
Making It in America - brg
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/?single_page=true
======
forrestthewoods
Great article. I'm from the boonies of Tennessee and have seen the exact same
thing.

The biggest change that I've seen is that working hard is no longer enough by
itself. A few decades ago anyone in my small town who was willing to work hard
could get a respectable factory job that provided a reasonable lifestyle.
Anyone who couldn't make it to college would be alright if they were willing
to put in the elbow grease. Many of my friends took that route.

Today that's no longer true. Companies today want a few high skill jobs rather
than many low skill. Those factory jobs are gone and they're never coming
back. It's rough.

~~~
tmh88j
>Today that's no longer true. Companies today want a few high skill jobs
rather than many low skill.

While that is true, high skill doesn't necessarily mean a 4 year college
education. Coming from a manufacturing background (engineer) I can assure you
that good machinists are in high demand. Kids shouldn't be given the
impression that shop-classes in high school are for "stupid people." Most
people don't realize the demand for these kinds of jobs. Even good welders can
make good money if the work is put in; the same cannot be said for all factory
positions..

~~~
_delirium
What I've read about welding, for example
(<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/24jobs.html>), suggests that
there's no good path to break in anymore: welders with 10+ years of experience
are in high demand, while novice and intermediate welders aren't, mainly
because the "easier" jobs can be done by machine these days. But how are you
going to get 10 years of experience if there aren't jobs for welders with 4
years of experience?

And the pay even for the very highly skilled doesn't sound that great; the NY
Times article linked above quoted a rate of $22/hr for a highly skilled
welder, which is decent, but not particularly great for something that's
considered highly skilled and has a 10-year skill ramp (works out to $44k/yr
pre-tax, if you work fifty 40-hour weeks).

~~~
stonemetal
_And the pay even for the very highly skilled doesn't sound that great;_

Not sure what you mean, that puts them at the 70th percentile of personal
income in the US. That rather sounds like highly paid professional to me.

~~~
_delirium
In some ways of looking at it yes. And yet we just had this other thread about
how software engineers making $100k are just getting by "ok", not even upper-
middle-class...

~~~
tricolon
$100k in NYC or SF is not going to get you much.

~~~
_delirium
Well, it'll get you considerably more than the majority of people living in
NYC or SF have. =]

------
enko
Good article. Nothing unexpected for me but a good, calm summary of the
matter. I appreciated the distinct lack of "us vs them" jingoism - it comes
down to the numbers, nothing more.

One thing that bothered me was the attitude of "Maddie", though, towards her
lot in life. I've seen it before and it baffles me:

> “If you don’t know jack about computers and electronics, then you don’t have
> anything in this life anymore. One day, they’re not going to need people;
> the machines will take over. People like me, we’re not going to be around
> forever.”

I just cannot fathom this blithe indifference to her fate, and this assumption
that, as someone who doesn't "know jack about computers and electronics" she
is basically doomed. Why doesn't she instead feel like she might want to start
reading up on these critical topics? The article doesn't paint her as lazy or
unwilling to learn. It just doesn't seem to occur to her, for whatever reason,
that the option of self-study is open to her. I can't figure it out.

~~~
_delirium
Some people I think could read up, at least on some aspects, but I don't think
it's equally easy for everyone to learn all topics. If we woke up in a world
tomorrow where technical skills were _not_ highly in demand, but, say, the two
main growth sectors involved writing and music, how many of today's Google
employees would be able to successfully retrain as novelists, journalists,
violinists, poets, historians, and editors? My guess is some would and some
wouldn't; and a number would need significant time to do so, and/or would end
up as only mediocre employees in their new occupation.

That's how I feel with computers, anyway, that I've in effect pulled a lucky
straw: I've been interested in and good at computers since I was like 8, and
it turns out they pay. If the money was elsewhere, I'm not sure how easily I'd
be able to switch. Likewise, I'm not sure how easy it'd be for an adult who
was never fascinated with and adept at technology to go the other way, and
"become a techie" through self-study, purely because they think it's
important/lucrative, as opposed to because they have the sort of
interest/drive/skill that most techies have.

Or put differently, I don't think everyone is the same or perfectly malleable;
not necessarily due to genetics, but at least by the time they reach adulthood
people have different skills/proclivities and are more or less adept at
learning certain things. Since the universe isn't aligned in some cosmically
fair manner, some people's skills/interests align with what's currently in
demand, and other people's don't, which puts the people out of alignment in a
more difficult place, like me in an age where being court poet, painter, or
musician was the main path for middle-class kids to advance, and engineering
was seen as a more working-class endeavor.

~~~
enko
I won't deny genetic predisposition exists. You can have your 10,000 hours and
what not but some people are just better than others at $task. I remember a
high school friend of mine who, after hundreds or thousands of hours of guitar
practise, still could not play by ear, something I could do at age five. Yes,
there are differences.

But I think a great many things can be learned. I actually disagree that all
those Google engineers couldn't re-educate, should they have to. They would
just have to choose carefully their new vocation.

You have (perhaps inadvertently) given a great example in your list of future
Google employee vocations:

> novelists, journalists, violinists, poets, historians, and editors

Think about these careers for a second.

    
    
      - novelist: writing skill, internal subject, long term
      - journalist: writing skill, external subject, short term
      - violinist: focus on repetition and incremental improvement
      - poets: writing skill, internal subject, taste
      - historian: external subject,long term
      - editor: writing skill, external subject, taste
    

Do you see what I'm getting at? They're all so different. And I kind of find
myself "choosing" one of them myself (I'm a professional programmer).

I think intelligent people tend to be able to bend their mind to whatever
purpose they desire, with enough effort. Sure, a bit of genetic predisposition
helps, but that's just tweaking the dials. You can go in the general direction
just with intellect and effort.

And I'd wager that the reason you were interested in computers since age 8 was
simply because you were exposed to them. If your Dad had been a typesetter for
the NYT, could things have turned out differently?

------
_delirium
This was a good read, thanks. The high-level takeaway is the same we've been
hearing for a while: U.S. manufacturing output is growing in value terms, but
employing fewer and fewer people as more of the value is being produced by
machines, and less by humans. But the case study elaborates some more
specifics of what's going on.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I don't understand why people want to go back to the bad old days of early to
mid 20th century labor. I suspect it's baby boomer nostalgia for a past that
never actually existed in reality.

~~~
_delirium
I don't think most people want to go back to mid-20th-century labor in
particular. It's more a question of what people are going to be gainfully
employed doing, if it's not the old things.

For example, one possible result of increased technology in manufacturing
could've (in some hypothetical world) been steady employment but greatly
increasing productivity, so e.g. the U.S. 2010 manufacturing sector employed
the same share of the population as the U.S. 1960 manufacturing sector, but
thanks to technology was vastly more productive, churning out lots more stuff
per employee, with employees doing more interesting things than 1960s
assembly-line drudgework.

That's one of the techno-utopian visions sometimes kicked around: for every
job lost on an assembly line, a new job is created as robot technician. But
instead the ratio has been more like, for every 3-4 jobs on an assembly line,
a new job is created as a robot technician. At least, that's the case within
the manufacturing sector; it's possible that the missing equivalent number of
jobs _are_ really being created elsewhere, in a more loosely related way, but
it's hard to quantify.

~~~
itmag
If society can get the same productivity with ever fewer people, then it
starts making sense to have a Guaranteed Minimum Income.

[http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-
inc...](http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-income/)

The notion of full employment is not necessarily good or realistic. Sooner or
later, a hi-tech society is going to have to answer the existential question
of "what to do with life?".

Low-tech societies can get away with answering it with "work!" because they
truly _need_ everyone to do that.

Point is: if productivity keeps increasing more and more, why is it such a
God-given thing that the point of our lives should be to work? We need to
start thinking about how to achieve personal fulfillment in a post-scarcity
world.

~~~
_delirium
I more or less agree, and it's interesting that while it's now seen as a
(very) "left" policy proposal, much of its historic support has been from
people who are more associated with free-market economics. Various reasons,
but they boil down to a mixture of negative and positive ones.

The negative ones are that it's better than the likely alternatives: Milton
Friedman thought it was better and less distorting to just hand people one
cash payment than deal with the huge mess of welfare, Section 8 housing, food
stamps, unemployment benefits, medicaid, etc., etc. that the U.S. currently
has. That's sort of the case here, in that just paying people a basic minimum
income is probably less distorting than trying to adopt policies to force full
employment (France-style policies that make it hard to fire people,
protectionist trade tariffs, etc.). Arguably, it makes people more willing to
accept major shakeups caused by markets if there's some minimum floor for what
happens to people caught in transitions or left out of shifts; otherwise
people are more likely to try to push back against the markets. (Actually that
last point is why classic Marxists were _against_ these kinds of things,
because they thought it had the effect of sugar-coating the markets' effects,
thereby making people less willing to revolt against them.)

Positive reasons include promoting entrepreneurship (provides a safety net
making people, especially those not from middle-class-or-better families, more
likely to take the risk of jumping from a stable job to start a business), and
giving people more freedom to choose their associations, as opposed to feeling
they need to cling to their ethnic group, religious group, or other such
organization for quasi-welfare (e.g. many non-believing Mormons stay in the
church because it provides a safety net). F.A. Hayek described that as a
necessary part of moving towards a less tribalist/group-centric society: _"The
assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below
which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears
not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all,
but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer
has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he
was born."_

------
joshuahedlund
Towards the end the article talks about multiple factors that are constantly
in flux regarding the flow of jobs but how overall they've been moving in the
direction of non-American manufacturing jobs. I've seen a few articles
recently about this flux moving back in the opposite direction[1][2][3], but
this article (for all of its interesting info and stories) doesn't address
those signs _at all_. Hopefully soon we will see an article from somewhere
addressing if these anecdotes are negligible or part of a real trend.

[1]
[http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/14/10156162-ma...](http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/14/10156162-made-
in-america-trend-against-outsourcing-brings-jobs-back-from-china)

[2] <http://www.economist.com/node/18682182>

[3] [http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary-
mainmenu-43...](http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary-
mainmenu-43/9418-reshoring-american-manufacturing-jobs-come-home)

------
bh42222
This is fascinating:

 _Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic
arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them
precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000
on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them
on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in
machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it’s
simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job
is safe—for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand
for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then
investing in those robots might make sense._

I think this is why there are a lot of manufacturing jobs in China, Chinese
workers are much cheaper then machines which could also do the same job... for
now.

The "for now" is true for all kinds of jobs and kind of unsettling.

------
hwawei2
Brief aside, what is the name for this type of writing? A longish piece in a
magazine illustrated with personal stories interspersed with facts about how
it relates to the bigger picture and general trends? Editorial?

~~~
mmahemoff
I'd be tempted to call it Gladwellian.

~~~
MaysonL
John McPhee did it long before him, and still does it better.

------
cgh
Articles like this make me wonder why more manufacturing isn't robotocised and
pulled back to domestic shores. Why are blue jeans destined for Western
markets made in China by hordes of human automatons? Couldn't stuff like this
be made locally in almost-fully automated factories instead?

China, India, Vietnam, etc. have a significant dependence upon cheap, semi-
skilled labour. Surely the future is uncertain for these countries as
programmable robots become the norm and there is little reason to outsource
most types of manufacturing.

~~~
hwawei2
Even after shipping costs humans are cheaper than robots, plain and simple.

~~~
cgh
Right now perhaps, but not in the future when this technology becomes
commodotised, as all technology does.

------
davidbanham
Did anyone else feel a bit uneasy with the racist undertone? The author seemed
to dismiss out of hand that "Chinese or Mexicans" could do any kind of skilled
labour. There is a fair amount of high tech work done in Asia these days.

~~~
hwawei2
The adversarial tone of international vs. domestic manufacturing was probably
due to compassion for the "Maddies" of the US. True, there seemed to be no
care for the "Maddies" outside of the US giving it an "us vs. them" feel. Not
necessarily racist, but overly patriotic perhaps?

If anything this phrase caused me a furrowing of the brow "the Gildemeisters
and their ilk".

------
gopi
Actually there is a demand for high skilled trades. The problem is most of the
not so academically gifted kids want to do useless college degrees instead of
learning a trade.

I think what US need is a german style vocational education system

------
FD3SA
Relevant reading:

Race Against the Machine (<http://amzn.com/B005WTR4ZI>)

The Lights in the Tunnel (<http://amzn.com/B002S0NITU>)

------
eliben
Interesting!

Can anyone point to/recommend other articles or books on the topic of
machinery & computers replacing human workers? I'm very interested in this
subject

