UNDER THE GUN: Microchips "Eating Jobs," Trump's Massive Challenge
Policy Analyst Arbess Says Virtualization Big Test for New Prez
November 30, 2016
By: Dave Rogers
Trump's first 100 days should involve commissioning a public/private task force on the future of employment with a mandate to come up with concrete answers.
Free trade is not the answer.
Neither is a massive infrastructure construction program.
Or the Robin Hood approach of robbing the rich to help the poor, an unAmerican process.
Nope, this nation is grappling with a job-eating virus called FinTech in which "the new real wealth of virtualization benefits fewer people all the time," says analyst Daniel Arbess in a startling column in Fortune with the misleading headline "How Donald Trump Can Bring Back Jobs to America."
http://fortune.com/author/daniel-j-arbess/
Real unemployment is nearly 10 percent, as the Beltway leadership class knows because their kids are still living at home. "The stakes couldn't be higher," he warns.
Among big shots punctuating the fears cited by Arbess, in a YouTube addition to the online version of the article was Dow CEO Andrew Liveris, now gritting his teeth over European roadblocks to a merger with DuPont.
Fewer people with jobs and income threaten the U.S. economy like never before, says Arbess, commenting: "The problem is structural. Jobs aren't being replaced by cheaper ones somewhere else; they're being eaten by microchips and smart software executing ever more sophisticated tasks without human intervention."
Donald Trump on the campaign trail claimed he could bring back jobs but good luck with that says Arbess, who calls the tenuous situation "Trump's epochal economic opportunity."
Millions more workers are on the road to displacement, writes Arbess, scornfully dismissing "our nation's leading economists (who) have more or less ignored the job-eating virus, just assuming that new jobs will simply appear, as they actually did in the last 'technology-driven economic transitions,' from farms to factories and production to services."
What to do?
Arbess suggests Trump's first 100 days should involve commissioning a public/private task force on the future of employment with a mandate to come up with concrete answers. "Develop appropriate options for keeping people purposefully occupied and putting money in their pockets without unfair government redistribution."
In a tv interview on MSNBC. Arbess mentioned the conservatives worst nightmare -- guaranteed annual income, somehow skirting the dreaded Robin Hood effect, a cultural no-no shunned like the plague in America.
He stresses the gravity of the moment: "If the symptoms are misdiagnosed and prescriptions ineffective, there's a material risk that by the next Presidential election we may be facing a truly disruptive strain of uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety, and possible social unrest."
Basically, according to Arbess, Trump bought the bucking horse and now he's got to figure out how to ride it.
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