Two weeks ago, a limousine driver in Manhattan killed himself in front of City Hall. He did it, he said in an earlier Facebook post, to show how services like Uber and Lyft had killed his livelihood. The New York Times reported that the mayor of New York said, “Let’s face it, for someone to kill himself there’s an underlying mental health challenge.”
No doubt.
Still, I keep thinking about that poor driver’s plight. When he started in the 1980s, he could support himself driving 40 hours a week. Lately he hadn’t been making enough to survive even driving 100 hours per week. Perhaps he had other problems, as Mayor de Blasio suggested, but his deteriorating work life was obviously a big contributor to his desperation.
Like coal miners in Kentucky, steel workers in Pennsylvania and textile workers in South Carolina, he was a victim of relentless economic change. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts that by 2030 up to one-third of American jobs may be lost to automation.
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari observes that the shift by humans from hunting and gathering to farming created more food to support population growth but resulted in worse individual living conditions. Hunter-gatherers had more diverse diets, more leisure time and were less isolated than their farmer successors, who had to toil alone morning till night to grow and harvest their wheat, which made up and unhealthy percentage of their diet.
According to Professor Harari, early tribes of humans could work well together up to a number of about 150. After that, communication and coordination got too tough and the group splintered. Only when humans invented fictions that people in disparate locations could rally around did that numerical limitation fall away. Religion, nationalism and corporations are fictions, he says—they don’t exist in reality, only in our imaginations—that permitted the species to work together in common cause by the thousands and millions. By enabling collaboration across geography and time, fictions gave us power that reality did not. In their thrall, or under their banners, we created mighty industries, cured diseases and went to the moon.
Still, our moral ethos in America, the subjective way we see reality, is through the lens of self-reliance. Carry your own weight; lift your share of the load. If China or Uber steals your job, go find something else to do if you want to survive.
It’s not quite that brutal. We do have a social safety net. But it’s pretty close to the ground, and it has quite a few holes. By the time you hit it, you’re pretty far gone. Those of us who are prospering are helping by paying taxes to support food stamps and children’s health care, but it’s not enough. There are a lot of desperate people out there who have been left behind by the dramatic economic changes of the last century. And the rate of change is picking up.
Working life in the United States today is a game of musical jobs. The music stops now and then and you try to take your place on the manufacturing line or at your office desk only to find it’s gone. You haven’t changed, the economy has. Maybe you can find another job, maybe not. Maybe the need for your skills is just gone and isn’t coming back.
The free-market economy works well overall, but it’s not always so good on an individual level. And it’s heartless. It’s up to those of us who benefit from its dynamism and efficiency to give it its heart. In the small tribes of yore, where the pain was plain on the face of your neighbor, and impossible to ignore, anthropologists tell us everyone pitched in to help the sick and the weak. In our huge national tribe, it’s easy to look away.
We need some substitute for the compelling immediacy of the up-close-and-personal suffering of a fellow tribe member. A compact that we make among ourselves, like the charter of a business that governs the conduct of its employees, or the commandments of a religion that guide its followers. Professor Harari would call it a fiction, and so it would be. A fiction we would honor as steadfastly and unquestioningly as we worship our gods. A fiction that would unite us behind the promise that when the music stops for someone, there will be a fund to support him, a fund to which we will all contribute as routinely and piously as we drop bills in the collection plate at church.
Instead of God or Google, we might call our new fiction “Rotation.” It’s a non-judgmental word and a good descriptor of what happens: people get rotated out of the economy by drought, poverty, bad health or technological change. Its objective—like the objective of a business to make and sell products, or of a religion to save souls—would be that no one who has been rotated out of productivity will go hungry or be left without health care. When the music stops for you, because your job disappears or for some other reason, you will not be abandoned.
All this might sound like little more than a linguistic gussying up of the welfare state. In a way, that’s right. It’s an attempt to set aside the political baggage associated with welfare and return our notion of personal responsibility to one another to the time when we lived in small tribes. In a nod to those ancient times, we might think of it as establishing a kind of modern volcano god to whom we offer tribute as a defense against the random savagery of the free market and the capriciousness of personal calamity. Or we could simply view it as an acceptance to our common humanity, a humble acknowledgment that “there but for fortune go you or go I.”
