Tag Archives: North Carolina legislature

All Posts, economy, poverty, public education

What is the future of our jobs?

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Today I’d like to introduce you to SAM. His full name is Semi Automated Mason.  SAM can lay as many bricks as three human masons.   He has only one year of experience and will become more skilled and productive as he continues to learn. On the other hand, SAM could become unemployed when on-site 3-D printing of walls becomes feasible.  It’s being tested now.

SAM’s story is important because it exemplifies a worldwide trend.  We are still in the early days of an economic and social upheaval that will be bigger than the industrial revolution; and we’re not prepared for what’s coming.  An Oxford University study identified jobs most and least likely to be replaced by automation.  Looking at the list, it becomes apparent that some among us will benefit from less expensive products and services produced through automation while others lose their jobs.

It’s going to happen regardless of what presidential candidates promise about creating jobs or trade treaties.  Even in China and undeveloped nations, automation is faster and cheaper than human labor.  That is true in the production of both “things” and services.  Human operators for elevators and long distance phone calls were displaced a long time ago.  Soon automation  will replace us in jobs as diverse as loan officer, manicurist, and drivers – not just drivers of taxis but also of trucks and buses.

In economic terms, this revolution means that fewer people can produce more goods and services.  The total amount of wealth available will increase.  Some of us will benefit from that but those who are replaced probably won’t.  If you’re old enough to remember it, think of what happened when mechanized agriculture drove down the cost of eggs, milk, corn, cotton and other products.   They became cheaper while previously successful farm families were devastated by agribusiness competition.  Today we can see  entire communities and families that are no longer self-sufficient because their jobs are gone.

The much-talked-about decline of the middle class is not primarily caused (and won’t be fixed) by tax or trade policies.  Instead, it is caused in large part by technologies that are cheaper and more productive than human labor.  This inevitable change brings opportunities along with threats.

What then, shall we do to prepare ourselves?

  1. Know the facts.  It’s particularly important for elected officials, educators, economic developers, city planners and business leaders to correctly anticipate the future and plan for it.  News media can improve public knowledge by researching  and reporting on these subjects.
  2. Understand the education and skills that will be necessary for success in the future economy.  I cringe when I hear someone say that, “not everyone needs to go to college.”  The statement is true of course, but it masks a more important truth.  Successful people will need to be able to learn at the college level.  Change will come at a pace that requires continuous learning of new information and skills.  The ability to read and learn at the level expected of a college freshman will be necessary for success in skilled trades, health occupations, and just about any field we can imagine.  It is a great disservice to children and parents to lead them to believe that they can succeed with less.
  3. Prepare community and regional infrastructure for success. For example, gigabit internet service will be more important than highways and railroads.  An increasing number of businesses require high-speed and high volume internet service at all of their locations. That’s often true of small startup businesses and may be true for in-home education opportunities.   Communities that lack gigabit service may be left behind as badly as those that lacked electricity, roads or railroads a century ago.
  4. Re-design public education and libraries to support lifelong learning so that all of us can continuously acquire new knowledge and skills as we need them, regardless of our economic status or geographic location.  We can discover ways to use the internet to deliver our finest instruction and most complete information to every American.

Issues of this kind should be on the agendas of national, state and local governments.  Instead we are arguing about voter IDs and bathroom privileges.  I don’t know all the answers, but I’m sure of one thing.  The people who find the right answers will be the ones who are asking the right questions.

 

All Posts, justice, north carolina, race

Silent Sam needs company

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The lady justice is depicted urging Sam to drop his books and his studies and go to war for the Confederacy. He looks victorious despite losing the war.
The lady justice is depicted urging Sam to drop his books and his studies and go to war for the Confederacy. Sam looks victorious despite losing the war.

While walking across the University of North Carolina campus, I paused to see the controversial statue of “Silent Sam“, a memorial to students who joined the Confederate army.  Some North Carolinians want it removed because it seems to celebrate the causes of racism, slavery, and rebellion against the United States.  Others want to preserve it and similar monuments across the Tarheel state that recognize those who served the Confederate cause.  They say that removing the monuments is tantamount to rewriting history.  The argument raises two questions.  What is the purpose of the statues?  Why did we fight a civil war?

Julian Carr, a wealthy Civil War veteran who delivered the keynote speech at Silent Sam’s 1913 dedication, made it clear that the monument was erected to honor and perpetuate the cause of white supremacy.  Here are a few of his words.  “The present generation…scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the Anglo-Saxon race…the purest strain of the Anglo-Saxon is to be found in the thirteen Southern States —  Praise God…One hundred yards from where we stand, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted…a southern lady…”  Today, a century after the statue was erected, that speech is proudly displayed on the website of the Durham Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The reasons for the war are evident in the reasons for secession declared by the legislatures of Confederate states:

Texas:  “…the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations…”

Mississippi: “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union…”

Southern state governments claimed slavery as a legitimate social structure that was vital to their economies and they saw the election of President Lincoln as proof that slavery would be ended in the United States.  Underlying slavery and the war was greed that justified ownership of humans, theft of their labor, sale of their children and accumulation of wealth through brutality.

Sons of Confederate Veterans hold ceremonies at the Smiling Sam statue.
Sons of Confederate Veterans hold ceremonies at the Silent Sam statue.

There are “heritage groups”  (a polite description) who regularly honor their ancestors’ loyalty to the Confederacy at its monuments, making speeches and waving battle flags while dressed in Confederate uniforms.  Siding with them this year, Republicans in North Carolina’s legislature made it illegal for local governments and state institutions to remove state-owned memorials; and they rejected repeated requests to stop issuing license plates featuring Confederate battle flags.

It is necessary to acknowledge history before we can rise above it.  Rather than rewriting their Nazi past, Germans acknowledged the holocaust and other horrors of the Third Reich with new monuments alongside Nazi concentration camps and symbols.  An alternative to moving Confederate memorials or preserving them would be to update them by adding a 21st century perspective.  Americans should support victims of Jim Crow laws and descendants of slaves in creating monuments documenting the evils that the Confederacy fought to perpetuate and erecting them beside those of the Confederacy.

Some will deny the comparison of the Confederacy to Nazi Germany, but they have much in common.  Eleven million people, six million of them Jewish,  died in the holocaust.  I can’t find an estimate of how many humans died as American slaves, but approximately four million were  emancipated in the aftermath of the Civil War.  Any estimate of the number who died during more than two centuries of pre-emancipation slavery would produce a count larger than the number of holocaust victims.  Is slavery a fate better or worse than a holocaust death?  I like to think that most humans would fight to avoid either one.

Now is the time to cease government sponsored glorification of the Confederacy, either by removing its monuments or by supplementing them with the values that we have learned in the century and a half since emancipation.  Republican legislators have not yet taken away the authority of local governments and universities to create new monuments alongside old ones.  We are the generation and now is the time for Americans to unite across lines of race and geography into one nation.  If not now, when?  If not us, who?

A victorious Union Soldier looks down in sorrow at fallen comrades

Urbana, Ohio's monument to returning and fallen Union soldiers comrades.
A Midwestern monument to returning and fallen Union soldiers