Robots aren’t what’s idling workers today
I have read many search-and-find children’s books during the pandemic. Can my 3-year-old child find the three A’s hiding on the page?
The discussion around automation often feels quite similar. Are the robots finally “here” on this page of human history? Are there more robots on the next page? And what about their mouths? Are they empty, or do they have jobs dripping from their shiny mechanical teeth?
For most of my life, the automation discourse could be reduced to this bookish trajectory. The conventional wisdom says that the more pages one turns in the great human book, the more robots one finds. The more robots one finds, the greater the threat to workers.
Aaron Benanav says workers are right to be fearful. But from his view, the boogeyman isn’t automated. In his brilliantly accessible “Automation and the Future of Work,” Mr. Benanav challenges the conventional wisdom by proving that “chronically low demand for labor” is a far bigger concern for workers than automation.
If it isn’t clear already, Mr. Benanav is an economic historian. Despite that imposing title, let me assure you that the book is far, far more intellectually creative than it is academically unreadable. Mr. Benanav is clearly an extraordinarily bright thinker and writer who is more interested in communicating his ideas clearly than being praised for their high-mindedness. His book unfolds as a dance between hard historical data and thought experiments that “revolve around and prioritize people, rather than technological progress.”
Mr. Benanav’s isolates what he feels is an overlooked villain in the current economic landscape: underemployment. This increasingly prevalent phenomenon, much more so than automation, has exacerbated inequality and insecurity. Worse yet, underemployment seems to be be growing.
Mr. Benanav’s explanations are numerous. At present, I’m staring at five quotes that summarize the economic fallout from post-war deindustrialization. I am too insecure about my own economic chops to pick the best one. The author is less interested in demonstrating how underemployment came to be and more focused on politely if forcefully pleading with us to acknowledge just how widespread and damaging it has become.
His pleas hit me hard. Across my adulthood, “Do you know someone who is underemployed” has become a less relevant question than “Do you know more people who are underemployed or fully employed?” During the pandemic, I, like most, have seen family members, neighbors and friends become underemployed. My contact tracer was on his third career, which is likely the tidiest economic, social and medical summation I can write about 2020.
Even in the fiction I’ve most admired from this year — Raven Leilani’s “Luster,” Alex Gallo-Brown’s “Variations of Labor” — characters swirl in the whirlpools of American democracy on rafts knotted together with the materials of severe underemployment. They rarely paddle toward stability. They paddle instead toward less severe
underemployment.
Mr. Benanav is deeply sympathetic to these people. He can write movingly and do so on a global scale: “Whether working as home health aides in Minnesota, adjunct university lecturers in Italy, fruit vendors in Tunisia or construction workers in India, more and more people feel that they are stuck in place.”
My quibbles with this book are embarrassingly me-related. Mr. Benanav identifies his foes as the “automation theorists.” I think this label is too broad. The writers Mr. Benanav cites seem to traffic in very little theory and could more accurately be referred to as “male entrepreneurs who write pop nonfiction and stroll onstage at Ted Talks.”
Like I said, these and other jargon-related quibbles are a flaw of mine, not Mr. Benanav’s. As both a writing instructor and writer, I become too fixated on grammatical minutiae and prosaic precision. I’m pointing with reservation at automation theorists on the search-and-find page and the so-called automation theorists are pointing at the robots. Meanwhile Mr. Benanav whispers, with slight exasperation: “Yes, but can you count the millions who are underemployed?”