By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, September 18, 2023
Josh Hawley is a familiar type: the prep-school/Ivy
League toff who grew up wealthy and has, for obviously self-interested reasons,
appointed himself tribune of the plebs, champion of the working class, and
zealous defender of literal McJobs—in this case, jobs working the drive-through
window at fast-food restaurants.
I suppose that young Josh Hawley might have learned
something about the drive-through window at the bank of which his father was
the president, but here is the voice of experience from an actual graduate
of Burger King University and a veteran of the drive-through window at
University Avenue and Loop 289 in Lubbock, Texas:
Don’t save these jobs.
Really. Don’t.
(“Burger King University” is what they used to call the training videos you
had to spend an afternoon watching if you worked at Burger King in the 1980s.
These were pretty much what you’d imagine them being.)
Hawley is joined by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal
(now there’s a brace of them) in
pushing a destructive, anti-market, anti-innovation, AI-regulation
model that would base decisions in part on “effects on employment.” That sounds
anodyne enough, but, in hearings
with Microsoft President Brad Smith, Hawley made clear that he intends
to see this construed in something very close to a literally Luddite fashion—he
doesn’t want to see automation replace a single job, including (this was his
example, and he dwelled on it) jobs running the drive-through windows at
fast-food restaurants.
(The Luddites, if you don’t know, were early 19th-century
English terrorists who destroyed machinery, most famously in textile mills, to
prevent automating repetitive tasks done by low-wage workers.)
While it may not be entirely obvious to those of you who
have had frustrating
experiences with Siri, understanding speech is something at which
artificial intelligence is increasingly good. (As usual, the most relevant
question is: Compared to what? Compared to, say, a Starbucks barista.)
Krishna Gupta, CEO of Presto, a company that makes AI-driven drive-through
interfaces, told
the Wall Street Journal in July: “In three years I don’t
think there’s going to be any human taking an order in any drive-through in the
U.S.”
I have my doubts about that prediction, but many human
drive-through clerks will likely be replaced by AI. Why? The usual answer
people give is, “Because the computer is cheaper.” But that isn’t quite right.
If all that mattered were cheap labor, then Porsche would manufacture all of
its 911s in Port-au-Prince rather than in Zuffenhausen. What matters isn’t
simply the per-unit cost of labor (or of labor substitutes, such as automation)
but the cost relative to the output, which is another way of saying productivity.
German autoworkers earn, on average, around
$35 an hour in wages. Never mind that cheap Chinese labor everybody is
worried about, that’s a good deal more than the $28 an hour the average
unionized U.S. autoworker makes.
Why don’t the suits at Porsche go to where the labor is
cheaper? What is it? German nationalism? Lack of ambition?
The truth is, German autoworkers are really, really good
at what they do. They aren’t the only people in the world who can make a
Porsche—all the 911s are made in Zuffenhausen, but Porsche makes Cayennes in
Slovakia and in Malaysia, where the factory specializes in right-hand-drive
models for the local market—but, as with their colleagues down the road
building Mercedes-Maybach S-Class sedans in Sindelfingen, the German
autoworkers who make Porsche 911s are extraordinarily skilled, experienced,
competent, and proven. When I visited the Mercedes plant in Germany a few years
ago, the workers were remarkably confident that what would keep their jobs safe
in the long run wasn’t any kind of protectionist policy or trade barrier, but
the fact that they are very, very good at what they do. Add to the skilled
workforce Germany’s highly developed, trade-oriented economy, trade
relationships within the European Union and beyond, competent (though by no
means unimprovable) governance, relatively productive relationships between
corporate management and labor unions, etc., and that $35 an hour starts to
look pretty good. Most other countries don’t offer that kind of economic environment,
the absence of which imposes enormous costs.
And that’s why Porsche doesn’t pay workers in Haiti 48
cents an hour to build 911s: it’s too expensive. They can’t afford those low
wages.
Low-wage jobs are always disappearing. They are too
expensive.
My father was occasionally employed picking cotton back
in the 1940s and 1950s, and his parents were by that time old hands at it.
Cotton-picking provides a very useful illustration for how automation actually
works in the labor market. At one terrible point in American history,
cotton-picking was work done by slaves. (Cotton, rice, and sugar were the main
drivers of slavery in the United States.) When the United States finally
abolished slavery, cotton-picking was done by very poor workers, in many cases
former slaves who had little choice when it came to occupation. (Jim Crow was
in part about social segregation, but much of that organized racial suppression
was about reducing competition in the agricultural labor market.)
Cotton-picking was unpleasant work—fibers had to be harvested by hand by
workers dragging 100-pound bags of cotton behind them with fingers bloodied
from working with the spiky plants. Between 1850 and 1950, there were nearly
2,000 patents filed for cotton-harvesting machines and parts, none of which
enjoyed much success. The cotton gin had been around since the 18th century,
but cotton-picking remained manual labor.
Here’s the weird—and stupidly familiar—part: The
politicians did not want those mechanical cotton-pickers to
succeed. They wanted those workers to stay in the field—because they didn’t
know what else to do with them. As Donald Holley wrote in The Second
Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They
Shaped the Modern South:
As early as 1932 the mechanical
cotton picker evoked the worry that continued throughout the decade: The United
States was in a major depression with thousands of people unemployed. The
invention of a mechanical picker would have the effect of putting additional
hundreds of thousands of people out of work. Additionally, the South was a poor
and backward region; and its poorest people—those at the bottom of the
agricultural ladder in the cotton fields, the lowly sharecroppers and tenant
farmers—were the ones most vulnerable to the impact of cotton mechanization.
Dispossessed of their pathetic livelihoods, these jobless masses would pour
into Northern cities in a vain search for jobs.
The introduction of International Harvester’s Model
H-10-H in 1942 changed all that. Work that had once taken many slaves or many
very poor low-wage workers became work that could be done much more effectively
by fewer people—by machines and machine-operators. Today, cotton-picking is a
very high-tech, high-capital enterprise, with one man in a sophisticated
harvester doing work that would have once employed hundreds. Many of those
operators are, in fact, sharecroppers—they own their own machinery and harvest
crops for big landowners in exchange for a share of the proceeds. The big
landowners are saved the necessity of paying out hundreds of thousands of
dollars (over a few seasons, more than $1 million) on machinery and learning
how to use it, and the machinery owner gets to use his investment to make money
off of land that he didn’t have to buy, pay taxes on, and assume the risk for.
These modern entrepreneurial cotton-pickers make a lot of money in many
cases—the successful ones can end up multimillionaire sharecroppers.
If Hawley believes that we would be better with more jobs
and less automation, then I invite him to go find himself a nine-foot pick sack
and show us what a Yale man is really made of.
As it turns out, eliminating 99.9 percent of the jobs in
cotton-picking did not leave the nation plagued by ravening hordes of
unemployed former farmworkers forming a restive, pre-revolutionary proletariat.
The first half of the 1940s were not great economically (the GDP numbers look
good on paper, but real life was grim as war, rationing, and New Deal central
planning took their toll), but U.S. economic output more than doubled between 1947
and 1958. Between 1958 and 1969, U.S. economic output more than
doubled again. Automating cotton-picking did not produce a gigantic
mass of miserable unemployables “dispossessed of their pathetic livelihoods”—it
helped to unleash the most wildly productive workforce the world had ever seen
and contributed (one factor among very many) to the creation of the most
affluent, most free, and most dynamic society the world had
ever seen.
Hawley and Blumenthal—and all economic nationalists—are
fundamentally pessimistic, believing the people they represent are too weak and
too stupid to manage their own affairs without the benefit of political
patronage. They see human beings as liabilities. That’s why the
people who advocate interventionist industrial policy have historically been
the same people who advocate population control—every person, in their view, is
just another mouth to feed. (Not their own children, of course, who aren’t
going to be losing jobs they never had taking drive-through orders at
McDonalds—those are precious, unique gifts from God—it’s your kids who are the
problem.) It’s the old Malthusian stuff, slightly updated: Too many people, not
enough jobs.
If you view human beings as black holes into which
resources must be shoveled, then a job—any job—looks like a solution to your
problem. It does not matter to Hawley whether Worker X does anything that is
economically useful (and doing work that could be more efficiently done by a
computer is not economically useful). If Worker X gets a paycheck (and,
preferably, health insurance and a pension), then somebody else has solved a
problem that might otherwise fall into the lap of the welfare state. Another
way of thinking about Hawley-style Luddism is as a complicated welfare program,
one in which the payments are shifted from taxpayers and government agencies to
businesses that are coerced into making decisions that run against their
economic interests in order to satisfy the political interests of Hawley and
his ilk. Economically, it’s the same thing as writing those workers a check,
but doing it through opaque, back-door means that satisfy the No. 1 political
need of the great nationalist-populist: It keeps events from exposing his
political cowardice.
The more enlightened view understands that human beings
are not liabilities but assets. Human effort is inherently
valuable. And that doesn’t just mean the effort of geniuses and very clever
people and people in high-status occupations—or people in paid formal work, for
that matter. There’s a reason we don’t grow our own food. My time is valuable,
and so I try to apply my working hours to the thing I do best. (Economics for
English Majors: This is “comparative advantage.”) The people who grow my food,
deliver my packages, refine my diesel, sew my boots, and put together the
computer on which I am typing this all perform the very valuable service of
doing things I am not good at—or doing things I might be pretty good at if I
did them all day but am not as good at doing as doing what I do for a living—so
that I can concentrate all my effort on doing what I do best. We free-market
types like to talk about competition—and competition is important—but
capitalism is profoundly cooperative: This marvelously productive worldwide
economy is something we all do together. The value created by the guy picking
avocados isn’t just in avocado production—it’s in the work of everybody else in
the world who gets to do something else because Avocado Guy, and millions of
others like him, have liberated the rest of us from the need to produce our own
food, mill our own flours, manufacture our own tires, etc.
As F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (among others) pointed
out, you can’t plan that. The relevant information is
distributed throughout society, every data point is contingent on potentially
millions of other factors, and the lifespan of a relevant data point may only
be seconds. I don’t know how many avocados I’m going to want to buy the next
time I go to the grocery store—and Hawley and other would-be central planners
sure as hell don’t know, either. We let markets—including the labor market—work
because the actors in the marketplace collectively are in possession of the
relevant knowledge that central planners cannot get their hands on. It is not
that the free market is unplanned—it is exquisitely, complexly planned by
billions of people, each acting on the problems closest to him, about which he
knows the most and is best positioned to act. You cannot impose a rational plan
on that–you can only impose rigidity and ignorance on it, pretending that that
is a plan.
Some people will try to tell you that the middle classes
have not seen any real economic progress since the 1970s or 1980s. This is pure
baloney. (Unless you are getting it from the New York Times, in
which case, it is mortadella.) The best economic data we have do not support
that conclusion, but, if you don’t want to dig into the economics, then go to a
library. Read a book written in the 1970s or the 1980s. Read a magazine. Look
at pictures, look at the advertisements—trust the evidence of your own eyes.
Some of you are old enough to remember what a typical house was like in 1975,
what a grocery store was like in 1981, how life was actually lived. The Brady
Bunch was not a documentary, but there is a reason people laughed at
the show’s jokes about the high price of meat—a complaint coming from the
family of a prosperous architect who lived in a large modern house with six
children, a stay-at-home wife, and a live-in servant. There’s a reason people
reading The Stand in 1978 nodded along with Stephen King’s
observations about the price of butter. In 1950, groceries (“food at home,” in
economists’ parlance) accounted for more than 16 percent of household spending;
today, that figure is less than 5 percent. And
before you say it, no, that hasn’t been more than offset by eating out:
Food “away from home” went from 3.8 percent of household spending in 1950 to
4.7 in 2019, a modest increase, which is part of why overall food
spending declined from 20 percent of household spending in 1950 to less than 10
percent today.
Of course we are far better off today than we were 30 or
40 years ago. The evidence is all around you.
That doesn’t mean things cannot—or should not—be even
better. There is always room for improvement. If you think that improvement is
going to come from letting Sens. Hawley and Blumenthal call the shots in the
technology industry, then you are a fool.
And Furthermore …
Burger King wasn’t a bad place to work at all. It was far
from the worst job I’ve ever had, and it certainly was a happier, healthier,
and more positive workplace than was, say, The Atlantic. We
were across the way from a cowboy bar, which meant that after last call, we
were flooded with all the drunks who hadn’t … found something better to do …
when the bar closed. They were a lively but mostly friendly bunch. One of them,
barely able to keep on his feet but holding on to his sense of humor, looked
over the menu and asked me, “What do you recommend?”
I thought about it for a second.
“Alcoholics Anonymous.”
I worked the drive-through, cleaned the flame broiler at
night (a job that required me to wear something pretty close to a hazmat suit),
cooked, everything. But, as it turned out, I spent much of the summer outside
the restaurant: They were building some of those playscapes with the slides and
the ball-pits and whatnot, and they asked me to help. It was a pretty good
deal: If I remember correctly, I got to clock in for my usual hourly wage and
then got paid an extra $10 an hour in cash (this may not have been strictly
legal), and, at the end, they gave me a coupon book for something like 100 free
meals, which were of little interest to me (the food was fine from a hygiene
point of view, and there was very little of the fast-food horror stories you’re
probably imagining, but I didn’t and don’t like Burger King food) but kept my
friends in Whoppers for a couple of months.
The franchisee I worked for was rumored to own a Rolls
Royce, though I never saw it. I’m glad he made his paper—it couldn’t have been
a fun business. But Burger King did alright by me. And if that job hadn’t been
there because of AI or automation, do you know what I would have done?
Something else.
Words About Words
Here is a really
illuminating opening in a Slate article:
The Washington Post published
a story on Monday that may harm Virginia Democrats’ chances of preventing a
complete Republican state government takeover this November.
Based on a tip from a Republican
operative to whom the Post granted anonymity, the paper
reported that a Democratic candidate running for a House of Delegates seat
in a competitive district has livestreamed videos of herself
having sex with her husband on the online platform Chaturbate.
Let me ask you this: If there had been a story about,
say, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle doing sex acts for money on
Chaturbate, do you think that the Slate lead would prioritize
the following facts? 1. It might harm Republicans’ electoral hopes; 2. It came
from a Democratic operative; 3. Said operative was granted anonymity by the
paper. I mean, holy heck! Here we have a political candidate doing live porn to
supplement her income, and Slate is only interested in the
fact that this might help Republicans win in Virginia, and in pissing on
the Washington Post for publishing the story without
disclosing the name of the source who tipped them off.
But that is the Slate view of the world,
which is also the view of much of the rest of the Democratic-aligned media: The
news doesn’t really matter as much as whether telling the story might help
Republicans.
It’s a broader and more general version of the
“Republicans pounce!” phenomenon. It doesn’t matter what the story is, how
depraved or embarrassing or foolish some Democrat may have been, the real story
is how “Republicans pounce!” on the episode.
Ain’t gonna be no “Democrats pounce!” headlines as the
latest Lauren Boebert story makes its way through the cycle.
Eric Adams Is Handing Republicans a
Flamethrower for 2024. Again.
The problem with creating the
impression of a nonexistent problem is that it becomes impossible to solve.
This is all to say: How best to
address the migration issue is an important consideration. But Adams is not
only bungling the response, he’s actively choosing to politicize it in a way
that helps Republicans.
…
Meanwhile, national Democrats who
invited the wolf into the henhouse can only hope that Adams has not yet again
created a winning blueprint for Republicans to overperform in this coming
election cycle.
Does anybody think that crime or immigration are in
fact nonexistent problems in New York City? Nobody in New
York, I would think. Exaggerated? Sure. Nonexistent? That isn’t
journalism—that is propaganda.
Given the subject matter, as a
journalist, did you have ethical concerns? Other journalists I’ve interviewed
have struggled with the question of when you should or shouldn’t humanize
leaders of violent groups like the Proud Boys. Did that cross your mind at all?
The question is asked of a journalist who has interviewed
and profiled Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio. “Humanize” is, of course, an
entirely empty word: Neither Enrique Tarrio nor the Proud Boys nor Adolf Hitler
nor Pol Pot needs to be “humanized”—they are human, their crimes are human
crimes, their failings are human failings. That’s what humans do, at least part
of it. People often wrote of the danger of “normalizing” Donald Trump, as
though Donald Trump weren’t as normal and all-American as
diabetic amputations and school shootings. The complaint, put into more honest
English, is this: “If you give readers a more complete and interesting view of
a person, then that person will become less useful to us as a hate totem to
employ for the purposes of community-building ritual-denunciation ceremonies.”
But nobody writes that. And nobody will usually go so far as to say that
the Washington Post should refuse to report the news when it
is bad for Democrats, though sometimes they get close to it.
Other Wordiness …
Drive-through, not drive-thru.
Unexpected News …
Finally, I have something in common with Lauren Boebert.
She seems like a fun date, but I still think my
theater-ejection story is better.
In Closing
Eventually, the money runs out. Wall
Street Journal:
The West Virginia University Board
of Governors voted Friday to cut 28 academic programs and eliminate 143 faculty
jobs—despite opposition from students, alums and faculty—in favor of what they
say is a necessary step toward financial viability.
The public flagship university will
eliminate a Ph.D. in mathematics, master’s in public administration, most
foreign-language instruction, graduate degrees in higher-education
administration, and ceramics and sculpture degrees. Faculty cuts will include
positions in its schools of law, mathematical and data science and public
health, and in its chemistry and plant and soil-sciences programs.
…
“We can’t keep every program. We
can’t do everything that we’ve been doing, because we’ve lived beyond our
means,” President E. Gordon Gee said at a faculty senate meeting
earlier this week.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of
financial records found that after adjusting for inflation, spending at the
university increased by 38% between 2002 and 2022, or 29% on a per-student
basis.
Protest all you like. Complain all you like. Call it
racist or sexist or monocisheteronormative or anything else. In the end, the
math is the math—in West Virginia and down the road in Washington.
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