I'm no Bible scholar... not even a fan... but I was reminded of this proverb when I saw women my age at the Women's March in January in Washington with signs asking, "Why must I keep doing this?" And, indeed, there was that sense of deja vu all over again. I recalled for my daughter and her friends my first march New York City, November 1969, during the Vietnam Moratorium. I have also marched for the right to choose in Washington in decades past. That Roe v. Wade remains under threat more than four decades after the decision was handed down is disheartening, as is the steady state of war in this new millennium.
But, if history is repeating itself in some respects this year, much that is unique to this era also drives the wedge dividing us... left v. right... Northern Hemisphere v. Southern... haves v. have-nots... white v. color... Judeo-Christians v. Muslims.
Three unique forces are easily identified. (Thomas Friedman identifies them in his new book.)
1. Technology: artificial intelligence, automation, cloud computing
Yes, technology is creating jobs and fortunes. But it is eliminating far more more jobs than it's creating. No revolution of the past --- not the agricultural or the industrial --- however disruptive, matched this 21st century phenomenon. You think I am exaggerating? Don't take my word. Researchers at Oxford University predict that 47 percent of all jobs in the United States have a high probability of being taken by technology in the next 5-15 years. The chief economist of the Bank of England chimed in with a guess that the U.S. will see a job loss in the area of about 80 million in that time frame.
Over the past 35 years, the U.S. has lost seven million manufacturing jobs. Try as he might, Mr. Trump cannot bring back those jobs. He may attempt to recapture them from Asia and Latin America. But he can't keep the robots from taking them, if ever they are brought back to America.
This is not... repeat, not... a rehashing of the Industrial Revolution, when wrenching disruption eventually led to unheard-of prosperity. In the 1950s a unionized blue-collar worker, capable of doing one of the mind-numbing chores on an assembly line, could make a middle-class income, have good benefits, and expect a comfortable retirement. Today, if your job doesn't involve "high-order thinking," expect it to be taken by AI. This likely includes, according to the source I've linked above:
- accountants
- clerks
- construction workers
- customer service reps
- paralegals
- security guards
- telemarketers
and even many healthcare workers. Look for "doc in a box."
2. Climate change
Deny it all you wish. But don't try telling the 2.6 billion agricultural people, who are experiencing desertification in the souther hemisphere, that Mother Nature isn't changing for the worse. Don't try telling the United Nations organization nothing bad is happening south of the Sahara. The U.N. says that arable-land degradation is happening at 30 times (no, that's not a typo) the historical rate.
And so, it's not just war, such as in Syria, that is driving masses of Southern Hemisphere folk to try to get into Europe. End the Middle Eastern conflict tomorrow and millions would still seek to escape to the north.
3. Population
Even those who deny cataclysmic job loss and climate change must admit that human population has never been this large before now. I sometimes am able to shock my students by telling them that, when I was their age, the world's population was half what it is today: 7.5 billion. That's a doubling in less than half a human lifetime. And it continues to climb, as this is written.
So, let's put this all together: unprecedented population... unprecedented desertification... unprecedented job loss. Isn't this indeed something entirely new under the sun?
Did those who voted for Mr. Trump know all this and take it into consideration? That's pretty darn doubtful. But I suspect they know deep down in their mammalian DNA that, to borrow a phrase from a Jimmy Buffett tune, "I'm in danger of extinction too".
The animals that perished in each of the Ice Ages must have had the same sort of gut feeling at some point during the onset of those cataclysms.
Mr. Trump's triumph, a phenomenon difficult to imagine before this age of cloud computing and social media, is the product of a desperation spawned by this gut sense of despair. And this is new.
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