
The Despair of Learning That Experience No Longer Matters - kawera
http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-despair-of-learning-that-experience-no-longer-matters?mbid=social_twitter&currentPage=all
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muninn_
" “Hurt my back at work, lost my job, got evicted, couldn’t get another job.”
"

This is the key here. We need to create safety nets that allow people to get
back on their feet and become productive members of society. Whether you are
rich or poor, this is in your long-term best interest.

~~~
vosper
Yes, and the culture of deriving (and judging of others) personal value
through paid work needs to change. Not having a job shouldn't make you a bad
or lesser person.

~~~
peonicles
Its not as simple as that. Humans are social, and want to feel that they are
"useful", that their presence / skills are needed. Not having a job takes that
away from them, which can snowball into psychological issues, and possibly
turn them "bad".

When a chunk of society becomes jobless, we've got problems ...

~~~
vosper
But that's my point. If there were non-job activities that society considered
equally useful (e.g. Charity work, spending time with the elderly, community
service type stuff) then not having a job wouldn't necessarily take away the
feeling of being useful.

~~~
mercer
To confirm your point: I've met many people who were stuck in a cycle of being
troubled (often mental health issues, but physical too), and as a result being
unemployed or barely-employed, and a result of _that_ ending up even more
troubled (again both mentally and physically; inaction is often unhealthy).

Then they found the church I was a member of (at times I was the one who
brought them).

The first thing that often noticeably improved their general well-being was
being _seen_ as a person. People would come talk to this newcomer and involve
them in some of the weekly activities. Another aspect of church that improved
their life was regaining a sense of rhythm that they had lost: a weekly Sunday
service + activities after, a weekly 'small-group' meeting at someone's house
(and a big source of new friendships), the usual religious holidays, etc.

But the thing that seemed to most improve their situation was becoming
_active_ as volunteers. This would speed up the making-friends process, give
them a sense of purpose, take them 'out of themselves' (and their troubles) by
focusing on others, and their new responsibilities provided an increase in
self-worth (and sometimes even an income, if they were among the 'paid
volunteers').

I've seen people that I couldn't imagine 'getting better' regain a sense of
normalcy, confidence and even happiness in astonishingly short periods of
time.

Now obviously there's also a lot I saw in churches that I didn't like. But
I've not found an alternative, at least not as visible as churches, that seems
as effective, to the point where I'm almost inclined to encourage 'troubled
people' to maybe give church a shot.

------
alphonsegaston
I think a lot of these "deaths of despair" are the result of America's racist
mythology running up against the realities of wealth inequality in a Late
Capitalist society. For a long time, the white working and middle classes have
been duped into believing themselves in solidarity with the (predominantly
white) wealthy elite, only a few steps way from achieving their rank and
status.

But as the vicissitudes of our economy make this delusion more and more
untenable, instead of freeing themselves from the racist mythology, they
internalize the circumstances of their economic position as a failure to
achieve what is "expected of them." This of course leads to all of the
despairing acts described in the article.

The situation reminds me a lot of the arguments made by first wave male
feminists, about how patriarchical structures are as oppressive to men as they
are to women. Considering we haven't moved the needle very far in that domain,
I'm not optimistic that we can shed the burden of our racist mythos any more
easily.

------
vosper
The article is a bit light on substance. The author is writing about a
hypothesis that the researchers have emphasized is still in development, and
includes (to his credit) what seems to me a pretty strong critique of their
work from a statistician at another university. And throws in some anecdotes
(which I find more compelling - the "got injured at work, lost my job, lost my
home" story is one we hear all too often in the US, because there's no safety
net).

------
otakucode
They're right. The ones that are in despair, I mean. As much as I love
computers, they have been involved (I do not believe them responsible, being
only tools) in a great swindle. Around 1980, computers entered the workplace.
Around 1980, median wages froze. And they have remained frozen since. Cost of
living has not frozen.

Between 1950 and 1980, the median wage of the lower 90% of the US economy rose
by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, that median wage rose by 1%. Meanwhile, the
median wage of the top 10% during that period rose by 495%.

Every single iota of productivity enhancement which was realized through
computers, software, and automation technology was sequestered by the upper
class and trapped in the financial services market, never to re-enter the
economy.

When your workers productivity increases by 3-7% every year, it is very easy
to be amenable to raises which keep apace with the value of the work being
done. When computers show up and your employees experience the productivity
multiplier of software, leaping 50 or 60% or more in a year... what then?
Giving a 50% raise sounds like patent madness. Yes the work they did produced
50% more value, but if they claim to be entitled to any of that value they
created, well, you can just say 'the machine did the work' right? So that's
what was done.

We've seen this before. When large factories and assembly lines sprang up.
Society and employers told workers 'the machines are doing the work' and the
fact the workers were creating more value was not reflected in their pay.
Eventually there were situations where when a law was proposed in New York
which restricted bakeries not permitting them to work people more than 60
hours per week (10 hours 6 days a week), people balked at the radical
progressiveness of such an idea. Many businesses were getting entire families
(children included, laws against child labor were similarly overturned and
said to infringe upon the rights of both employers and workers) working 16
hour days 6 days a week and paying them so little that the family could barely
afford housing and food.

People eventually, of course, got fed up and we got labor laws and other
protections via the New Deal. For some businesses, that amounted to their
labor costs raising 600% overnight. And they were fine.

The idea that 40 hours of work in a week should be paid enough that that
single income should be able to raise an entire family on comfortably,
including saving for retirement, medical care, leisure activities, education,
etc was seen as the bare minimum of sensible fairness. Somehow, despite the
widespread adoption of technology which enables 1 person to do the work of 20
or 50 workers just a few decades prior, the number of hours people work is
ballooning. Raising children without multiple incomes is tantamount to
economic suicide.

Because of the radical jumps in productivity, combined with social forces in
the executive management class, compensation has been completely divorced from
any relationship with the value of the work performed. This is seen in
especially outsized ways in the technology industry itself. A small company
can make a new product that costs a few hundred thousand to create, but which
creates tens of millions in value shortly after its release. Would any
executive in the world consider paying the workers in that company anything
other than market average rate?

We are still largely mired in the patterns and systems developed to deal with
manufacturing work. That mental work is a profoundly and fundamentally
different animal has not been integrated into either the work world or society
at large. We still presume people to be capable of 8 hours of exertion,
despite mountains of research showing human beings not capable of that with
mental tasks without severe degradation of their work product. We still
presume that dumping people in the same open floor plan office, rife with
interruptions and noise, shouldn't negatively impact productivity despite
research showing it is pure poison. Management still presumes that employees
which become invaluable become expendable. Aside from the costs involved in
finding and hiring a replacement, they see it dangerous to permit an employee
to become 'important' to the organization. We still presume that we are
dealing with tasks which the vast majority of people in society would be
capable of doing simply by following instructions, despite this not being the
case for any creative or deep technical work.

I think we might not see another New Deal, however. It would be better for the
companies, no matter how they would wail and cry, if we did. Instead, I think
the fact that all this technology which makes people individually very
productive and capable of creating great value is all very inexpensive and
ubiquitous will eventually cause the lens to be turned upon the companies
themselves. What are THEY bringing to the table? What are THEY offering
workers? When it comes increasingly tenable for individuals or loose
confederations of individuals coordinated via software and the Internet, and
as the myth of employer loyalty finally dies with the Millenial generation,
people are going to realize that companies have screwed themselves. They spent
the 1980s abandoning every single benefit they provided to workers (welching
on pensions, leaving behind providing insulation from market fluctuations by
reflexively laying off workers, shrinking vacation time, abandoning raises
that outpaced cost of living increases resulting in required job-hopping, etc)
while computers were spreading everywhere, and while the Internet was growing
in its nascency. At their very fundamental core, companies exist to do one
thing: distribute. Distribute work to workers, and end product to customers.
But the Internet and software solved distribution. It's a worthless problem to
solve now. All that overhead of office buildings, multiple layers of
inefficient management, etc which could be paid for by the large price anyone
used to be able to command for solving those problems of distribution are now
pure dead weight.

When the tide turns, it will probably happen so fast that people won't be able
to believe it. Things tend to do that with software and the Internet.
Lumbering corporate giants certainly won't be able to adjust to compensate.
They will see their employees abandon them in legions, and things will
reorganize. Businesses which actually critically rely upon physical co-
location of workers (a much, much smaller number of businesses than most
people expect) or physical proximity of workers to customers will fare the
best. Maybe. Uber is already showing how even in an industry which absolutely
requires physical co-location of worker and customer, the right piece of
software is all that is needed.

~~~
prostoalex
> Between 1950 and 1980, the median wage of the lower 90% of the US economy
> rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, that median wage rose by 1%.

That excludes the non-wage compensation. Health + dental + vision insurance,
stock options, stock grants, employee stock purchase plans and 401(k) matching
(among others) became a fairly important piece of the compensation puzzle,
especially in white collar jobs.

The monetary value of some of those components (healthcare) rose quite
substantially.

