|
Difficult, but not zero. Social Security got passed, for example. A crisis makes radical solutions easier. And if Yang is right about what is going to happen to the economy over the next couple of decades, crisis is what we'll have. And his look to the recent past, rather than the future, isn't speculative - it's fact-based. When he points out that half the laid-off manufacturing workers wind up never returning to the workforce, many on "disability" that is becoming a long-term unemployment system rather than its original intent, he's quoting statistics. To reject his conclusions in a valid manner, one must either challenge his facts, or provide alternative interpretations of the observed facts. (Of course, most won't bother with a valid rejection, and instead just wave their hands around and shout louder about how we're going to train 50 year old truck drivers to be software engineers or whatever.) Even where Yang is speculating, his speculation seems pretty reasonable. Making trucks drive themselves rather than needing a human for the steering and brakes and situational awareness isn't exactly an NP-hard problem. The odds that Amazon etc will continue to eat into retail seems reasonable to me. These things add up to millions of jobs lost, with no equal-paying replacements in the pipeline for those workers. And it's not just "blue collar" work... what happens to paralegals, for example? There are a lot of jobs that people go to college for, taking on tens of thousands in debt, that might just disappear in the course of a few years. What the hell are we going to do about that? Tell them to get their lazy asses back to work? Because that's the current solution. |