White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Cheerio, Your Job Has Been Computerized

February 10, 2014 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Some thoughts about work. It is under attack from a giant labor pool of maybe 200 million eager and qualified people in Asia and elsewhere, who will do it for less than it costs in the United States.
 
It also is under attack everywhere from computerization. Stated bluntly: if jobs are not going to Asia, they may be going to the cloud. The service sector, once the saving grace of the post-industrial world of work, is being computerized: no more people needed. 
 
The somber back story at the recent National Federation of Retailers annual convention and expo at the Javits Center in New York City, as recorded in The Washington Post, was not about new shopping centers, point-of-sale displays, the minimum wage or offshore call centers for warranties: it was about Amazon. Online retailing is eating up traditional retailing — and retailers have seen the future, and it is bleak.
 
Two University of Oxford researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, recently calculated that 47 percent of American jobs are under threat from computerization. The only major publication that dwelt on this extraordinary study was The Economist.
 
Even those spoiled children of society, university professors, are feeling the cold winds from the computer vortex. Online learning is shaking up the quietude in the ivory towers. While they have to do something to improve the productivity of their academic staffs, this is not the way.
 
Against this threatening employment sky rages the debate over the minimum wage. But it is a debate that is too narrow; too much about the short-term interests of the employers of minimum-wage earners and too little, if at all, about the endangered workplace. The spurious argument is that any increase in the minimum wage will drive employers to install more computer substitution of workers. 
 
They are hell-bent on that anyway. Look around: checkout counters are being automated; book manufacture is threatened by e-readers; telephones are answered by other telephones, guided by the unseen hand of computers. Soon even those vilified call-center jobs in India, will be under threat. Here, your doctor will not want as many support staff, as records go the Web.
 
The minimum wage should be raised. It will not stop the rush to substitute humans with computer-driven gadgets. When a machine can be finely tuned to cook and serve hamburgers, a machine will be cooking and serving hamburgers. All those untruths about jobs in fast-food chains being only entry level will fade away. 
 
Meanwhile, go into any fast food outlet and count the people who are middle-aged: They are not there because it is a way in. It is a way of hanging on – especially for African Americans and Hispanics. The same is true for hotel room cleaning, chicken-plucking in processing plants, cleaning toilets in commercial buildings, warehouse working and those toiling in the night kitchens of bakeries. Entry into what? Hell?
 
I once earned the minimum wage in New York City. At the hiring hall, I can tell you, there were only those exiting the job world not entering it.
 
You will not get rich driving a non-union truck, either. Delivery people do it because they have no other skill and almost none of them are candidates for retraining, another shibboleth. Wherever there is menial work that is not unionized, there is economic misery.
 
Recently, I attended a conference in Europe — where the jobs problem is as bad as here, and possibly more intransigent — and speakers were talking openly about a decline in the standard of living. We, in the United States, are not immune. Those who have enjoyed middle-class comfort may have to face a devaluation in their quality of life: less and crowded housing, less travel, a smaller, older car or no car, more hourly work and less security, no medical procedures for ailments that some computer may deem elective. Grimmer daily lives that are more 19th century than 21st century.
 
The debate over the minimum wage ought to be a national discussion of the future of work. A rising tide does not lift all the boats anymore. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Amazon, Carl Benedikt Frey, computers, jobs, Michael A. Osborne, National Federation of Retailers, The Economist, University of Oxford

The Man Who Was The Economist Dies

June 25, 2010 by White House Chronicle 2 Comments

Norman Macrae, who died on June 11 in London at the age of 86, looked into the future and saw it was good. So it should have been. He worked hard to make it so.

Macrae was one of the intellectual giants of latter part of the 20th century, who ceaselessly opposed all forms of collectivism, communism, socialism, statism and group think. But unlike his American contemporary and fellow philosopher of the right, Milton Friedman, Macrae was a journalist; and as such he was influenced by what he saw, as well as what be believed.

One could say that as a philosopher, Macrae was more of a journalist and as a journalist, he was more of a philosopher.

Macrae had unique gifts and found a unique home in which to exercise them, The Economist—a magazine that resolutely calls itself a newspaper. He worked there for just shy of 40 years, and the glove fit the hand perfectly.

Macrae was not the kind of reporter who kicked down doors looking for smoking guns, nor was he likely to waste time and space speculating whether a politician would or should apologize for some slip of the tongue or judgment. Instead Macrae, without pomp, actually tried to find out where the world was going.

He tackled such enormous issues as world health and education, and he found the trends that would change things permanently, far more than posturing politicians could or would do. He predicted the computer workstation, the collapse of communism, and the privatizations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Macrae added ideas to his times, corrected drift and exulted in the human condition. He even coined a few words like “telecommute,” “stagflation,” “intrapreneur” and possibly “privatize.”


In a seminal two-part survey for The Economist, published in September 1962, Macrae noted the economic rise of Japan, enabled by the Japanese way of working in teams. That was a collectivism he embraced. That was also the journalist in Macrae, triumphing over the ideologue.

Macrae came to his hatred of state control honestly: His father was the British consul in Moscow from 1936-38, and he witnessed Stalin’s purges in the embassy compound.

Macrae suffered and benefited from The Economist’s practice of not using bylines. While he was saved from the ranks of celebrity journalists and their airs, he was not known to the world he affected.

For 23 years, Macrae was deputy editor of The Economist. But he was more. He was its, heart, soul and visionary.

It was Macrae who joyously referred to The Economist as the world’s newspaper, which indeed he helped it to become. Macrae was such a giant in a forest of giants that the magazine broke its own rules and gave him occasional bylines.

For a man of the world, Macrae was quintessentially English and quite eccentric. After his beloved wife Janet Kemp died, I was talking to him on the telephone, and he accosted me with this information: “My skillet is broken. You know, there are no ironmongers left in London.”

“That is right, Norman. You railed against first-world countries maintaining obsolete skills and technologies,” I said.

“But, Llewellyn, it is such a small repair; and it is a good skillet. You could probably fix it,” a comment that was followed with a volley of high-pitched laughter.


I said, “I’m not flying to London to fix your skillet.”

The great man conceded: “I suppose not.”

Macrae, a big man physically, was great company. Actually, he was great in many ways.

 

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Norman Macrae, The Economist

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
From Louisville to Ukraine, Two Women and a Partnership of Help

From Louisville to Ukraine, Two Women and a Partnership of Help

Llewellyn King

Today will be a terrible day in Malawi, where more than 500 died in Cyclone Freddy last month, and everything is flattened. Today will be a terrible day in Turkey and Syria, where thousands died in the Feb. 6 earthquake and cities are piles of rubble. And today will be a worse day in Ukraine, […]

The Next Big Thing for Electricity — the Virtual Power Plant

The Next Big Thing for Electricity — the Virtual Power Plant

Llewellyn King

America’s electric utilities are undergoing a revolution — one which is quiet but profound. Since Thomas Edison set the ball rolling, utilities have made electricity in a central station and dispatched it down a line to a consumer. It was a simple transaction: manufacture, transport, sell. Now it is getting more sophisticated. So long a […]

Irish Exceptionalism — They Punch Above Their Weight

Irish Exceptionalism — They Punch Above Their Weight

Llewellyn King

The Irish punch above their weight. That is why worldwide, on March 17, people who don’t have a platelet of Irish blood and who have never thought of visiting the island of Ireland joyously celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. That day may or may not have been when St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, died in the 5th century. The […]

If We Keep Electrifying, We Will Run Out of Power

If We Keep Electrifying, We Will Run Out of Power

Llewellyn King

If you punch in “outage map” in a search engine, you will get a series of maps, ranging from the entire country to state by state and even smaller jurisdictions. These maps show electrical outages across the United States and territories, and they are within 10 minutes of actual time. The data come from the […]

Copyright © 2023 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in