An Ill and Gilded Wind

I was on my way back from picking up groceries when it caught my eye.

It was a golden car, a little stumpy and awkwardly proportioned, as if an otherwise sleek sedan had been compressed front to back.  The golden wheel covers gave it a cartoonish appearance, as if the wheels were wildly outsided.   As I sat stopped at a traffic light, this peculiar car crossed in front of me, turning left.  The driver, a young casually dressed Black man, was sitting in the driver's seat, looking down at a tablet.  Not once did he bother to look up.

His inattention to his driving didn't matter or alarm me, because I recognized the car.  It was a self-driving Cybercab, the latest product from Tesla.  They're being beta-tested now in a number of metropolitan areas, and might be on our streets by next year.  The final version will lack a couple of things we generally expect in a car:  1) A steering wheel and 2) Pedals.  They'll be hailable through a Tesla Robotaxi app, which will send a robot car to your house to drive you wherever you wish to go.  Or perhaps they'll just be your car, given that the regulatory environment now is a little spotty.

Full Self Driving is actually fairly sophisticated, and given the startling incompetence of many human drivers, I'm not quite as alarmed about the prospect of machine mind driver safety as some.  With that said, the reason I love driving is the act of driving, and the idea of cars that require no meaningful engagement or input from me just feels drab and joyless.  Yay.  More time to stare at our phones.

More on my mind is this: there are roughly two million Americans who rely on ridesharing or taxi-driving for their livelihoods.  Tesla's stated goal is to produce two million of these gleaming bot-taxis every single year, doing to ride sharing what ride sharing did to cab-driving.

Back in the day, I drove a Falls Church Yellow Cab for a while, having gone through the relatively demanding process of getting my golden Fairfax county "hacker's" license.  Note:  this was before GPS, before cell phones, back when you found your way to pick up a fare by reading a map.  Was it the best job ever?  It was not.  But it paid the bills for a season.

Normally, I'm psyched when I encounter a new car, particularly one that's...for now...rare.  It's like seeing your first Model T, or your first VW Bug.  

But as the quants, tech-bros, and equity-class come up with more and more ways to take work away from us, while their faux-moralist political enablers hypocritically curse the unemployed for their laziness, this brazen AI chariot arrives like an ill and gilded wind.

Labor and Vocation

It's Labor Day, and on this Labor Day, I'm looking at a new job.  Starting the first Sunday in October, I'll be making that ride out to Poolesville on a far more frequent basis, as I take the position of Supply Pastor at Poolesville Presbyterian Church.  

By some of the more commonly used metrics of employment, some folks might look at the transition I'm making with befuddlement.

The salary is...like my current small church...indexed to the minimum acceptable to Presbytery.  As this is a half-time position and my current position is three-quarter-time, well, you do the math.   It's less money.  The commute goes from twenty minutes without traffic to one hour and ten without traffic.  Each way.   

Less pay?  Longer commute?   And yet, I'm totally psyched.

Being the mutant that I am, salary levels just don't matter to me.  Well, that's not entirely true.  What matters to me is twofold.  First, that salary be sufficient to allow me to shoulder a fair share of the costs of maintaining a household.  As the husband of a working woman, I'm not the sole income provider, eh?  This salary will be sufficient for that.  Second, that salary should be fair relative to what you're doing.  I love pastoring, and marvel that it is even possible to preach and teach the Gospel and talk about the meaning and purpose of our existence...and receive compensation.  This does tend to put me at a bit of a negotiating disadvantage.  Pesky thing about vocation, I guess.  It's so much more than just a "job."

The commute matters.  Too many Americans have come to assume that those two hours a day they spend in traffic are fine and normal.   If I had to make this commute every day, it might get old fast.  But...I'm not.  Nor does the church expect me to.  It's twice a week.  Any other work, like emailing, texting, prepping sermons and talking on the phone and doing reports and creating web-content, that can be done remotely.  And at twice a week, the gorgeous country roads that lead to Poolesville feel like a retreat in and of themselves, particularly in the saddle of a motorcycle.  I'd ride that ride for the good of my soul.

Then there are the benefits, and by benefits, I don't mean pension and major medical.  I mean those other intangibles that make your work feel less like work.  Like, say, a community that laughs easily, and that radiates interpersonal warmth.  Or a place that recognizes the need for human beings to be flexible with one another, and values a life lived in balance.  When I say I need time to care for kids, and to work on doctoral studies, and to write...it's good to see nods around the table. 

Work does not exist for the sake of work, after all.  

Innovation and Jobs

One of the core themes in this last week's State of the Union address was the call to innovate and create our way out of the sinkhole into which City-On-A-Hill-America is slowly sliding.  The idea, I think, is pretty classically American.  We grow by seeking the new frontier, chasing our Manifest Destiny right up until we prang into the Pacific.  We improve our lives through new products and pharmaceuticals that suddenly make everything better. 

But I just don't buy it.  Not any more.  Innovation is no longer the engine by which American jobs are created.

Nifty new electronic gizmos and doodads to clutter our rec room?  Sure.  Remedies for ailments we never knew we had?  Absosmurfly.  But jobs?  No.  I don't see it, not in the context of our globalized capitalistic economy.

Let me offer up three examples from innovative, successful American firms.  If you had to think about what American company would be consistently described as cutting edge, profitable, and successful, Apple would be at or near the top of every list.  While not without flaws, the company has created products that are aesthetically pleasing, boundary shifting, and that people want to buy.  My own home has a rather large number of iPods and iPhones and iPads, and I'm composing this on an iMac.

Apple is an innovator.  But jobs?  Yeah, his name may be Jobs, but they mostly ain't American.  Apple maintains a stable of about 25,000 American employees, in design, engineering, retail, and corporate.  But when it comes to actually making the iPods and iPhones and iPads and iMacs, that gets done by  Chinese subsidiary Foxconn, which employs 250,000 workers to make products for Apple.  A generation ago, those would have been a quarter-million American wage-earners, enough to fully fuel the economy of a mid-sized city.  Now?  Nope.

Globalized industry is a game changer.

That painfully neglected reality was reinforced recently by an announcement from Evergreen Solar.  That company, in the event you haven't heard of it, is the third largest manufacturer of solar panels in the United States.  Or rather, it was.  After many millions of dollars of public funds and tax breaks were given to it's leadership to develop renewable energy production, the suits did what suits are obligated to do.  They chose to remain competitive in a global economy.  Evergreen Solar is folding up shop in the U.S., and will now produce solar panels only in it's new Chinese factory.

In a globalized economy, where production chases the region with the lowest possible wages, innovation does not mean jobs.  Not here, anyway.

But innovation poses another threat.  It takes jobs away, particularly as more efficiencies are discovered in production.  Take, for instance, Amazon, another successful innovator.  I buy stuff from Amazon plenty, and the success of their Kindle ebook platform has surprised me...I still like paper for my bookish moments...but I'm apparently now in the minority.  Amazon recently announced that sales of books on the Kindle now exceeded their sales of paperback books.  That's good for the trees, but it's an ill wind if you work in retail.  Virtualized products, be they books or videos or games, well, they don't require bricks and mortar or paper.  If the people who read are increasingly content to read electronically (as you are, dear reader), then there's no need for book stores.  The scores of I.T. jobs that are required to maintain that business model don't counterbalance the tens of thousands of jobs that will be lost as Borders and Barnes and Nobles start to fold.

I wish I could share Obama's optimism about innovation and jobs.  But I think that industrial-era horse has left the stable.

The Higher Education Bubble

In a very slightly self-congratulatory way, the Washington Post's local section today affirmed what any inside-the-Beltway denizen already knows: we are the most educated region in the nation. Yeah, I know, y'all assume Washington is just a gray and sorrowful land in which soulless bureaucrats sit and fill out endless, pointless paperwork in tiny little offices like extras in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. And maybe we are.

But we do so because of our superlative levels of higher edufimicashun.

In the DC environs, 46.8% of residents have undergraduate degrees. 21.9% of us have graduate degrees. That beats every other region or jurisdiction in the country. This surfaces something of a puzzler. On the one hand, Americans who live outside the Beltway are fond of railing on the DC area. We are "those Beltway insiders." We are not "real Americans."

On the other hand, the goal of most Americans is to get what is increasingly viewed as a prerequisite for success: a college degree. That's your ticket to the good life, or so the story goes. It's a sign of attainment, of intelligence, and of stick-to-itiveness. By that standard, DC must be, by definition, the place inhabited by the most successful, driven, and capable Americans.

Only there's a problem with that, one that goes deep into an underlying dysfunction in our culture. There is, to my eyes, a problem with the whole "college as a prerequisite for life as a viable human being" thing. Undergraduate education, at least for me, proved profoundly useful. It was in my Religious Studies program at UVA that I began finding my way into a faith that could engage both my heart and my intellect. Seminary prepared me to go deeper, and to teach, and to preach.

But what my undergrad and graduate studies did not do was prepare me to work. Working prepared me to work. I learned the ethic that makes for successful work as a dishwasher. As a stock clerk. As a forklift-driving warehouseman. As a cabbie. I learned office skills as a fetch-and-carry intern. None of those things...not one of them...tapped into the knowledge I received as a student at Mistah Jeffahson's University. Or, frankly, in seminary.

Yet as our captains of industry offshore the industrial foundation that once provided blue collar workers with gainful, productive, lifelong employment, Americans are increasingly driven to attend college. You can't just work 9 to 5 on the line, and come home to your nice little house. There is no line. You need a degree to succeed. And so that becomes the goal, even if 1) it doesn't meet the broader needs of our society and 2) the number of jobs appropriate for a general college education no longer match the volume of graduates.

That cultural trend is, I'm convinced, is one of the primary reasons college education is growing so damnably expensive. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. With the collapse of our industrial base, the only jobs that can sustain our expected standard of living are for the educated. Knowing this, people are willing to undertake huge debt loads to finance their education.

Fueled by debt-driven spending, the costs of higher-ed soared, in the same way that housing costs soared. That was fine, though. You could pay off your loans over the years when that college degree reaped it's expected rewards.

Only, as anyone who knows anyone under 30 realizes, those rewards are now far from certain. The huge debt burden you undertook to get your English degree or your degree in Anthropology or Women's Studies or Architecture or Automotive Engineering gets you exactly nothing. The jobs for such souls aren't there. Nor, given the broader trends in the global economy, do they appear to be likely to return.

I find myself wondering if, at some point, people will realize this.