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Or maybe the factory closing is a net benefit long term. Was losing millions of jobs in the farming sector a bad thing? Or the automation of the glass industry

Or maybe the factory closing is a net benefit long term. Was losing millions of jobs in the farming sector a bad thing? Or the automation of the glass industry in the 1930's and 1940's that increased production and cleaned up emissions? Is the move to driverless vehicles and what that'll do to the logistics industry bad? There's lots of examples of people losing jobs. That's sad for the individual, but long term it's generally good for the country. It'd be easy to say no to those forms of progress that hurt workers, but it'd be the wrong decision in the long run. No-one said making the right choice has to be victimless, or that the wrong one has to be hard.

gaius 10y ago
Sure, but telling an ordinary worker that they need to give up their livelihood in the now, for a net long term benefit that he or she may not live to see, is a hard sell.
- avz 10y ago
  > telling an ordinary worker that they need to give up their livelihood What you need to tell the worker is not that they need to give up their livelihood, but that they need to retrain. Still painful, but much less. Also, there are ways to reduce and relieve the pain of retraining. And who knows for many people acquiring new skills and contacts may even turn out to be exciting and fun. We need a politician with the guts to openly explain to the public that retraining is a necessity instead of fostering delusions that the old jobs can be kept. In fact, the progress in the development of self-driving cars combined with the fact that the most common job in most states is a truck driver [1] make this something of an emergency. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
- internaut 10y ago
  Harder still when wage growth has been this anemic for this long. The number of niches in the economy are not expanding. When the average worker gets laid off, he or she stays laid off. We could sprinkle the market with PhDs and it would solve nothing. The underlying issue is much more structural than the NYT wants to admit.
catawbasam 10y ago
Not saying you're entirely wrong, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you yourself aren't in immediate danger of having your job eliminated. If you were, I'm guessing you'd see another side of the story.
- Jsrs 10y ago
  I'd be a lot more sympathetic to that other side if the people most in danger of losing their jobs weren't overwhelmingly voting against socialism.

gaius 10y ago

Sure, but telling an ordinary worker that they need to give up their livelihood in the now, for a net long term benefit that he or she may not live to see, is a hard sell.

avz 10y ago
> telling an ordinary worker that they need to give up their livelihood What you need to tell the worker is not that they need to give up their livelihood, but that they need to retrain. Still painful, but much less. Also, there are ways to reduce and relieve the pain of retraining. And who knows for many people acquiring new skills and contacts may even turn out to be exciting and fun. We need a politician with the guts to openly explain to the public that retraining is a necessity instead of fostering delusions that the old jobs can be kept. In fact, the progress in the development of self-driving cars combined with the fact that the most common job in most states is a truck driver [1] make this something of an emergency. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
internaut 10y ago
Harder still when wage growth has been this anemic for this long. The number of niches in the economy are not expanding. When the average worker gets laid off, he or she stays laid off. We could sprinkle the market with PhDs and it would solve nothing. The underlying issue is much more structural than the NYT wants to admit.

catawbasam 10y ago

Not saying you're entirely wrong, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you yourself aren't in immediate danger of having your job eliminated. If you were, I'm guessing you'd see another side of the story.

Jsrs 10y ago
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to that other side if the people most in danger of losing their jobs weren't overwhelmingly voting against socialism.