](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9006988/Mass-suicide-protest-at-Apple-manufacturer-Foxconn-factory.html) in protest against Foxconn's labor practices---and increased awareness among consumers. Mike Daisey's [report](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory) for *This American Life*, in particular, deserves credit for raising consciousness. This victory, if it holds up, is an encouraging example of how trans-national labor solidarity can work.

In a follow-up, however, the *Times* [carefully avoids](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/technology/pressures-drive-change-at-chinas-electronics-giant-foxconn.html) the class struggle at the heart of this story: as Ned Resnikoff [observes](http://resnikoff.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/workers-never-act-but-are-merely-acted-upon/), the story goes through remarkable linguistic contortions to avoid ascribing agency to the Foxconn workers themselves. We are told that for higher wages to be sustained, companies "must convince consumers in America and elsewhere that improving factories to benefit workers is worth the higher prices of goods." The fate of Chinese workers is thus placed in the hands of corporate marketers and beneficent consumers rather than, say, the workers themselves.

Mobilizing consumers has its place in a labor organizing campaign, but I'm dubious that the altruism of atomized consumers on its own is a durable basis for increasing wages. The market is simply too good at obscuring the true relations of production, except when rare instances like this one break into the open; ethical consumerism can easily be subverted by companies that sell a false sense of moral purity by [marketing themselves](http://clamormagazine.org/issues/38/aa/straub.php) as virtuous capitalists. A better model for the role of consumers in labor struggles are things like the [California Grape Boycott](http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/systems/agentsheets/New-Vista/grape-boycott/History.html), which was initiated and led by the United Farm Workers.

There are a couple of other interesting things about the Foxconn story, which actually ties together a lot of my preoccupations. One thing to note is that in this case, the struggle over *time* was at least as important as the fight over money. In addition to higher wages, Foxconn is pledging to reduce overtime---the punishing 14-hour days and 7-day weeks have been reported as a major factor behind the wave of suicides. Given how much of 19th Century labor history in the West was devoted to the fight over the working day, it's not surprising that the same struggle is being recapitulated in China.

The other thing that jumped out at me is the last paragraph of the [*Times* story](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/technology/pressures-drive-change-at-chinas-electronics-giant-foxconn.html), which is tacked on almost like an afterthought:

> And worried that the old model is dying, Foxconn has announced plans to invest in millions of robots and automate aspects of production.

Just last week, I [wrote a post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/) where I described the relationship between worker bargaining power and technical change as follows:

> Suppose, for example, that employers had to pay much higher wages for work outside of standard hours, for irregular schedules, and for last-minute re-schedulings. In the short run, this would increase the income of some workers, which is good. It would also make employers more reluctant to use employees in this manner, unless it made them enough money to pay the higher wages. But in the long run, it would create stronger incentives for employers to simply use fewer workers, perhaps by replacing their labor with machines. This might sound like a dystopian scenario in itself---we win higher wages, and the end result is that we just get replaced with robots! But the alternatives are, in my view, even worse.

If Foxconn follows through on its wage and hour concessions, and on pledge to automate, it will fulfill this dynamic perfectly.

Moreover, this case demonstrates that the disappearance of human labor in manufacturing is not just a rich-country phenomenon, and the data suggests that Foxconn is not anomalous. Recently, Felix Salmon [came up with](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/02/why-jobs-require-cities/) data showing that the absolute number of manufacturing jobs is declining, not just in the United States and other rich countries, but even in China. Some of this may be a result of production shifting to even lower-wage countries, but it also lends support to my [longstanding contention](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/04/the-united-states-makes-things/) that the most important story behind deindustrialization is technological change rather than outsourcing. If even China isn't growing manufacturing employment, this suggests that the global economy is going through a gradual transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, much as rich countries made the transition from being predominantly agricultural to a stage where farming only makes up a tiny percentage of jobs and GDP. Going back to a manufacturing dominated workforce doesn't seem much more plausible---or, when you think about it, much more desirable---than reverting
to a
situation in which most people worked on farms.

That's not to say manufacturing doesn't matter. Jared Bernstein had a [good post](http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/manufacturing-why-we-should-help-the-sector-but-not-too-much/) the other day that describes the ways that a strong manufacturing sector benefits a national economy. But direct job creation is only a minor component of the case for manufacturing, and the declining employment in the sector means that a revival of manufacturing is unlikely to play a large role in reducing the unemployment rate. Matt Yglesias [gets to the central issue](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/02/02/china_s_service_juggernaut_and_the_scourge_of_agriculture.html) here:

> But *even in China*, job growth is coming primarily from the service sector. It's not a nation of factory workers and it likely never will be. But China has been de-ruralizing very rapidly. And it turns out that one way to characterize the "good old days" of rapid income growth in the United States is as not a move to factories but *off* of farms.

To Yglesias, this implies that growth in the service sector is the key issue for global economies in the future. But to take this a step further, one way to characterize what is happening in the United States today is not a move to the service sector but *out* of manufacturing. And it's true that, if you want the aggregate amount of employment to grow in step with the growth of the population, you are committed to creating a whole lot of service jobs. But as I have [argued before](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/), this implies a strong normative judgment about the socially-optimal level of commodification.

As Ursula Huws has [pointed out](http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5712), the creation of service sector jobs often entails "a socialisation of the kinds of work which are also carried out unpaid in the home or neighbourhood", things like "health care, child care, social work, cleaning, catering and a range of personal services like hairdressing." Insofar as people experience these tasks as unpleasant drudgery, it is desirable to reduce the need for them to performed unpaid---particularly since unpaid work is done disproportionately by women. But just as in manufacturing, there are more and less labor intensive ways of replacing domestic labor. As Cat Valente observes in her [fascinating post](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/02/life-with-and-without-animated.html) on gender-biased technological change in Japan, innovations that reduce the need for household labor can be at least as significant as iPhones or assembly-line robots. This is the alternative to the system in which one privileged group of workers hires another group of workers for the domestic tasks they no longer have time or inclination to perform.

To what extent do we deal with de-industrialization by turning more and more of human activity into paid work, and to what extent do we try to decrease the total amount of wage labor by reducing the work week and allowing people to spend more time out of the labor force? That is one of the key questions facing us in the 21st century, as the jobs that currently
form the basis of our economy [begin to disappear](http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2012/02/2-billion-jobs-to-disappear-by-2030/).

Commenter JKudler [alerted me](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/#comment-412825465) to one of the less well understood aspects of Martin Luther King's legacy. I knew that MLK had described himself as a democratic socialist, but I didn't know that he [said this](http://www.progress.org/dividend/cdking.html):

> In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing -- they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.

> I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Naturally [I agree](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/02/do-they-owe-us-a-living/), and I encourage you to read the [whole thing](http://www.progress.org/dividend/cdking.html), which ends on the note I quoted in the title. It's something to ponder as you go about marking the occasion of MLK day---or, as Ron Paul calls it, [Hate Whitey Day](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/08/in-my-family-we-always-toast-marshmallows/)---in whatever way you find appropriate.

With all the writing I do about our encroaching dystopia of artificial scarcity and rentier elites, it's always slightly embarrassing when my writing is trapped behind a paywall. Fortunately, both of my contributions to the new *Jacobin* have entered the digital commons, now that my editorial on working time and feminism has been [posted online](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/01/winter-2012-issue-preview/). This web version preserves the print and PDF formatting, so it also shows off the work of our fantastic new designer, [Remeike Forbes](http://positionstudios.com/).

My editorial isn't particularly radical, especially in contrast to the speculative reveries of my main essay in the issue. But I felt like it was worth taking the time to say that if we're to talk about reducing working time---something that's a central political concern of mine---we have to be clear that *paid* work isn't the only kind, and that reducing time in waged work can sometimes be in tension with equalizing the gender division of labor.

I do wish, though, that I'd said a little more about the institution of the nuclear family, which functions as a kind of unstated premise of my whole editorial. Just after I wrote it, I read [this essay](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n24/jenny-turner/as-many-pairs-of-shoes-as-she-likes) by Jenny Turner on recent feminism, which draws out a great point from Toni Morrison by way of Nina Power:

> ‘Sometimes the things that look the hardest have the simplest answers,’ Nina Power writes towards the end of her chapbook, One Dimensional Woman. She then hands over to Toni Morrison speaking to Time magazine in 1989. On single-parent households: __‘Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community … The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work.__ It doesn’t work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it I don’t know.’ On ‘unwed teenage pregnancies’: ‘Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can … The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.’ On how to break the ‘cycle of poverty’, given that ‘you can’t just hand out money’: ‘Why not? Everybody [else] gets everything handed to them … I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. That’s the shared bounty of class.’

> What about education? If all these girls spend their teenage years having babies, they won’t be able to become teachers and brain surgeons, not to mention missing out on cheap beer, storecards, halls of residence. To which Morrison, with splendour, rejoins: ‘They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them in my arms and say: “Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me – I will take care of your baby.” That’s the attitude you have to have about human life.’

Leaving aside the point about "just [handing out money](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/why-not-just-give-poor-people-cash-preliminary/)", which I obviously love, this point about the nuclear family struck me just recently, because I was writing an entry for an academic encyclopedia on the topic of the "24/7 economy"---that is, the fact that 40 percent of employees in the United States don't work Monday to Friday 9 to 5 jobs, but instead work evenings, nights, weekends, or rotating shifts. [Scholars](http://books.google.com/books/about/Working_in_a_24_7_economy.html?id=56gXBZzzY7AC) of these "non-standard" work schedules often point out that they tend to make child care logistically difficult, but usually this is posed as a contrast with the "normal" situation of a couple working standard hours. Workers with non-standard hours are much more likely to rely on their relatives for child care, for example; but rather than viewing this the way Morrison does, as an opening onto a more humane and realistic way of organizing care work, it is instead portrayed as a problem and a burden, something which threatens to strain relations between family members.

As long as single and dual parent nuclear families are the norm, it makes sense for the Left to demand policies that at least ease the burden of unpaid work on women, which is what my essay was about. But I'd very much like to reclaim the old socialist-feminist idea that, as Turner puts it, "any politics worth having has to start with the nuclear family: its impossibility, its wastefulness, its historical contingency." I wouldn't ultimately be satisfied with reforming the current relations of *re*-production any more than I just want to humanize the relations of production---the point is to overturn them.

There's a good article in [LA Magazine](http://www.lamag.com/features/Story.aspx?ID=1568281) about UCLA parking theorist Donald Shoup. Shoup has made a name for himself (among urban planning nerds) by showing how urban land use practices systematically over-produce free and cheap parking, leading to all sorts of undesirable consequences for everyday life.

As Matt Yglesias [says](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2011/12/29/la_magazine_profiles_donald_shoup.html), Shoup's views on parking can be reduced to two themes. First, "that governments should not force real estate developers, store owners, and other businessmen to build more parking than their own calculation of what the market balance of supply and demand is." This is just the straightforward point that the state shouldn't force the creation of things that have negative externalities and disproportionately benefit the already well-off. More interesting is the second theme, "that governments shouldn't underprice street parking in a way that leads to Soviet-style shortages of available spaces and elaborate rationing rules about how long you're allowed to stay in a given spot." Yglesias, and Shoup, portray their position as a free-market alternative to the evils of central planning, surely a canny move for liberal audiences. But there's something else going on here; consider this experiment in LA, as described in the LA Magazine article:

> This spring the DOT plans to introduce an $18.5 million smart wireless meter system based on Shoup’s theories. Called ExpressPark, the 6,000-meter array will be installed on downtown streets and lots, along with sensors buried in the pavement of every parking spot to detect the presence of cars and price accordingly, from as little as 50 cents an hour to $6. __Street parking, like pork bellies, will be open to market forces__. As blocks fill, prices will rise; when occupancy drops, so will rates. In an area like downtown, ideal for Shoup’s progressive pricing, __people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination.__

There are two points I want to make about the two bolded phrases, one directed to my left and one to my right. (See? I'm an even-handed centrist.) To Leftists, this talk of subjecting parking to "market forces" sounds like the usual neo-liberal claptrap, in which public services are thrown open to private avarice. And it's understandable that we're all wary of talk of the market, which has become a kind of universal solvent for putative reformers looking to batter down the welfare state; as Tom Frank [remarks](http://politics.salon.com/2011/12/28/the_rise_of_utopian_market_populism/), faith in the market has a utopian fervor on the right, as the free play of capitalism is presented as the magical solution to all problems.

But rather than accept the ideological representation of The Market as all that is competitive and efficient and bounteous and true about capitalism, it's worth reflecting on just what the Leftist objections to the market traditionally were, and whether they fit the case described here. There are two that I think are most important. The first is a narrowly economic argument, to the effect that under the "anarchy" of capitalist competition, the pursuit of private profit leads to unjust and irrational results: luxury goods are produced while the poor starve, inventories pile up that no-one can afford to buy, factories lie idle while thousands are looking for work, the environment is despoiled, and so on. In Trotsky's [Transitional Program](http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm ), there are repeated references to this kind of market anarchy, which will inevitably be superseded by a superior form of rational, conscious, worker-controlled planning. Indeed, says Trotsky, "The necessity of 'controlling' economy, of placing state 'guidance' over industry and of 'planning' is today recognized – at least in words – by almost all current bourgeois and petty bourgeois tendencies, from fascist to Social Democratic."

But is someone like Donald Shoup trying to introduce the anarchy of the market, or suppress it? Consider:

> Parking had never crossed Shoup’s mind when he left Yale for L.A. in 1968—his focus was public finance and land-value theory. In 1975, he stumbled onto a master’s thesis by two USC students who had worked their way through school parking cars for a man named Rex Link. “Link,” says Shoup, “was annoyed that county workers were offered free parking downtown when federal workers had to pay. ” Link’s student employees proposed a study. “They found that 72 percent of county workers drove to work alone,” says Shoup, “but 60 percent of federal employees carpooled, took public transportation, or even walked. These were workers in the same professions, driving to the same location.” When forced to pay a practical value for their parking, drivers were twice as likely to carpool—traffic congestion was halved, carbon emissions were halved. “The more I thought of that,” says Shoup, “the more I thought there was a perfect storm here. __No one can tell you why parking prices are set as they are. But when people pay comparatively little for something that’s expensive to produce, the result is collective irrational behavior.”__

The Market has been so mystified by its apologists that we no longer recognize a planned economy when we see it. It's true that that last sentence is, in some ways, redolent of old pro-market critiques of Soviet planning: when prices are arbitrarily decreed by the state rather than equilibrated in competitive markets, irrational and suboptimal outcomes are the result. But Shoup's alternative is not merely to unleash the anarchy of the market, in which private firms somehow compete to offer parking at the lowest price. The ExpressPark experiment, as described in the first quote, is an exemplary case of central planning. The city begins by decreeing a production target, which in this case is maintaining one empty parking space on each street. The complex system of sensors and pricing algorithms is then used to create price signals that will meet the target. The key point here is that the capitalist market's causal arrow has been reversed: rather than market price fluctuations leading to an unpredictable level of production, it is the production target that comes first, and the prices are dictated by the quota. What this reminds me of, more than anything, is some of the abortive experiments in economic planning that happened in the USSR under Kruschev, as fictionalized in Francis Spufford's *Red Plenty*. Mathematicians and economists, including the Nobel prize winner Leonid Kantorovich, attempted to use the mechanism of prices, not to restore capitalism, but to make central planning work better. Consider this exchange, which Spufford invents between Kantorovich and his academic critics:

> ‘But what about the evident similarity between your “valuations” and the market prices of a capitalist economy?’ asked Boyarskii, who was sounding rather strained.

> ‘It’s true that there is a formal resemblance,’ said Leonid Vitalevich. ‘But they have a completely different origin, and therefore a completely different meaning. __Whereas market prices are formed spontaneously, objective valuations – shadow prices – must be computed on the basis of an optimal plan. As the plan targets change, the valuations change.__ They are subordinate to the very different production relationships of a socialist society. Yet, yet, __the scope for their use is actually bigger under socialism.__ The capitalists actually agree with you, Dr Boyarskii, that the mathematical methods we’re talking about should only be applied on the small scale, on the level of the individual firm. They have no choice: there is no larger structure, in the economy of West Germany or the United States, in which they can be set to work. They have had some success, I believe. I’m sorry to say that, since George Danzig and Tjalling Koopmans made their discoveries of “linear programming” in America during the war, the techniques have been adopted there far more eagerly, far more quickly, than in the Soviet Union. Linear programmers in the USA calculate routes for airlines, and devise the investment policies of Wall Street corporations. But we still have an opportunity before us which is closed to the capitalists. Capitalism cannot calculate an optimum for a whole economy at once. We can. There is a fundamental harmony between optimal planning and the nature of socialist society.

This seems much closer to what Donald Shoup is doing than the traditional liberal conception of the free market. The same might be said of various "market based" solutions to climate change, which begin by setting price on carbon or a limit on total carbon emissions and then allow the rights to emit to be traded. Once again, the plan targets come first and the prices come second.

There is a second line of argument against markets, however; that they are not merely anarchic and inefficient, but also induce ideological mystifications that perpetuate capitalism and exploitation. Bertell Ollman puts the point as follows in his [criticism of market socialism](http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/market_mystification.php):

> One major virtue of centrally planned societies, then, even undemocratic ones, even ones that don't work very well, is that __it is easy to see who is responsible for what goes wrong. It is those who made the plan. The same cannot be said of market economies which have as one of their main functions to befuddle the understanding of those who live in them.__ This is essential if people are to misdirect whatever frustration and anger they feel about the social and economic inequality, unemployment, idle machines and factories, ecological destruction, widespread corruption and exaggerated forms of greed that are the inevitable byproducts of market economies. But to the extent this is so, only a critique of market mystification will enable us to put the blame where it belongs, which is to say—on the capitalist market as such and the class that rules over it, in order to open people up to the need for creating a new way of organizing the production and distribution of social wealth.

This attack, too, fails to land a blow against the LA parking experiment. Despite the presence of price signals, and a market, it is no mystery who is responsible for the new regime of fluctuating meter prices: the city of Los Angeles, urged on by its academic homunculus Donald Shoup. Indeed, it is the very visibility of the planners that makes projects like this so controversial among those who take their right to free parking for granted, and who oppose policies like congestion pricing that would mitigate traffic by charging drivers for entering busy areas. This is also part of what makes cap-and-trade climate policy vulnerable to right-wing attack; whatever its "market based" costume, everyone knows that the policy begins with government lawmakers and bureaucrats.

Which is not to say that all opposition to these schemes is unfounded. There's a blind spot that characterizes many proponents of things like the re-pricing of parking, particularly those who we learned to call "left neo-liberals" this summer. It's captured in the second phrase I bolded in that first passage: "people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination." In just three words, "willing to pay", we have swept away the inequality of wealth and power that any attempt to turn market mechanisms toward planned ends must confront. Willingness to pay, of course, is also a function of *ability* to pay, and a market mechanism implicitly attributes worth to a person's desires in proportion to the money they have to spend.

Thoughtful neoclassical economists [know this](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-a-non-socratic-dialogue-on-social-welfare-functions.html), but they usually choose to ignore it, presumably because the consequences of confronting it would be too politically uncomfortable. Their own theories tell them that, due to the [decreasing marginal utility of money](http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2010/06/16/the-marginal-utility-of-money/), an extra dollar is worth more to the poor than to the rich. It follows that asking an extra dollar for parking hurts the well-being of the poor far more than the rich, and systematically privileges those who don't need to think twice about paying six dollars for a parking space. To which a good left neo-liberal would no doubt reply that the issues of rational pricing and wealth redistribution are logically distinct and should be thought separately. But politically, this means that redistribution is the lonely last instance that never comes.

All of which is enough to make a good progressive recoil from such a thing as "the market price for street parking". But this position is not nearly audacious enough. Rather than a rejection of market relations, this is merely a rejection of a novel form of planning, in favor of the older, more obscure, more unfair and more inefficient methods of planning the use of public space. We could say instead that what's needed is a direct assault on the inequalities of wealth and income that subvert the functioning of prices, and thereby impede the realization of the plan.

The lesser depression has called forth a profusion of new and old theories about what's wrong with the American economy, and what can be done to put it right. As you can see in Mike Konczal's topological maps, these accounts can be broadly separated into "demand" and "supply" side arguments. Within the supply side, there is a subdivision between arguments based on government-induced uncertainty (due to taxation, regulation, policy, or deficits) and those centered around labor productivity. Of these I regard the uncertainty argument as opportunistic rhetorical hand-waving, with no real principled rationale; the argument about labor productivity, however, has some real substance behind it.

Curiously, however, the labor-productivity side contains proponents of two antithetical views: one group argues that jobs and income have stagnated because labor productivity is growing too slowly, while others argue that technology has been changing too fast for the labor market to keep up. Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation, which I've discussed before, is an argument for the first proposition. A new book provides an argument for the second: Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. The e-book, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT, is a cheap and quick read (I call it a book, but it's really more like a very long article); it doesn't provide much detail that will be new to people who follow the topic, but it's a decent introduction to the effect of technology on the demand for labor. It's accessibly written without being too dumbed down, although it engages in some of the Gladwellese that seems to pervade recent pop-social science, such as the use of cutesy overriding metaphors (grains of rice on a chessboard, in this case). But while its account of the current economic landscape is useful, its ideas about where we should go from here are exceedingly lame.

Some liberals will probably react unfavorably to the book's whole thesis, because its emphasis on long-term technology and productivity issues threatens to distract attention from the more immediate problem, which is the tremendous shortfall in aggregate demand. The authors themselves are careful to say that they recognize the current demand problem, and that they do not believe that dealing with technological change should be a substitute for short-term measures to increase demand. Nevertheless, some commentators will no doubt be tempted to misuse the argument this way, as President Obama allegedly did when he used productivity-related claims to dismiss the need for additional stimulus.

But people on the left shouldn't let such foolishness scare them away from understanding changes in technology and labor productivity. Not only are such changes real and socially significant, but they present us with an opportunity to reorient the economic conversation in a more radical direction. To do so, however, we'll need to assimilate Brynjolfsson and McAfee's empirical argument, while rejecting their timid and depoliticized policy recommendations.

Technology and Employment

Race Against the Machine is organized around explaining the same empirical reality that confronts every would-be analyst of our economic woes: the stagnation of median incomes over the past three decades, long predating our current joblessness problem. As I noted recently, many of the underlying reasons for this stagnation are political, and this is something Brynjolfsson and McAfee don't discuss at all. But the fact that rising inequality and stagnating labor income have a political context doesn't mean they aren't also a function of technological changes: what we have seen in recent decades is a continuation of the disruptive and labor-displacing technical innovation that has always characterized capitalism, but without many of the countervailing protections that labor enjoyed in the heyday of the postwar Keynesian compromise. Brynjolfsson and McAfee do a good job of explaining the way labor markets play out under such conditions.

In contrast to Cowen, they argue that recent productivity growth has been quite good, and that published statistics are likely to under-state the increase in our social wealth. We're able to provide more goods and services with less and less human labor, which ought to make us materially richer as a society. The basic argument is similar to the one made by Farhad Manjoo in his recent series of articles on automation: computers and robots are rapidly permeating every part of the economy, displacing labor from high- and low-skill functions alike. Race Against the Machine gives many examples, from Google's self-driving cars to automation in Chinese electronics factories to software that can review legal documents. The problem, then, is not stagnation but uneven distribution: GDP per capita has continued to rise rapidly, but median incomes have stagnated, because the gains from growth are now going almost entirely to the very richest.

Three interrelated mechanisms are adduced to explain this lopsided growth: the advantaging of high-skill over low-skill labor, the rise of winner-take-all "superstar" markets, and the increasing returns to capital rather than labor. All three of these trends are facilitated and intensified by rapid technological advances--especially in computers and networks--that are making the skills of many workers obsolete while enriching the owners of capital and a few well-placed workers. Overall, this account of the relationship between technology and employment is the book's strength, particularly since it manages to avoid two common fallacies that beset such discussions, what I'll call the "end of work" fallacy and the "end of technology" fallacy.

The end of work fallacy, named for the title of a Jeremy Rifkin book, is the mistaken notion that if most of the labor currently performed by humans is replaced by machines, the result will inevitably be permanent mass unemployment at some point in the future. This is a fallacy for two reasons: first, because it ignores the possibility that we could all work less rather than leaving some unemployed, and second, because it assumes that human societies are somehow inherently limited in their ability to concoct new occupations for people to perform. While they ignore the first possibility, Brynjolfsson and McAfee do correctly point out that there is no reason to believe the second; just as we found new jobs for all the people displaced from working in agriculture a century ago, capitalism is no doubt capable of generating novel occupations for those whose jobs are automated in the 21st century (if all else fails, perhaps we can all become the personal servants of the top 1 percent). They frame this as an optimistic vision of our economic future, but I would interpret it somewhat differently: the gradual disappearance of work may not be inevitable, but it is also not something to fear: rather, it poses a major political and cultural choice for human societies centered around the institution of wage labor; I return to this point below.

Arrayed against the end of work fallacy, one often finds the end of technology fallacy, which insists that there is some obvious limit to just what can be automated. I guess this isn't so much a fallacy as a failure of imagination: as Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out, such pronouncements can look silly within a remarkably short time. As one example, they cite a 2004 book that confidently asserts the impossibility of something like the self-driving Google car. Today, the jobs most resistant to automation seem to be those that require finer-grained types of manual skill, as robots remain crude and awkward when they attempt to manipulate the physical environment. But while it is certainly possible that some kinds of automation will never be attained, it's dangerous to base one's economic analysis or one's politics on that belief.

While I find Race Against the Machine's argument about automation generally persuasive, the general theory of socio-technical development that the authors rely on is somewhat questionable. Citing Moore's law and the futurist Ray Kurzweil, Brynjolfsson and McAfee portray technological development as a process that starts off slowly but then relentlessly accelerates "into the phase where exponential growth yields jaw-dropping results". But this is a misleading picture of the history of technology. As Charles Stross has extensively argued, (and as I've written about previously), the path of progress within particular technological domains looks less like exponential growth than like a sigmoid curve, in which a middle period of rapid and seemingly exponential growth transitions into a mature plateau of slow progress. It's tempting, when you're in the rapid-acceleration phase of the curve, to extrapolate it forward exponentially--but this can lead to extremely misleading predictions. Mid-twentieth century futurists extrapolated the rapid improvements in transportation that they had lived through, and ended up imagining a future with flying cars but not the Internet; anyone who tries to imagine our future without accounting for unexpected and disruptive innovations is likely to be proven wrong as well.

The book's central claim nevertheless holds up without the dubious assumption of exponential growth. As the authors point out, we are in many ways in the early stages of adopting and integrating the technologies we already have into the economy, and so we can expect much more technological displacement of labor even if Moore's law slows down. And even if computer processing speed plateaus, some other area, such as biotechnology, will eventually enter the rapid-growth segment of its own sigmoid curve. Hence I generally accept the argument that rapid automation and technological unemployment will be a reality for the foreseeable future, and our societies need to find a way to deal with it.

The Future of Work

But it's in the recommendations for adapting to technological change that this book really falls short. The program for winning the future, it turns out, consists of encouraging entrepreneurship and improving education. The former, the authors say, will allow us to discover a bounty of new ways of employing people, through the magic of Hayekian tacit knowledge and Schumpeterian creative destruction. And an improved education system will ensure that the general population has the necessary human capital to participate in this magical new economy. This is a remarkably thin vision, redolent of the kind of popular techno-libertarianism that flourished at the height of the dot-com bubble, and it's no more compelling now than it was then. Brynjolfsson and McAfee write that "the stagnation of median wages and polarization of job growth is an opportunity for creative entrepreneurs", who can "combine the swelling numbers of mid-skilled workers with ever-cheaper technology to create value". Aside from the moral gruesomeness of this entrepreneurial paradise built on immiserated and precarious labor, where is the demand supposed to come from to realize all this "value"? This sounds like a recipe for re-creating the bubble economy of the last few decades, where most economic rewards go to capital and the working class props up its buying power with debt.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee do offer a more specific 19-point policy agenda. Some of the proposals are good ideas: reducing government support of the financial industry, decoupling social benefits from employment, scaling back copyright protections, increasing government funding for infrastructure and basic research, eliminating the home mortgage interest tax deduction, increasing high-skill immigration. But much of the rest is the usual grab-bag of neoliberal market idolatry: cut back workplace regulation, reduce taxes, make it easier to fire workers. The section on education, in particular, is just a rehash of the usual education reform arguments: less job security for teachers, longer hours, and more testing (though to be fair, they do at least call for higher teacher pay).

In the end, Brynjolfsson and McAfee don't even try that hard to make the case that their agenda will actually employ everyone or reverse rising inequality and stagnant incomes--they admit that "not everyone can or should be an entrepreneur, and not everyone can or should spend 16 or more years in school". But they casually dismiss the one thing that indisputably would address the unequal rewards of the contemporary economy: direct redistribution of income. "While redistribution ameliorates the material costs of inequality", they say in their one mention of the possibility, "it doesn't address the root of the problems our economy is facing" and "does nothing to make unemployed workers productive again". There's an implicit belief here that distributional outcomes somehow aren't "real" unless they are the result of the private labor market operating in the absence of government transfers. This denigrates the robustness of redistribution as a program: European social democracy, for all its shortcomings, has shown that it's possible to create an enduring system in which highly unequal market outcomes are ameliorated by government taxes, transfers, and social programs. That's one reason I'm partly sympathetic to the model of "globalize-grow-give" progressivism, which focuses on remediating inequality through redistribution rather than tight regulation of the labor market: leaving the labor market as it is and then doing lots of redistribution on the back end may not be ideal, but it would be a lot better than what we have now.

But if technology really is dramatically reducing the need for human labor, then we have an opportunity to think bigger and better, getting beyond merely trying to scrape up new skills and new jobs for the displaced proletariat. If you're a regular reader, you know where I'm going with this by now; as somebody said of one of my earlier renditions on this theme, "we get it--Peter Frase hates work". Totally missing from Race Against the Machine is any consideration that we might take some of our productivity gains in the form of free time rather than income. Nowhere do the authors even contemplate reducing the length of the work week and work year, or accepting a lower labor-force participation rate. Thus, despite constantly reminding us of all the ways in which technology has improved our standard of living and transformed society, Brynjolfsson and McAfee never question the centrality of wage labor in its current form: they never consider that there is any alternative to a society in which everyone expects, and is expected, to spend the bulk of their life as a 40 (or more) hour per week wage laborer, or as a profit-maximizing "entrepreneur".

Mostly, the immortality of capitalism is just an implicit assumption. But to the extent that this book contains a defense of the wage labor society, it is this: "the value of gainful work is far more than the money earned", and "forced idleness is not the same as voluntary leisure". Both are true, and both are reasons why in the short term, a federal jobs program is a good demand--and one that's more likely to revive the economy than any amount of education reform or entrepreneurialism. But the question that Race Against the Machine raises is explicitly not about the short term aggregate demand problem, to which some package of monetary and fiscal stimulus could be an adequate solution. If we ever escape from the nightmare of self-inflicted disinflationary contraction, we will essentially be back where we started before the financial crisis--and we will still have to come to terms with the constantly changing balance of labor between human and machine, and what it means for the future of work.

We live in a society in which a huge amount of a person's status and sense of self-worth is tied up in what they do for money. And the stigma of joblessness, combined with the stresses of job-hunting and dealing with the meager American welfare state, make unemployment a physically, psychologically, and emotionally damaging ordeal. But these aren't inherent features of the human condition; as another analyst of productivity-enhancing technology said:

Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

"We clearly are not pessimists about technology and its impacts", write Brynjolfsson and McAfee. They add that they considered calling their book "The Digital Frontier, since the image that keeps occurring to us is one of a huge amount of new territory opening up because of technological improvement and innovation". As it happens, I'm not a pessimist either, and I think the Digital Frontier is a wilder place than our intrepid economists imagine. Out there you'll find the advocates of work time reduction and guaranteed income and plenitude, and many others working to build the realm of freedom and abundance rather than keep capitalism's engine of artificial necessity and scarcity chugging along. The defenders of the current order will keep trying to convince us that in a technologically advanced world of material plenty, more capitalism is still the solution to all our problems; but perhaps it is capitalism itself that is holding us back, and maybe it's time for that integument to burst asunder.

Peter Orszag has a [column](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-19/kaldor-s-facts-fall-occupy-wall-street-rises-commentary-by-peter-orszag.html) about the diminishing share of labor in national income, relative to capital. Mike Konczal provides some useful [additional discussion](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/labor-share-long-term-trends-and-financial-crises/). Both of them frame the issue as a new empirical mystery, because it contradicts a "stylized fact" that economists have long assumed about capitalist economies: that the relative share of labor and capital in national income remains constant over time.

I try to avoid the characteristic sociologist's vice of economics-bashing, but this does rather strike me as a case where economists are betraying their insularity by purporting to discover something that other social scientists are already talking about. Mike quotes (the generally excellent) Arjun Jayadev musing that "A more comprehensive account should really take a look at the politics of this shift and there is some evidence for the contention that an eroded bargaining power of labor is an important factor." As it turns out, someone has looked at "the politics", although they're not an economist. Last year, the *American Sociological Review* published a paper called "Good Times, Bad Times: Postwar Labor's Share of National Income in Capitalist Democracies" by Tali Kristal of the University of Haifa, which bears directly on this issue. (An un-gated version is [here](http://gesd.free.fr/kristal10.pdf).)

One of the tricky things about explaining long-term economic trends is that we don't have access to the counterfactual: what would the U.S. economy look like if, say, we still had 1950's levels of unionization? As a next-best solution, though, we can contextualize the United States by comparing it to other rich countries. The global economy is characterized, as Trotsky put it, by "combined and uneven development": while the declining share of labor income is a cross-national phenomenon, it has not been experienced or responded to in exactly the same way everywhere. Kristal's paper compares the U.S. to 15 other countries in the period since 1960, in an attempt to identify some of the factors behind labor's declining income share.

Even if you don't want to wade through the text, I highly recommend giving it at least a "quant-jock read"--that is, have a look through the charts and tables. I'll try to summarize the main argument and findings of the paper here. Kristal shows that Labor's share of income has risen and fallen over the past century, "stylized facts" notwithstanding. In the United States and and the UK, much of the increase in labor's share took place before and immediately after World War II; there was a substantial postwar increase in continental Europe, the Nordic countries, Australia, and Japan. Since 1980, labor's share has generally declined everywhere. But the scope and timing of this decline differs across countries, indicating that the relative position of capital and labor is related to the economic and political particularities of the countries.

The assumption that labor's share of income is constant implies that gains in national income due to increasing productivity are always shared equally by labor and capital. Kristal shows that this is not the case: in the 1960's and 1970's, labor income grew as fast as or even faster than productivity, whereas since 1980 labor income has lagged far behind. In other words, this pattern is valid cross-nationally:


Kristal makes the interesting point that this dynamic isn't necessarily related to the much more studied phenomenon of rising income inequality. Income inequality could increase if one group of workers captured most of the wage gains, which would keep the overall labor share of income constant. And as Kristal wryly notes, studies of income inequality "tend to identify the capitalist class as
a subset of the self-employed."

In attempting to explain the changing fortunes of labor, economists are generally inclined to reach for explanations rooted in the market rather than the political sphere. Thus, as Kristal explains, the two leading explanations for the declining labor share of income have been technology (i.e., the adoption of labor-saving production techniques) and worker bargaining power (declining unionization, competition from abroad). But workers can alter their share of income by political means that go beyond the immediate power of unions in wage bargaining. When social democratic parties are in power, they can shift income shares by shielding workers from market forces, expanding public employment, and regulating the workplace, as well as by taking steps to strengthen labor unions.

Kristal attempts to capture these dynamics with a regression-based analysis, in which labor's income share in a given year is predicted based on both economic and political variables. Changes in productivity, inflation, unemployment, union power, the strength of left parties in government, and several measures of economic globalization are all combined in the model. To quote from Kristal's conclusion:

> __Labor’s share of national income increased in the 1960s and 1970s due to unions organizing new members, the surge in strike activity, and the consolidation of the welfare state.__ These factors all increased labor’s compensation faster than the economy’s income. __Labor’s share declined since the early 1980s with the decline in unionization rates and levels of strike activity, stagnation in government civilian spending, and bargaining decentralization. Labor’s capacity to influence state policies has also declined across countries, and governments’ targets of full employment have been abandoned in favor of labor market flexibility and low inflation.__ The current decline in labor’s share of the national income can also be traced to an increase in imports from developing countries and the increased presence of foreign affiliates of multinational firms.

Technology, meanwhile, looks like it is not an independent source of labor's diminishing share. That is, while increasing productivity is associated with a lower labor share of income, this association has *always* been present, even in the earlier periods when productivity growth and income growth matched up in the aggregate. What has changed is the countervailing political factors that used to ensure that a share of economic growth was paid out to workers.

You can question some of the particulars of the modelling that leads to this conclusion, and in general it's hard to disentangle the causal relations in this kind of bird's eye view quantitative analysis. But as an overall correlational picture of what's happened to labor in the past 50 years, I think there's a lot in this analysis that people can learn from--maybe even economists.

Via [Yglesias](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/28/330662/productivity-increase/), I find to my dismay that some alleged progressives at [Lawyers, Guns, and Money](http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/) are exulting in the failure of supermarkets to replace human checkers with automatic checking machines. Like Yglesias, I don't think bemoaning automation in this way is helpful. He gives the empirical argument that slow productivity growth hasn't historically been good for workers, and that too-low wages are probably one of the things impeding the adoption of productivity-enhancing technology. The second is an argument that I [made before](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/cheap-labor-and-the-great-stagnation/), specifically using the supermarket checkout machine as an example. But now I want to make a broader ideological point about this.

These two posts, the one from [Erik Loomis](http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/09/on-self-checkout-at-supermarkets) and especially the follow up by ["DJW"](http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/09/two-cheers-for-luddism), contain two distinct arguments for the anti-machine position. To take the second and less compelling one first, there's the claim that maybe being a supermarket checker isn't so alienating and menial after all:

> Secondly, this line of thinking makes some assumptions that I’m sympathetic to, but can’t entirely get on board with. First, __the assumption that we can theorize about jobs in this concrete and certain way and determine that supermarket checker (and I assume many much worse jobs) are ‘menial’ and we should hope for a world in which humans don’t do that sort of thing.__ I like my early Marx, too, but I can’t get on board with this. I simply don’t think we have the tools to do this kind of universal theorizing about the essential nature and value of this or that job. __People have long found meaning and dignity in all manner of repetitive and uncreative work.__ Others have approached the world of work with indifference; they work to pay the bills and finding meaning and value in other aspects of their lives. Marx, of course, chalked this sort of thing up to alienation and false consciousness and the like, but I’m more of pluralist about what a dignified and fully human life looks like. At a minimum, __I don’t have all the answers, and have a healthy distrust of letting my own tastes and proclivities get in the way of respecting other’s ability to determine what they value about their lives on their own terms.__

This is reminiscent of my exchange with [Reihan Salam](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/to-be-a-productive-labourer-is-not-a-piece-of-luck-but-a-misfortune/) from a couple of months ago, and I don't find this argument any more compelling from the left than I did from the right. I'll just note that by framing the issue in this way, DJW totally effaces the real nature of work in a capitalist society. To pretend that the existence of many people who work as supermarket checkers reflects their "ability to determine what they value about their lives on their own terms" is to ignore the reality that for the worker without independent wealth, the only "choice" is between obtaining the wage they need to get by, or starving in the streets. You don't see a lot of trust-fund kids or lottery winners working as supermarket checkers.

Moreover, there's no principled rationale here. If the menial jobs we have are good, then why wouldn't more would be better? we could solve the jobs deficit through a campaign against technology throughout the economy. This would also have the effect of lowering our material standard of living, but to this way of thinking that's presumably a good thing.

I doubt the LGM bloggers really endorse such a program, though. As I said, I don't think the argument is based on an ideological principle at all; rather, it's the result of a pragmatic calculation:

> First, let’s be clear that __this is some deeply utopian stuff.__ This makes third party advocates seem downright practical. We’ve had a modern capitalist economy for quite some time now, in many different countries, and I can’t think of any that have come anywhere close to this, or made it a meaningful priority. Of course __some unpleasant and meaningful jobs have been largely eliminated, and more probably will be in the future, but when this does occur it is almost always with indifference or actual malice toward the eliminated worker__, rather than compassion. And while the overall mix of jobs in a society may improve for the better over time, __it’s virtually never the case that workers in eliminated fields end up better off. If the elimination takes place in a moment of robust employment they may be OK, but for the most part those who lose the jobs are going to be worse off for a good long while.__ Even in the most robust and humane welfare states the modern world has developed, unemployment is generally associated with a decline in living standards, sense of self-worth, and so on.

Leave aside for a moment that this argument sort of implies that no-one should ever lose their job, which is inconsistent with the assumption of a capitalist economy; I'm willing to chalk that up to a sloppy formulation. The general principle being expressed here isn't unreasonable or irrational: sometimes it's better to help a few workers here and now than to run off after utopian pie in the sky, and we should be wary of the slippery logic that it's OK to impose hardship on a few workers for the sake of the greater good. This is the same thinking that's at work in defenses of [licensing cartels](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/19/273414/the-distributional-impact-of-barber-licensing/) that protect some workers at the expense of consumers and excluded laborers, and in attacks on investments in urban infrastructure that [may have the effect](http://current.com/green/92560577_david-harveys-urban-manifesto-down-with-suburbia-down-with-bloombergs-new-york-fast-company.htm) of pricing some people out of their neighborhoods. These aren't silly things to be worried about--if you can't achieve anything positive, you should at least do no harm. And as the left has gotten weaker and weaker, such arguments have gotten more and more plausible. But we've reached a point where some people seem to be opposed to any policy at all that imposes a burden on any group of workers.

It's an attitude that bespeaks an intensely conservative and defensive politics, and one which has internalized the great right-wing motif of the past several decades: there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. To Loomis and DJW, the possibility of a historically novel progressive alternative is literally unthinkable. For them, the only choices are a) an intensification of neoliberalism's logic of inequality and joblessness; or b) a desperate struggle to hold on to the remnants of the 20th century Keynesian social compromise. Given those options, I'd take the second choice as well.

But I don't think those are the only options, and moreover I don't think that in the long run this position is really as pragmatic as it seems. It commits the left to an endlessly reactive, defensive struggle over a shrinking commons, while leaving us bereft of any compelling vision to offer people. And trying to fight off automation won't be a matter of a few rear-guard skirmishes, but of all-out societal-scale war: see Farhad Manjoo's [ongoing series](http://www.slate.com/id/2304442) on the pervasive effect of robotization throughout all sectors of the economy.

That isn't to say that I'm always opposed to defensive struggles--sometimes that's the best you can do, and sometimes winning a small human-scale victory is worth compromising our broader vision a bit. But the LGM authors go a good deal farther than this: Erik Loomis's original post didn't say that de-automation was a good second best outcome, he said that he was "very glad" to see the self-checkout machines disappear, because they are "a calculated plan by grocery stores to employ less people." DJW, meanwhile, straightforwardly embraces Luddism. I'm taken aback by a worldview that would make such defensiveness and conservatism central to its ideology. That's not what the left has been about at its best--and as Corey Robin [explains](http://coreyrobin.com/2011/09/27/revolutionaries-of-the-right-the-deep-roots-of-conservative-radicalism/), it's not even what right-wing "conservatism" was ever about.

Left out of consideration in these anti-technology arguments is any conception that increased productivity could be used to benefit the masses rather than the elite. The decoupling of rising productivity from rising fortunes for workers is, after all, only [a phenomenon of the past 30 years](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/epi-on-lagging-wages-rising-productivity/). In the period prior to that, rising productivity went with rising wages: this was the heart of the postwar Keynesian social compact. And in the period prior to *that*, rising productivity went along with a shortening of the working day, through a long series of [bitter struggles](http://books.google.com/books/about/Our_own_time.html?id=h8P-uuyYe_YC). It's odd, and a bit sad, to see the LGM bloggers ahistorically naturalizing the left's weakness, especially given that at least one of the authors I'm discussing is [a college professor](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11112580/loomiscv--lgm.doc). I thought it was the professors who were supposed remind us of history, and to cling to impractical utopianism. But to find an antidote to the timid conservatism of the professor, we have to turn to the harebrained utopian dreaming of....dockworkers.

Containerization and automation have drastically decreased the need for human labor in America's ports, as anyone who's watched Season 2 of *The Wire* knows. But among some longeshoreman the response wasn't to resist the machines, but to accept them--[with conditions](http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/weekinreview/the-nation-the-100000-longshoreman-a-union-wins-the-global-game.html):

> In modern times, far more than other unions, the longshoreman have used technological change to their advantage. In 1960, the West Coast longshoremen agreed to far-reaching automation that replaced inefficient break-bulk cargo, which relied on hooks to move the cargo, with containerized cargo, which relies on cranes. __In accepting automation, the union recognized that productivity would soar and the number of longshoremen needed would plunge__; there are now 10,500 West Coast longshoremen, down from 100,000 in the 1950's.

> In exchange, __the union received an unusual promise: port operators pledged to share the fruits of the new automation. Management promised all longshoremen a guaranteed level of pay, even if there was not work for everyone.__ Management also promised to share the wealth.

Bill DiFazio [wrote a book](http://books.google.com/books/about/Longshoremen.html?id=33aaAAAAIAAJ) about some longshoremen like this in New York, and he makes a case against the view that without wage labor, our lives will lose meanings and we will drift into dissipation. He found instead that the lives of the longshoremen were greatly enriched, as they were freed from dangerous labor and became more deeply involved with their neighborhoods and their families.

Basically, I think this is the deal we need to strike throughout the economy: automation (and relatedly, free trade) in exchange for compensating the displaced. However, the longshoremen were only able to achieve this victory because they occupy an unusual strategic choke-point in the economy. Shutting down the ports can cripple wide swaths of business, and this gives dockworkers a kind of negotiating leverage that isn't available to, say, supermarket checkers. Which is why I think that the demand to compensate workers for technological change now has to be fought out politically and electorally, at the level of the state, rather than in the individual workplace. That's the essence of my argument for the [Basic Income](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/09/the-basic-income-and-the-helicopter-drop/): just like the dockworkers' agreement, it ensures a level of pay whether or not there is work for everyone, only it generalizes the principle to encompass the whole economy.

You can dismiss that as utopianism if you like. Certainly the call for work reduction and the decoupling of income from employment has been made many times through the generations, from [Paul LaFargue](http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/) to [André Gorz](http://books.google.com/books/about/Paths_to_paradise.html?id=5wTsAAAAMAAJ) to [Stanley Aronowitz](http://www.amazon.com/Jobless-Future-Second-Stanley-Aronowitz/dp/0816674515). But the left does itself no favors by remaining in a defensive crouch, clinging to nostalgia for a political order that was rooted in a very different political economy--and which wasn't even [all that great](http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Age-Illusion-Rethinking-Capitalism/dp/0898625734) to begin with. Despite what William F. Buckley once said, the right didn't win by "standing athwart history yelling 'stop!'"--and on issues where they *did* do that, like racial segregation and gay marriage, they have lost or are losing. The modern right provided an offensive strategy and a grand vision of what was wrong with the society that existed and what had to be done to turn it into something better: [one market under god](http://www.amazon.com/One-Market-Under-God-Capitalism/dp/038549503X).

Their dream of unrestrained capitalism, of course, turned out to be a nightmarish fraud. But that's all the more reason to demand something new and better, rather than merely clinging to what's left of the old.

Today, of course, isn't the real [labor day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers_Day), merely a fake American version with origins in the machinations of [anti-labor politicians](http://curiousnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/09/origins-of-labor-day.html).

Still, we can celebrate any day that's a holiday. It may be true, as [this *New York Times* op-ed says](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/do-happier-people-work-harder.html?ref=opinion), that "Labor Day is meant to be a celebration of work". But as the same article goes on to say:

> The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has been polling over 1,000 adults every day since January 2008, shows that Americans now feel worse about their jobs — and work environments — than ever before. People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do. And there’s no reason to think things will soon improve.

Rather than celebrate work, I'd prefer to celebrate *workers*. And the best way to truly pay respect to the workers of the world is not to glorify the [misfortune of labor](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/03/undercover-boss-and-the-misfortune-of-labor/), but to celebrate those temporary moments of freedom from wage labor that the workers' movement has managed to win.

Here are a couple of relevant passages on that theme. [Via](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=1473) Malcolm Harris, I was recently reminded of [this passage](http://operaismoinenglish.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/struggle-against-labor/) from Mario Tronti that makes that's still relevant after nearly 50 years:

> The contemporary forms of workers’ struggles in the heartlands of advanced capitalism unmistakably reveal, in the rich content of their own spontaneity, the slogan of __the struggle against wage labor as the only possible means of striking real blows against capital.__ The party must be the organization of what already exists within the class, but which the class alone cannot succeed in organizing. No worker today is disposed to recognize the existence of labor outside capital. __Labor equals exploitation: This is the logical prerequisite and historical result of capitalist civilization.__ From here there is no point of return. __Workers have no time for the dignity of labor. The “pride of the producer” they leave entirely to the boss.__ Indeed, only the boss now remains to declaim eulogies in praise of labor. True, in the organized working-class movement this traditional chord is, unfortunately, still to be heard – but not in the working class itself; here there is no longer any room for ideology. Today, the working class need only look at itself to understand capital. It need only combat itself in order to destroy capital. It has to recognize itself as political power, deny itself as a productive force. For proof, we need only look at the moment of struggle itself: During the strike, the "producer" is immediately identified with the class enemy. The working class confronts its own labor as capital, as a hostile force, as an enemy – this is the point of departure not only for the antagonism, but for the organization of the antagonism.

> __If the alienation of the worker has any meaning, it is a highly revolutionary one. The organization of alienation: This is the only possible direction in which the party can lead the spontaneity of the class.__ The goal remains that of refusal, at a higher level: It becomes active and collective, a political refusal on a mass scale, organized and planned. Hence, the immediate task of working-class organization is to overcome passivity.

And then there's this, from André Gorz's misunderstood classic [*Farewell to the Working Class*](http://books.google.com/books?id=7wxpl7sYYCYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gorz+farewell+working+class&hl=en&ei=Nb5jTpqyF6rv0gG1heGKCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false):

> For workers, it is no longer a question of freeing themselves within work, putting themselves in control of work, or seizing power within the framework of their work. The point now is to free oneself from work by rejecting its nature, content, necessity and modalities. But to reject work is also to reject the traditional strategy and organisational forms of the working-class movement. It is no longer a question of winning power as a worker but of winning the power no longer to function as a worker. The power at issue is not at all the same as before. The class itself has entered into crisis.

So enjoy the beer and barbecues folks, and revel in your power not to function as a worker.

Here's something timely for Labor Day: a couple of my colleagues at CUNY have produced a report on the state of union membership--focused on New York State and City, but with national numbers included as well. (I did some work on the report as well, but my role was limited to designing the layout, so I can take no credit for the writing or data analysis.)

The broad findings will not be surprising to those who follow these things: the percentage of workers who are members of labor unions has fallen at a fairly rapid pace in the past ten years, and has continued to fall during the recession. This trend is driven primarily by the decline in private sector unionization--union density in the public sector is both much higher and fairly stable over the past decade.

There are lots of other interesting details in the report, which includes breakdowns by age, gender, race, education, industry, and immigration status. You should [go read the whole thing](http://www.urbanresearch.org/news/second-annual-state-of-the-unions-report-released-in-commemoration-of-2011-labor-day), but here a few semi-randomly chosen facts that I found interesting:

- People with at least a 4-year college degree are the most likely to be union members.
- This is probably because the sector of the economy with by far the highest unionization rates is education, which is also one of the biggest sectors. It's not surprising to see teachers bearing the brunt of anti-union attacks, when you realize what a huge portion of American union members they constitute.
- In the U.S. as a whole, men are more likely to be union members than women. In New York City, though, women are actually more unionized--largely because they tend to work in the highly-unionized public sector. Women are the future of the labor movement, if it is to have one.
- Blacks and whites are unionized at roughly equal rates nationwide, but blacks are much more highly unionized in New York, again probably because blacks are more likely to work in the public sector.
- It's true, as you might expect, that immigrant workers are less likely to be unionized than native born workers. But that's really just a small subplot of the broader story of declining unionization: workers who immigrated recently are much less unionized than those who immigrated earlier, just as young workers are much less unionized than older workers; people who immigrated before 1990 are unionized at a higher rate than native-born workers.

For more analysis, and lots of graphs and tables, go [check out the report](http://www.urbanresearch.org/news/second-annual-state-of-the-unions-report-released-in-commemoration-of-2011-labor-day).

These facts about unions bear on some of the recent [discussions](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/policy-politics-and-strategy/) of [theories of politics](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/19/20991/) and the political basis of progressive politics under neoliberalism. Leftists and liberals still don't really have a credible strategy for building a winning progressive coalition that isn't centered on the labor movement. The decline in union density, and the transformation of the labor movement from a private sector to a public sector institution, force us to ask some hard questions. Either the labor movement has to be revived, or we need a new institutional basis for the left. I tend to be pessimistic about reviving labor in anything like its traditional form, since we really only have one historical example of sustained union strength, and that was based on an industrial economy that [isn't coming back](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/04/the-united-states-makes-things/).

But there are obviously a lot of things that would help labor to recover at least a bit (EFCA, sigh). I'll close with one thing that's based on a personal observation, from on my experience as a member of a union bargaining committee that recently [negotiated a first contract](http://psc-cuny.org/new-union-contract-cuny-research-foundation-workers). I'm convinced that severing the connection between health care and employment would be really good for unions, despite the labor movement's opposition to [some of the moves](http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/15/nation/la-na-health-congress15-2010jan15) in this direction. A huge amount of our negotiating time was taken up with a fight over how the cost of health insurance would be divided between employer and employee, in the context of premiums that are accelerating rapidly for reasons neither workers nor bosses can control. The need to hold down our members' health care costs sucked up a huge amount of bargaining time and money that could otherwise have gone to providing raises or addressing other aspects of the work environment. If there were a real, quality public option for health care, I would have considered trying to sell my fellow members on a radical idea: let's propose phasing out employer-provided insurance, getting people onto public plans, and putting those employer savings into big wage increases. But for now, that's just a dream for the future, and instead the best I can tell those members is that we successfully fought for their health care costs to skyrocket less rapidly than their non-union counterparts.

Jared Bernstein [recently posted](http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/miles-to-go-before-we-sleep/) the graph of U.S. Vehicle Miles Traveled released by the Federal Highway Administration. Bernstein notes that normally, recessions and unemployment don't affect our driving habits very much--until the recent recession, miles traveled just kept going up. That has changed in recent years, as VMT still hasn't gotten back to the pre-recession peak. Bernstein:

> What you see in __the current period is a quite different—a massive decline in driving over the downturn with little uptick since.__ Again, both high unemployment and high [gas] prices are in play here, so there may be a bounce back out there once the economy gets back on track. But it bears watching—__there may be a new behavioral response in play, with people's driving habits a lot more responsive to these economic changes than they used to be.__

> Ok, but what's the big deal? Well, I've generally been skeptical of arguments about "the new normal," thinking that __much of what we're going through is cyclical__, not structural, meaning things pretty much revert back to the old normal once we're growing in earnest again. __But it's worth tracking signals like this that remind one that at some point, if it goes on long enough, cyclical morphs into structural.__

Brad Plumer [elaborates](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-are-americans-driving-less/2011/08/18/gIQAUv7tNJ_blog.html):

> __What could explain this cultural shift? Maybe more young people are worried about the price of gas or the environment.__ But—and this is just a theory—technology could play a role, too. Once upon a time, newly licensed teens would pile all their friends into their new car and drive around aimlessly. For young suburban Americans, it was practically a rite of passage. Nowadays, however, __teens can socialize via Facebook or texting__ instead—in the Zipcar survey, more than half of all young adults said they'd rather chat online than drive to meet their friends.

> But that's all just speculation at this point. As Bernstein says, __it's still unclear whether the decline in driving is a structural change or just a cyclical shift that will disappear once (if) the U.S. economy starts growing again.__

Is it really plausible to posit this kind of cultural shift, particularly given the evidence about the [price elasticity of oil](http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/04/raw-data-everyone-loves-oil)? As it happens, I did a bit of analysis on this point a couple of years ago. Back then, Nate Silver wrote a [column](http://www.esquire.com/features/data/nate-silver-car-culture-stats-0609) in which he tried to use a regression model to address this question of whether the decline in driving was a response to economic factors or an indication of a cultural trend. Silver argued that economic factors--in his model, unemployment and gas prices--couldn't completely explain the decline in driving. If true, that result would support the "cultural shift" argument against the "cyclical downturn" argument.

I wrote a [series](http://www.peterfrase.com/2009/05/attempt-to-regress/) [of](http://www.peterfrase.com/2009/05/predictin/) [posts](http://www.peterfrase.com/2009/05/one-last-time/) in which I argued that with a more complete model--including wealth and the lagged effect of gas prices--the discrepancies in Silver's model seemed to disappear. That suggests that we don't need to hypothesize any cultural change to explain the decline in driving. You can go to those older posts for the gory methodological details; in this post, I'm just going to post an updated version of one of my old graphs:

The blue line is the 12-month moving average of Vehicle Miles Travelled--the same thing Bernstein posted. The green and red lines are 12-month moving averages of *predicted* VMT from two different regression models--the Nate Silver model and my expanded model, as described in the earlier post I linked. The underlying models haven't changed since my earlier version of this graph, except that I updated the data to include the most recent information, and switched to the 10-city Case Shiller average for my house price measure, rather than the OFHEO House Price Index that I was using before, but which seems to be an [inferior measure](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2008/01/house-prices-comparing-ofheo-vs-case.html).

The basic conclusion I draw here is the same as it was before: a complete set of economic covariates does a pretty good job of predicting miles traveled. In fact, even Nate Silver's simple "gas prices and unemployment" model does fine for recent months, although it greatly overpredicts during the depths of the recession.\* So I don't see any cultural shift away from driving here--much as I would like to, since I personally hate to drive and I wish America wasn't built around car ownership. Instead, the story seems to be that Americans, collectively, have experienced an unprecedented combination of lost wealth, lost income, and high gas prices. That's consistent with graphs like [these](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/18/271412/the-consumer-bust-and-the-inevitability-of-politics/), which look a lot like the VMT graph.

The larger point here is that we can't count on shifts in individual preferences to get us away from car culture. The entire built environment of the United States is designed around the car--sprawling suburbs, massive highways, meager public transit, and so on. A lot of people can't afford to live in walkable, bikeable, or transit-accessible places even if they want to. Changing that is going to require a long-term change in government priorities, not just a cultural shift.

Below are the coefficients for my model. The data is [here](http://www.peterfrase.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/silver_driving_2011.csv), and the code to generate the models and graph is [here](http://www.peterfrase.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/silver_driving_2011.R.txt).

Coef. s.e.

(Intercept) 111.55 2.09

unemp -1.57 0.27

gasprice -0.08 0.01

gasprice_lag12 -0.03 0.01

date 0.01 0.00

stocks 0.58 0.23

housing 0.10 0.01

monthAugust 17.52 1.01

monthDecember -9.21 1.02

monthFebruary -31.83 1.03

monthJanuary -22.90 1.02

monthJuly 17.84 1.02

monthJune 11.31 1.03

monthMarch -0.09 1.03

monthMay 12.08 1.02

monthNovember -10.46 1.01

monthOctober 5.82 1.01

monthSeptember -2.73 1.01

---

n = 234, k = 18

residual sd = 3.16, R-Squared = 0.99

\* *That's important, since you could otherwise argue that the housing variable in my model--which has seen an unprecedented drop in recent years--is actually proxying a cultural change. I doubt that for other reasons, though. If housing is removed from the model, it underpredicts VMT during the runup of the bubble, just as Silver's model does. That suggests that there is some real wealth effect of house prices on driving.*