The eCrozier

“To believe in this living is just a hard way to go”
– Legendary songwriter, John Prine, in Angel from Montgomery

When J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was published a few years back, many people latched onto it reaching simplistic conclusions about his personal experience as it related to what happened to many of his family and friends. It allowed people to sit back and say: “See, Vance, made it out of poverty and a destructive family system, so anybody can do it if they just work hard enough.” Mr. Vance himself gave credence to this line of thinking in the book’s last chapters where he seemed to blame the poverty of his people on their bad habits and choices. While that’s true to a certain extent, it doesn’t do justice to a larger, more complicated truth.

Automation and technology in recent years has replaced over 4 million manufacturing jobs in the Midwest alone (where Vance writes about). It’s affected many jobs here in Georgia as well where it used to take hundreds of people to bring agricultural crops to market, but now a fraction of those workers is needed. This trend will accelerate as automation becomes more omnipresent in other areas, such as service-sector jobs (retail, call-center, food service, etc.). Driverless trucks are coming next. Soon robots will replace truck drivers. It’s way too easy to blame this massive shift in job loss and change on global trade, immigrant labor, jobs moving overseas, or even on flawed workers (aren’t we all?) with destructive habits. To be sure, those are part of it. But technological change, particularly automation, accounts for much of it as well.

My graduate school economic textbooks would tell me that people looking for work would get retrained for the high-tech world, move to where the new jobs are, and all would be well. But that’s not happening. People don’t actually behave the way economic textbooks say they should behave. They aren’t always as resilient, adaptable, or rational as the “invisible hand” of the market tells them they should be. What we’re seeing is a rise in people filing for disability (more Americans are now on disability than work in the construction trade), rising suicide and opioid-addiction rates, and the lowering of life expectancy rates for the first time in modern America.

It’s all complicated. But we should know that a good-paying job isn’t just about earning a paycheck. It’s part of one’s identity. Jobs provide coherence and purpose to people’s lives. They help shape one’s sense of dignity and relevance in the social fabric of communities. But we’re not going stop all technological change, even if it were a good idea. So, morally speaking, what are we going to do with all these people who are getting left out? They aren’t going away and they’ll only get angrier, or conversely, more self-destructive, as their dignity and social relevance continue to be threatened. This is a moral issue, not just a socio-economic one. It’s about how we’re going to treat one another as some of us benefit from economic change while others of us suffer from it. “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ,” St. Paul wrote to the Galatian church. Yes, because living is so often “just a hard way to go.”

+Scott