Eager to Protect the Past, Oren Cass Would Harm Every Worker
Almost a quarter of a millenium ago, Adam Smith explained the cornerstone of the free market economy when he wrote in The Wealth of Nations that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of production.” Now, in The Once and Future Worker, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Oren Cass tries to turn that principle around, arguing that our goal should not be to improve our opportunity to consume, but to preserve the way we produce – ie, protect the jobs of the past.
Cass is essentially arguing that we do not work to live, but rather we live to work. To be precise, he argues for a public policy focus on maintaining a “labor market in which supporters can support strong families and communities.” The problem with pursuing 18th century economics is you end up in the 18th century. If successful, the result is a world in which nothing changes. But consider the advances the world has seen over the past 200 years, or even the past 20. Which do we want to reverse? Would we want to say goodbye to smart phones, laptops or Internet access? That would save a lot of jobs for telephone operators – but would it leave us better or worse off? Would we be prepared to give up Uber, online shopping, or HDTV and Netflix? That would save a lot of jobs in the cab industry, retail trade, and video stores – while undermining everyone who seeks efficiency, convenience, low cost and mobility.
Would we be prepared to give up MRIs, surgical robots, lithotripters, stem cell research? How about statins, beta blockers and anti-cancer drugs? All of these products are the fruits of an economy dedicated to meeting the needs of consumers, not producers. Would we prefer a return to the 1950s, with access only to cars that are not as safe, cheap and convenient? Would we want to revisit a time when Henry Ford could say that people can have whatever color Model T they want – so long as it is black? Or would we prefer not to have cars at all, but to travel by horse and buggy – with all of the restricted mobility and related diseases that entails?
Each of these innovations has resulted in the shedding of jobs. Each of these jobs represents a worker, a family, a piece of a community. But shedding them has bolstered many individuals, families and communities. Trying to halt this progress would not eliminate the challenges facing working class families, just change them – and make them infinitely worse.
What Cass is offering is Trumpism without Trump. The Once and Future Worker puts forward the same kind of nationalism and resistance to progress that Trump stands for – albeit much more coherently and articulately. Cass doesn’t seem to want to continually meet people’s evolving needs so much as preserve their opportunity to keep producing what they produce now. But we cannot combine a mid-20th century way of working with a 21st century way of living. New products are made available because people are willing to pay for them; old ones are abandoned because they no longer meet our needs, at least not as well as fresher alternatives.
The world is a better place today than it was 20, 50 or 200 years ago – not because we tried to keep it the way it was but because we continually improve the way it can be.
What then about Cass’ notion that economic change is eliminating jobs and undermining our ability to earn a living? Tell that to the Silicon Valley millionaires, or the many men and women who work for them at premium salaries. Rather than being short of jobs we are short of people with the skills to perform them. We urgently need people who can maximize the efficiency of a robot workforce, sit at computer screens and direct them, and quickly repair them when they break down. We need assemblers, fabricators and machinists. More than anything, we need entrepreneurs who can create, produce and market products that provide jobs for these people – while meeting the over-arching goal of catering to the needs, desires and tastes of a growing global market. It may seem unfair to rust belt cities and rural regions, but they received the opportunity to grow in the first place only because we shifted from artisanship to mass production.
The Once and Future Worker offers a road map for maintaining jobs by diminishing living standards. Our goal should be the opposite – improve living standards, and continually rejuvenate an economy piece by piece around them.
