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US Politics Is Badly Infected with Economic Nostalgia
The current state of American politics has led to a rediscovery of working-class philosopher Eric Hoffer. Probably Hoffer’s most well-known work is “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” published in 1951. As a recent Daily Beast story on his new found relevance explains, “Hoffer’s big insight was that the followers of Nazism and Communism were essentially the same sort of true believers, the most zealous acolytes of religious, nationalist, and other mass movements throughout history.”
Hoffer is amazingly quotable — and tweetable for that matter. Here’s one a bit of wisdom that seems particularly applicable at the moment: “All mass movements deprecate the present, and there is no more potent dwarfing of the present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a glorious future.”
Preach. I’ve written frequently about the economic nostalgia that has infected American politics — on the left and right — along with the ridiculously gloomy assessment of today. For instance, here is Donald Trump recently: “I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country. And we’re a poor country now.”
Of course America remains an incredibly powerful and prosperous and innovative nation, a nation with the strong military and a net worth of nearly $100 trillion. And American living standards are certainly higher today than a generation ago, much less two generations ago.
One weird offshoot of all this is the obsession with manufacturing jobs as a key metric of America’s health. Back to the 1950s and 1960s! In a recent column, New York Times’ reporter Eduardo Porter writes at length about the myth of the manufacturing jobs renaissance:
No matter how high the tariffs Mr. Trump wants to raise to encircle the American economy, he will not be able to produce a manufacturing renaissance at home. Neither would changing tax rules to limit corporate flight from the United States, as Mrs. Clinton proposes. … Look at it this way: Over the course of the 20th century, farm employment in the United States dropped to 2 percent of the work force from 41 percent, even as output soared. Since 1950, manufacturing’s share has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs, from 24 percent. It still has a ways to go. The shrinking of manufacturing employment is global. In other words, strategies to restore manufacturing jobs in one country will amount to destroying them in another, in a worldwide zero-sum game.
Published in EconomicsSo when Trump says he wants to force Apple to make its products in America, what he’s really unintentionally saying is that he wants American robots to do the work of Chinese robots. President Trump can raise all the tariff walls he wants — manufacturing jobs lost to Asia aren’t coming back in any sense that Trump means. Going forward, it’s automation, not globalization, that poses the bigger risk to the economic security of the American labor force. And unlike off-shoring, robots and super-smart software will affect both manufacturing and service jobs.
That’s a very good point.
One of my favorites:
A Fugio Cent for your thoughts…
Here’s one of mine: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.” – Eric Hoffer
James, this post really hits the nail on the head. Thank you for tying these ideas together.
Interesting, and it may be true.
On the other hand, last time the ’70s only lasted eight years.
This time the ’70s has lasted sixteen years, so far.
And despite that long stretch, for the last twelve months it has felt like it is only just beginning.
(Emphasis on felt.)
You’ve committed the (extremely common) fallacy of viewing everything statistically.
Those people aren’t just numbers on a page. They are living, breathing, individual human beings. Step down off the ivory-tower and look at them.
Or lose the country to darkness. It’s your choice.
Yes, and what do we do with the folks whose ability to earn a living is destroyed by this new automation economy? I suppose, to go a step further than Mr. Williamson did a few weeks back, we could encourage people to emigrate to poorer countries that have not quite reached the level of automotive manufacturing. When the super smart software begins to produce economic columns on Ricochet are you going to start giving a damn?
On this logic we would subsidize subsistence farming because your built-in-premise is that people cannot do something else if their current job becomes outmoded. Or, perhaps you are suggesting that automation will eliminate the need for all labor of any variety therefore justifying government intervention to preserve the availability of work generally?
I don’t think the logic necessarily leads there. It might instead lead to creating more of an opportunity society in which the barriers to finding or creating new modes of employment are lowered. And for that to happen, we first need to destroy the corrupt GOPe.
Back in the 80s I used to watch my blue-collar friends and relatives use their generous vacation time and income for recreation. Or I’d watch all the weekend travelers heading north out of Detroit, and coming back again on Sunday nights. And I’d wonder, “What are you guys going to do when your jobs become obsolete? Shouldn’t you be using some of your weekend and vacation time to learn new skills?”
It was certainly what we computer techie people had to do, because our old jobs were becoming obsolete at a pace never before seen. We had to keep up with new things to stay employable. In fact, sometimes our jobs consisted mostly of keeping up with new things. But it couldn’t all be done on our employers’ dimes. It took extra effort outside the regular work hours.
I am a little less judgmental about blue-collar lifestyles now than I used to be back then. But people need to plan for change. There are a lot of things in the regulatory environment that could make the odds better for those who want to transition to something new, but most of the so-called deregulation favored by the GOPe does just the opposite.
I don’t know what the answer is, nor do I know why the economists’ instruments are telling them this plane is still in the air, but this guy’s perception of the economy and this election matches mine:
I’m Trump promises to grow the 47% to above 50%
Are you railing against reality? The author’s point is not that these people don’t matter, only that the policies proposed would NOT help them. Automation is not in danger from tariffs.
I think the author might agree that any policies that prolong these jobs will only lead to further heart ache as it will delay the needed adjustment in the work force. In other words, the quicker those individuals who will lose these jobs adjust and find different (better?) jobs, the better off everyone is – especially them. You don’t want to be the last mainframe manufacturer – everyone else got out because the industry is dead.
I’m not sure how to read your comment. I think you are angry because you read a lack of empathy in the article. I don’t think the authors point was to be empathetic, only to share an observation. That doesn’t mean that he is without empathy.
I do agree with you that we need to, as communities, think hard about how to address the disruptions to our economies, parts of which are out dated.
By this logic, you should commit suicide, because you’re going to die eventually anyway. May as well get it over with.
I suggest that you don’t, only partially because you’re wrong.
I think the real point about restoring “manufacturing” is that it was the one way average Americans could earn a middle class income with benefits that drove the economic engine of the country. Without those jobs, what will the living, breathing, individual human beings do?
If people switch from economic nostalgia to economic cynicism about the past, I’m not sure those complaining about economic nostalgia will like the result.