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Now that the voices of the disenfranchised blue collar workers have been heard, what actually can be done to help them? I'm less worried about the accusations o

• happytrails 10y ago
  Those old jobs are never coming back.
  • imglorp 10y ago
    No, and it's going to get much worse when the coming automation waves hit. We need a sociological solution. Perhaps base income?
    • hx87 10y ago
      Yes to basic income--if democratic socialists and Milton Friedman can agree on an idea, it's worth trying out at least.
    • st3v3r 10y ago
      There is absolutely no way in hell basic income is anywhere near the table now. It's not even in the kitchen. It's been returned to the grocery store.
      • nkrisc 10y ago
        Which is unfortunate since many of these out-of-work Trump supporters who are never getting their factory jobs back would likely benefit from basic income.
        • madamelic 10y ago
          We have to factor in, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, some people are too proud to admit they need help. The reason they want Trump is he promised that he will make it where they can help themselves.
    • mason240 10y ago
      UBI can't work with the open border situation we currently have.
      • imglorp 10y ago
        Presumably it would only go to citizens, yes?
      • imglorp 10y ago
        Presumably it would only go to citizens, yes?
      • ahoy 10y ago
        Firstly, we don't have open borders. Secondly, why not? Lots of other social programs work with the present "border situation". No illegal immigrants are drawing social security or medicaid.
  • giardini 10y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. Robots will not be immediately cost-effective for all production and it may be 30 years before they permeate manufacturing. Until then humans will serve. I've complained on HN about the low quality of many goods (e.g., nail clippers) and about how the supply chain to US consumers today is no better than it was in my youth more than 50 years ago. Most of you were not yet around to know what the supply chain was like 50 years ago so please suspend your disbelief. QC in some countries appears impervious to consumer feedback; they couldn't produce a decent set of pliers 20 years ago and they cannot today. They may never succeed due to their unique social and political histories. Lack of communication and competitive feedback in non-free markets inhibits quality. In contrast USA manufacturers 50 years ago and earlier produced very high quality goods (many still in use!). I expect the USA to bring back production of high-quality goods and a more robust supply chain. Until someone invents a Star Trek replicator, I expect JIT inventory management to be discarded in many industries; it's primary benefit was bigger bonuses for MBAs. No education I know of available today will prepare youth for the future they face. Once machine learning and AI become widely embedded in manufacturing and commerce, skills required will be beyond the ability of most. Meanwhile grades are falling and testing becoming more lenient. Someday almost no one will have a job. We should plan accordingly. Just for fun, see the movie "Idiocracy ": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 Thread on IMDB discussing the relevance of "Idiocracy" to Trump's victory today: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/board/nest/257141945?ref_=tt_bd_2 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/board/nest/257141945?ref...
    • grzm 10y ago
      "QC in some countries appears impervious to consumer feedback; they couldn't produce a decent set of pliers 20 years ago and they cannot today. They may never succeed due to their unique social and political histories." Would you provide some examples of the countries you're thinking of? My inclination is that it's more a function of demand for cheap products and unwillingness to pay more for better quality even while complaining about the quality of what some are willing to pay for. Also, the generalization that all (or most) products coming out of a country are of equal in quality. Two counter examples come to mind as well. Japan and China have both been a source of cheap, low-quality goods during the last century, and both also produce some very high quality goods as well. I've also purchased very low-quality "Made in USA" products. And things change, including "unique social and political histories". Is it more accurate and useful to think of differences in QC in a general way or to look more closely at the incentives and circumstances at work? If I've mischaracterized your views, please do point it out, as that's not my intent. Thanks!
• moultano 10y ago
  Dramatically increase the amount of housing in urban areas so more people can move there and away from the places without any industry left.
  • helthanatos 10y ago
    There's a reason cities vote the way they do... Cities are terrible places of hate and murder and disenfranchisement...
    • helthanatos 10y ago
      "Oh let's down vote him because I don't like what he says" It's the truth
      • CamperBob2 10y ago
        No, you're being downvoted because you're wrong. http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it-turns-out-that-cities-are-the-safest-places-to-live/ http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it...
        • helthanatos 10y ago
          That's using misguided statistics and cherry picking. Enlighten me with real information.
          • CamperBob2 10y ago
            Sorry, I'm afraid I'm not your own personal Google.
    • helthanatos 10y ago
      "Oh let's down vote him because I don't like what he says" It's the truth
    • ocschwar 10y ago
• antidaily 10y ago
  Working poor voting HRC: http://i.imgur.com/RAaGDnW.jpg http://i.imgur.com/RAaGDnW.jpg Dems across the board stayed home. And 9% of registered Dems voted for Trump.
  • moultano 10y ago
    That's a red herring. The white working poor voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
    • antidaily 10y ago
      Not according to exit polling.
  • mason240 10y ago
    Oh boy, an online poll.
• dopamean 10y ago
  This is the crux of why Trump's pandering to them was total bullshit. He can't do anything to help them because the jobs that left aren't coming back. In four years they will be in the same position they are now but they wont have a black man or a Democrat to blame for it and so they wont be quite as bitter about it.
  • jhanschoo 10y ago
    Considering that so many of Trump's promises are infeasible, I'm wondering what Trump will actually do in office.
    • _audakel 10y ago
      Maybe he will more or less admit that alot of it was just theatrics, and he will go on to be a sane[ish] human being and normal[ish] POTUS
      • md_ 10y ago
        One hopes. But people did vote for whom he appeared to be. Even if it was an act, that is, to me, a scary thought.
        • chronic6l 10y ago
          The world is a scary place. Did you not know that? Bullies, liars, and cheaters win. That's the unfortunate truth.
      • st3v3r 10y ago
        And maybe I'll get a pony. And even if that somehow happens, those scenes from his rallies are not going away. The videos of people cheering racist rhetoric, cheering the idea of an entire religion being banned from the country, the idea of not giving a shit that someone confessed to sexual assault, is not going away. If anything, it's going to flourish.
        • deleted 10y ago
• ahoy 10y ago
  The working poor voted for Hillary. Trump's support comes from households making $50,00 or greater.
  • hyperpape 10y ago
    While it is true that Clinton carried voters making less than $50,000 a year, Trump did well with them for a Republican. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/exit-poll-analysis.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/e...
  • _audakel 10y ago
    it seems to be more accurate clustering division around rural / cities than rich / poor
  • cmdrfred 10y ago
    Interesting that right around that number the Obamacare subsidies fade away and are replaced by fines. These are the people getting the short end of the stick in regards to the ACA.
    • panzagl 10y ago
      Don't know why you're being downvoted- there has always been a bubble where you're too rich to get help, too poor to afford all the responsibilities you currently have. These are the people who voted Trump- they think they don't need the government to help them, they just need the government to stop hurting them.
    • karmicthreat 10y ago
      Unless they had health issues, acute or chronic. In which case the ~6K out of pocket limit was helping them. It provided a ceiling to help keep people from going bankrupt. Without Obamacare we are probably going to see a return of unlimited out of pocket, no drug coverage and a maximum lifetime benefit (Don't get cancer). So those people are going to get the short end of the stick still as they age.
• ynniv 10y ago
  Historically speaking, war is very effective at reducing unemployment. I'm not advocating it, but others will soon.
  • lmm 10y ago
    Perhaps a revived CCC would be a more, ah, constructive approach?
    • st3v3r 10y ago
      You mean something like Clinton proposed? Something that Trump wants no part of?
      • mastax 10y ago
        Trump has been harping on infrastructure spending the whole election. That certainly seems like the modern version of the CCC. Hopefully some of that money goes towards national parks and the like.
  • galago 10y ago
    It also seems to be following the same pattern as other industries in advanced economies in a that we're doing more with fewer employees.
  • programmarchy 10y ago
    So is breaking windows.
  • mch82 10y ago
    And in increasing national debts.
  • MisterBastahrd 10y ago
    There's almost a 100% chance that the country will be at war by the time Trump's first term is up. It's going to be his only shot at a second term given that he won't be able to run on nonsensical rhetoric anymore.
• adrr 10y ago
  Problem is you can't help them, they are self destructive. You need to change their culture of "learned helplessness". Read the book Hillbilly Elegy for a good perspective.
• lordnacho 10y ago
  Jobs that can't be exported are safe from movement. Hairdressing and cleaning for instance. That doesn't mean the person doing it can't be an immigrant, though, so perhaps by restricting immigration you reduce competition for it. Jobs that compete with similar jobs in other countries can potentially benefit from trade barriers. Make foreign cars expensive and there will be substitution with local cars. Long term it's worth thinking about whether there's a dependency created on that tariff. Higher minimum wage has been mentioned. In so far as demand from the firms is inelastic you improve the lot of the minimum wage workers. Question is whether it is. Moving from 7 to 12 sounds like a big jump, and will be very dependent on what part of the country it is. All these things depend on econometric measurement whose results I haven't come across.
  • simonh 10y ago
    > Make foreign cars expensive and there will be substitution with local cars. This is quite true, but the problem is those cars will be a lot more expensive. That means a small number of people employed making the cars benefit, while the vastly larger number of people buying them lose out in higher costs. This never works out to the benefit of the country as a whole and low wage earners are the ones that lose out the most. For every car those workers make, they buy dozens of other goods which, if more expensive due to trade barriers, more than soak up any increased wages they might have. Actually it's worse than that, because often many of those workers could have been gainfully employed is other industries. Only a small minority of our theoretical car workers would actually have been unemployed in a globalized world. It's the same with Brexit. The vote was driven by working class people on low incomes, but the impact of inflation from the fall of the pound and further economic problems when we do actually leave the EU will predominantly fall on them. Middle class people like me have enough marginal income to absorb the hit. People on low income don't.
    • sdenton4 10y ago
      The incremental improvements in averages aren't what's driving people to vote, though. We need to look hard at the situation in the rust belt, and figure out how we pull these people up, who have consistently lost in the game of averages and aggregation.
• mitchpron 10y ago
  Education. It's what Obama was emphasizing his entire presidency. Those jobs are never coming back, and even more are going to be automated. The education gap between rich and poor (and white and minority) is getting larger because of hoodlum-fearing mothers who support segregated neighborhoods and schools. Plus the poor-parent schools stay poor and the rich-parent schools stay rich. All of these factors together (which Democrats are actually interested in addressing) are growing an underclass of under-educated, unconnected people who can't make it in the world of the middle and upper class, so violence may become more frequent and jails will fill up. I doubt that the Trump administration and Congress have a plan that could come close to fixing this.
  • noobiemcfoob 10y ago
    Education helps the young, at least as our systems are built. The people vocalizing their opinion by voting for Trump are beyond the age where education can be the key (old dogs and new tricks, etc.). There isn't a will to go to an educational program. There is a will to work and support yourself, but no work for them to do... /because we can't get our shit together and fund infrastructure programs //Not bitter.
    • micaksica 10y ago
      > The people vocalizing their opinion by voting for Trump are beyond the age where education can be the key I hate seeing this meme. It is ageist and makes older people less likely to be hired for even their same jobs. Old people can still learn to do new things. The problem I see is that a lot of older people do not want to learn new things. Also, old people tend to have obligations such as family/child expenses, residence costs, etc. that they want to be compensated for even at an entry level. Rural conservatism has a lot to do with preserving tradition, that is, making sure things don't change from the old status quo you loved before.
      • noobiemcfoob 10y ago
        I didn't mean to imply that older people are incapable of learning. However, there are substantial barriers to that demographic to return to an education program precisely because it is a "return". Those barriers are far more social than anything else, yet they remain.
• danielweber 10y ago
  Raise my taxes to increase the EITC on low-wage workers.
• belorn 10y ago
  I can think of several things, from cultural long term changes, rhetoric and acknowledge of human struggle, to smaller changes on the local level. We could start by not calling them privileged, demeaning them in their struggle. Acknowledging peoples struggle in life is often the first step in helping a demographic, be that women, black, white, immigrant, American born, or what have you. As cultural changes, one would be to lower the harm from being unemployed. For men, too much of social value and social opportunity is tied to being employed and having a high earning potential.
  • woodchuck64 10y ago
    > We could start by not calling them privileged, demeaning them in their struggle. We don't call them privileged. Rather, they hear the insults and put-downs they want to hear by tuning in to customized news and propaganda that confirm their deepest insecurities. > As cultural changes, one would be to lower the harm from being unemployed. For men, too much of social value and social opportunity is tied to being employed and having a high earning potential. Re-engineering the social brain so that status doesn't matter? Wow. I doubt you'd have anything like homo sapiens after that.
    • hx87 10y ago
      >Re-engineering the social brain so that status doesn't matter? Status will always matter, but you can change the signifiers of status. There are plenty of places in, for example, rural China where women do most of the work while the men mostly stay home, and yet the men do not lack for status because of that.
      • woodchuck64 10y ago
        Women doing backbreaking work in the (rural) fields while the men stay at home with the children? Citation needed!
        • hx87 10y ago
          The Mosuo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo) are the most well known, but many ethnic groups in the southwest operate in similar ways. I grew up in a family belonging to one of them, so it always seemed strange to me when people claim women can't do physically demanding tasks.
• mch82 10y ago
  As a community we need to create more tools like WordPress that decentralize wealth creation and create jobs. We need to create fewer tools like Medium that centralize wealth creation and eliminate jobs.
  • jmkni 10y ago
    When the only tool you have is a hammer
    • mch82 10y ago
      Well this is hacker news, so I figured code is at least one tool this community has the ability to apply.
  • inimino 10y ago
    I appreciate your passion for decentralization, but these issues go a bit beyond what kinds of software we write. The issues this election raised aren't going to be solved by writing code.
    • _audakel 10y ago
      Code is just automated human thought. If we can think of a solution code just carries it out at 100Bx / second
    • Frondo 10y ago
      Too true. If you want to start steering political life according to your values, next election cycle, pick a candidate for city/state/federal/whatever, or cause that matters to you, and give them 10 hours a week of your time. They might win, and you might have your issue or values better represented at your city/state/federal/whatever. If they lose, you get up and do it again the next election cycle.
      • eru 10y ago
        The smaller the election the better, actually. Because your influence will have a greater relative weight. Though, the vote that you can do that has the most influence on you is the vote with your feet.
• Asdfbla 10y ago
  I think it's an interesting issue because Trump pretty much stands for nothing that could help those people. Maybe the nth time is a charm and the incoming tax breaks for the wealthy will eventually trickle down, but I doubt it.
• venomsnake 10y ago
  Solar, wind, repairing of roads and bridges and building and tightening of low skill immigration. There is a load of blue collar work that can (and urgently needs to) be done in USA. Building a single wind turbine are dollars for R&D, truckers, manufacturers, maintainers, people that install and pour concrete, electricians, miners and so on ... And also maintaining and repairing the old stuff. The North Dakota oil boom showed that if there is work to be done, blue collar's willingness to do it is there. Is is mostly a matter of will.
  • blocktuw 10y ago
    I thought we would get an infrastructure boom from Obama during the Great Recession. We went through 2 huge rounds of spending that mostly went to "shovel ready" projects. From my understanding, today's construction budgets are tied up in capital costs like heavy machinery and materials. There isn't much need for labor anymore with automation and specialized equipment. There is also the issue of planning out infrastructure improvements. With environmental reviews that can take decades and lawsuits that occur after that, it is extremely difficult to pull the same type of "New Deal" programs that happened during the 1930s. My guess is for all the spending, very few people would end up employed. Is the goal employment at any cost, or providing people without jobs welfare?
    • venomsnake 10y ago
      Trump has years of experience in real estate development. I am sure he can pass project trough the regulators. The critical variable is what is the Congress willing to do - if the Republicans embrace the blue collar workers - a lot can be accomplished. Right now republicans have a chance to shape the country for a generation. And I hope they will see how rewarding the working class could benefit their big corporate donors - because america need a new middle class that can consume everything that corporate america produces. And infrastructure spending is hard to resist to - it will benefit even Democratic districts.
• stefs 10y ago
  reddit user TPKM's comment on the sanders-would-have-won-thread: "Support for Trump, much like Brexit, was based upon an extremely widespread feeling that average people are not getting their fair share of the benefits of globalisation. This is neither a specifically Democrat or Republican problem, and people have been saying it one way or another for years. It was also the foundation of Sanders' campaign. The difference is that Sanders blamed deregulation and big corporate bonuses while Trump blamed immigration and open borders. I'm sure that there are elements of truth to both of these positions." i'm sceptical that trump, as a big corp owner, will do much to regulate and reign big corps in; if that's really the case we'll now see if curbing immigration is an actual solution to the problem. (personally, i doubt it - it has failed in other countries already) so, let trump do what he promised and see how it works out. if it doesn't, try the other method next. for me it's easy to say because i'm not an u.s. citizen and have no desire to move there (i think my country will be in the same situation in a couple of weeks though); it's not like it wouldn't affect me, but i can't change it anyway.
  • micaksica 10y ago
    > curbing immigration is an actual solution to the problem. Curbing immigration won't be a solution to the problem; it's just a highly visible one. Each immigrant that is looking for a job in the US is taking one away from the supply for an American. That is how the Trumpistas see things. Economically, sure, that's true. The immigrants take jobs from the labor supply. What people don't see is that aside from ones on skilled visa programs is that these jobs are either 1. underpaid by minimum wage or 2. not jobs that these people actually want anyway, so at worse you will see a lot of inflation, or a lot of open job positions. It doesn't make sense, but it won't really make sense.
    • hx87 10y ago
      > so at worse you will see a lot of inflation Personally, I wouldn't mind inflation if all workers are paid a decent wage as a result. For far too long inflation has been too low and confined to precisely the wrong sectors (i.e. land, health care, education). It's time for workers to get their share of the action.
• jernfrost 10y ago
  You can do what the democrats have talked about, which we have successfully done in Nordic countries which is to spend a lot of money on re-educating the workforce and making sure those at the bottom get decent skills. I grew up in a rustbelt like industrial town in Norway. We has shipyards, glass factory, paper mill, textile industry, lock systems etc. Almost all of it got closed down and moved overseas as I grew up. But we never ended up in the deep pit blue collar America ended up in, because government took a very active stance early to fight this with active policies. In towns where factories died, they moved public sector jobs from the capital. People got a lot of retraining for new jobs. There is a strong system for vocational training in technical jobs like Germany so people could get skills for more advance jobs which was easier to keep when competing against asian industrial giants. Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools. And when economic times got harder it never hit blue collar works as hard as in America because we have free universal health care, heavily subsidized childcare, good pensions for everybody. Basically the welfare system we built up saved our blue collar workers. Yet Americans pretend that there is no solution to this problem except attacking minorities, Mexico, China etc. It is rich people like Trump and their agenda, which has made sure that blue collar workers in America have felt the influence of globalization harder than many other blue collar workers in the west.
  • neves 10y ago
    You can't compare Norway, a high educated small country full of petromoney with the rest of the world. The recipe can't be reproduced.
    • Inthenameofmine 10y ago
      The US has per capita more natural resource money than Norway. It just got privatized.
    • kogepathic 10y ago
      > The recipe can't be reproduced. Yes it can. According to Wikipedia, Sweden has lower economic inequality than Norway does. [0] And the percentage of income held by the poorest 10% is nearly the same across Nordic countries. [1] I have quite a few friends from the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and they are quick to tell you that things aren't perfect there, but I think you can say that government policies can create a more equal society even in countries without petromoney (e.g. Sweden). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality [1] http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EuropeIncomeShareMaps.jpg http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Eu...
• norea-armozel 10y ago
  Well first, the DNC needs to stop sucking up to Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites. They should've gone with Sanders and stop tipping the scales for the Clintonistas just because they got connections with the elites. Hillary had her shot in 2008 and that should've been that. So they need to pull left...HARD. No more limousine liberalism. As for the RNC, they really really really really need to stop propping up the evangelical vote. Mike Pence and his ilk need to stop forcing their faith onto the rest of us (who still support things like gay marriage) have decided on a decade ago. Gay marriage is here to stay. Us "trannies" are gonna use the restroom that best fits our gender identity (man, woman, neutral, whatever). And the RNC really needs to stand by the promise of standing up for the Rust Belt workers. It doesn't have to be some protectionist claptrap that Trump spewed but something practical and reasonable. Especially something that'll pay for the healthcare that's sorely needed not only for the poor but the elderly who voted for them (whether they like it or not many of those folks won't be able to pay for their insulin, heart bypass surgeries, and the like from their 401ks). Sorry for the crude language. I'm just annoyed by what I've seen in social media from liberals and conservatives on this. It's time for real change and not the smoke and mirrors they've been playing since Bill Clinton.
  • itchyouch 10y ago
    unfortunately, for the RNC, the evangelical vote is still a significant portion of the population and people are still voting on issues like gay-marriage & abortion. I asked my gramps in-law why he voted for Trump and it was purely due to anti-abortion & gay-marriage. Non internet-connected gramps has no idea that Trump would only have those positions because it's an RNC position, not because Trump's actions show said beliefs.
    • RealGeek 10y ago
      > unfortunately, for the RNC, the evangelical vote is still a significant portion of the population Trump has exposed that the evangelical voters are hypocrites who don't practice what they preach. Their goal is to impose their religion on us. They are totally enamored with a candidate who has profited off strip clubs, cheated on his wife, married multiple times, sexual assaulted women and bragged about it, and appeared on the cover of the nation’s pre-eminent porn magazine. But they are offended by Beyonce's songs. This is an opportunity for GOP to move away from evangelical appeasement, but no... they will double down on it.
• blakeyrat 10y ago
  I live in a relatively small suburb of Seattle. I'm a software developer. There are no jobs for me where I live. None. None within 20 miles. The only job for me is in Seattle or Bellevue or Redmond, an hour-long commute. I love where I live, and I don't want to live in Seattle (which I could barely afford anyway-- I like owning a house). I also don't want to exclusively work-from-home and be cut-off socially from my co-workers. It sucks. (And as I've griped before, this is only true of a couple professions, and software developer happens to be one of them. If I had become a lawyer, I could work in any town in the US. Or a plumber, or a doctor, or a school administrator, or a tow truck driver, or a...) I'd just be happy with some policy that spreads these companies out a bit. Maybe a tax benefit for opening office space in communities under a certain population size. I'm not sure how it would work. All those angel investors propping up tech companies could also be propping up small town economies merely by moving their offices outside of Seattle, Bellevue, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. The last company I worked for had 55 employees, about a dozen of which were software developers. That 55-person company means nothing to Seattle. Not even to the South Lake Union neighborhood. It's not even a blip. But it'd be part of the lifeblood in a smaller town. It'd also help cut the commute for everybody, be able to recruit technical workers like myself who don't want to live in a big city, etc. Anyway, just a thought, hopefully relevant to this site. Meanwhile I go back to the jobs site, sigh heavily, and judge positions on how close they are to the bus stops...
  • rconti 10y ago
    This feels like an issue with the way our cities and towns are designed, sadly. (I grew up in Bellevue and worked in Seattle).
  • laserDinosaur 10y ago
    >The only job for me is in Seattle or Bellevue or Redmond, an hour-long commute I don't mean to belittle your situation but..an hour seems like fantastic commuting time. Most people I work with take an hour to an hour and a half to get to work. Up until our office moved there was two guys that had a 2 hour trip into work every day. Most people I know would kill to have an hour commute.
• zanethomas 10y ago
  I believe you're incorrect in asserting that the election was about "disenfranchised blue collar workers". My daughter and her husband make about $200k per year and they voted for Trump. She's describes Trumps win as a great big middle finger to career politicians.
  • nkrisc 10y ago
    Some might call that cutting off your nose to spite your face.
    • oldmanjay 10y ago
      There is no limit to the stupid shit people like to say when their political opinions aren't accepted as gospel by others.
      • nkrisc 10y ago
        I suppose in this case I might be wrong. At $200k annual income they are probably well positioned to benefit from his policies, as opposed to his lower income supporters.
  • rconti 10y ago
    There are people who spraypaint unintelligible garbage on highway overpasses and key peoples' cars as a big middle finger to society, too. It's all just trolling. It's not to gain anything. It's to make things worse for everyone else.
    • icantdrive55 10y ago
      His relatives voted? How are they Trolls? It might have to get worse, before it gets better? They apparently voted for Trump because they don't believe in career politicians. They did not just sit, and complain. Sometimes, the biggest complainer in the village brings on change. (I'm really tired of the word Troll. We need to stop using this Interweb speak. It's just played out. The slightest critism, "She's a Troll!" It's done. Let's put these words away? Let's leave them to the Wayback Machine?)
• criddell 10y ago
  It's very interesting to me that so many union households voted Republican. If the Democrats can't rely on organized labor, they really are screwed. Are the Demnocrats a party of elites and the Republicans a populist party now?
  • eru 10y ago
    The Democrats used to own the south, and the Republicans freed the slaves. The two parties traded constituents since then. They might do so again. Or one of them might implode---like the earlier antagonist of the Democrats did before the Republicans came around.
• Shivetya 10y ago
  Honestly I am hoping Donald Trump is more centrist than many people expect. While he touts protectionism to the point of blocking access to the country his other ideas are pretty much down the middle of the road with regards to rebuilding the country itself. A lot of his ideas are not hard right Republican. He openly embraces gays and will make many of them in the Republican party feel more welcome. He has allies of all races and even pulled in record Hispanic votes. So the first signs will be, who composes his cabinet? Who will be his advisors be? How much of a role will Pence play? Will he give equal time to leadership from both parties? With both parties approach with hostility or be willing to give it a try? Still when I view the race, I really want to know if Democrats think it was worth it to become a party whose candidates are selected on what they are first compared to what they believe. Why was the "party of the people" the side with the least number of candidates? I would ask the Republican party, why do you continuously try to for far right cultural view points and such candidates when conservatives want you out of our personal and financial lives both? Sadly no candidate championed privacy and freedom of self but there is a chance that change might have actually finally reached the White House
  • pyre 10y ago
    > when conservatives want you out of our personal and financial lives Do they really? There are a lot of people that view the Republican Party as their ticket back to an idealized Leave It to Beaver world, which is definitely NOT the government getting out of your personal life (make homosexuality illegal, bring back "separate but equal", make sure that minorities "know their place", etc). Still others see it as a the path forward to a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. The same people that eat up Bill O'Reilly's "The War on Christmas" segments and get outraged that Christmas is "under attack" by the evil Liberals that want to destroy Christian values.
    • yourapostasy 10y ago
      These sentiments come from an extremely-well-organized, but minority faction of the party. If these were majority sentiments, then legislation pushing those sentiments would have progressed far faster than they have. Back in the 60's, the evangelicals started to learn the ropes of party machinery, primarily crystallizing around the abortion single-issue. During the 70's, they started to take up positions throughout the party and attempt to dominate it, but the Rockefeller Republicans trounced them. To their credit, they licked their wounds, learned their lessons, and kept coming back spoiling for another fight. In the 80's they consolidated their power. Today in the largest state Republican party, they absolutely control all the chokepoints of power, they vote virtually in lock-step, but they don't have the numbers to completely dictate policy and seed their own hand-picked and -groomed candidates at the national level. The parliamentarian is an evangelical, most times the convention chairman is either evangelical or strongly allied to them, and key committee chairmen who have a lot of control over which party members participate in the committees and advance to the next convention level are evangelicals. Your level of participation in the party is contingent upon passing one or more litmus test(s): for certain key levels, you are interviewed to state your positions on their hot button topics (abortion is a favorite). While small in numbers, they carry a huge stick, and they're utterly ruthless political knife fighters, as many Ron Paul supporters found out. They're very tightly coordinated and highly prepared: as an example, they come to district and state conventions prepared with earbud FRS radios so they can confer upon split-second decisions on the floor. While they don't quite have the numbers to be the party unto itself, they dominate the voting plans of the congregations that send them to the party, so they make a formidable voting bloc. The end result is they can exert enough pressure to force the Republican party to adopt objectively terrible policy planks (no-abortion-no-exception even in medically-dire situations where both mother and fetus can die, really?), that then don't make it into national legislation. But just like before, they keep trying, learning, and adapting.
• threatofrain 10y ago
  I think the only decent destiny left for the unskilled undemanded worker is one of welfare, but those same voters have vicious attitudes about welfare and those on welfare. It's not reasonable to retrain this coincidental generation of unskilled undemanded workers, especially not when our nation still has a bad education resource problem. Pedagogical expenditure should go to those who are most likely to experience the largest impact, and that's children. Also because any training program you develop has to work <fast> and <soon>. Also because there are no fast and easy training programs that have high efficacy rates. Trump and some laborers have talked about bringing manufacturing back to the US. But this is by far the most impossible demand. Tariffs on Mexico and China won't persuade a metaphorical Foxconn to bring a Shenzhen analogue to the US. Shenzhen works because China and the rest of the Chinese people are okay with Shenzhen style workers breaking their back for the rest of the nation, and China can quash any worker malcontent, union, or any collective action. There's no way that people would be okay with that here. And with all the companies of the world racing towards robotic labor and domain applied machine learning, the kinds of US manufacturing job growth here will be few, high paying, and highly technical. But these innovations will mean net fewer manufacturing jobs, even as manufacturing may go up. And the fact that driving is one of the most frequent jobs in most states of the US, and with Uber having made an automated truck delivery of beer recently... there's no way that manufacturing jobs will keep pace with job loss. These people are screwed without welfare, and after welfare, there's nothing else to be done for them. They're a $100 barrel of oil in the ground that costs $105 to extract.
  • sabarn01 10y ago
    The argument could be made to role back the clock make import tariffs very high and limit automation. If I'm unskilled why would I not join a political revolt to limit the effects of my future irrelevance.
    • threatofrain 10y ago
      If you're an unskilled and undemanded worker, you cannot simply join a political revolt in <one> nation. Every major company in the world is racing for robotic manufacturing and machine learning-applied services and products. A robotic future is very amenable to elite interests in all corners of the globe.
• ProAm 10y ago
  > Now that the voices of the disenfranchised blue collar workers have been heard, what actually can be done to help them? You are 100% correct. Trump wont do anything about it, but now that the message has been sent and heard I think the next election in 4 years is where we will see this being addressed an hopefully some change for these people. The people want change, now they've been heard. Both political parties were decimated in this election, I think they'll try harder next time for the people.
• mtkd 10y ago
  You can stop incentivising off-shoring of jobs - it's too easy for companies to close down profitable activities and move them abroad to make more profit If you drive out of any city in US or EU you'll see the devastation that has caused
  • eru 10y ago
    I've been around Europe. What devastation are you talking about? It's a diverse place.
  • vkou 10y ago
    How can you stop incentivising automation of jobs?
    • lliamander 10y ago
      By not making labor prohibitively expensive (automation will still happen of course, but at a slower rate).
      • vkou 10y ago
        When you make labor not prohibitively expensive, these jobs can't pay their workers enough to put a roof over their heads, and food on their table. If your job can't provide poverty-level income, you aren't helping.
    • SketchySeaBeast 10y ago
      Make robots pay taxes!
• MisterBastahrd 10y ago
  You're talking about a demographic who, by and large, distrust experts, scientists, educated people, and any information that doesn't agree with their biases. They chose to be this way.
• j2kun 10y ago
  This is simply not true. The exit polls suggest it's middle and upper middle class who primarily voted for Trump.
• BenoitEssiambre 10y ago
  If central banks of the western world had run countercyclical monetary policy meaning higher than average inflation when unemployment was high, these people would have had almost uninterrupted jobs and careers, not just people in educated urban centers. I know people don't grasp this because it is all very mathematical but hawkish monetary policy was a massive factor in this. This graph summarizes the situation: https://twitter.com/kocherlakota009/status/796190076921376769 https://twitter.com/kocherlakota009/status/79619007692137676... Here is my attempt at an explanation: https://medium.com/@b.essiambre/the-world-deserves-a-pay-raise-302f25efd82a#.pf6u86wtc https://medium.com/@b.essiambre/the-world-deserves-a-pay-rai... But also taking a more sociological perspective, if you haven't seen it, this Cracked analysis is worth a read: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on... As well as this older Scott Alexander post: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
• samcodes 10y ago
  I am an engineer, not an economist or policy wonk, but I feel like I got a lot of insight on issues like this (and a lot of other modern, political/economic issues) from reading "Connectivity" by Parag Khanna
• lumberjack 10y ago
  Whatever it is, you do to help, you cannot do it without a cost. And I think the problem in the US is less about what can one do to help and more about nobody wanting to be burdened with the cost. And then people say that economic inequality is not a problem. This is exactly why economic inequality is a problem. Because you end up in situations where 1/3 of the country needs to be taxed to help the other 2/3 and that 1/3 does not feel like helping because they don't see any gain from it.
• icantdrive55 10y ago
  I don't know either. 1. I think degruglation in a lot of industries might help this demographic. I think his administration will make doing things in this society easier. My hope is his administration makes building that house easier. (I hope he come down hard on these little town/counties--that make doing anything complicated/expensive.). My hope is his administration will lift restrictions on the little guy. A lot of hope. 2. That's it, "I don't know either". I do know the current status quo was unacceptable for a lot of "disenfranchised blue collar" workers. I'd be careful with the "blue collar" label. The typical IT guy is a blue collar worker. Most people in tech are just a body. It's a profession that doesn't have a huge barrier to entry; just like a lot of blue collar workers. It becomes so true once you hit 35. "On to the next self-taught young, hungry person." The eletism in this current, oh so changing industry, is hard to take some days. Every one of you should be saving money. The party doesn't last long. I'll get heat for this; I know too many former Programmers that are literally homeless. 3. My hope is if things don't get better, it's only four years. My hope is the senate, and house become democratic. We then vote for someone like, a less liberal Bernie Sanders. (This is my biggest hope.) 4. I'm leary much will change because money will still control politics. Keep up the heat Wikileaks. 5. So--we will see.
• farright 10y ago
  The payoffs to education are huge [0]. People need to be prepared for the new economy which requires college degrees and has fewer low-skill jobs. The left laid the groundwork for Trump's victory (assuming Blue color Whites are really the cause, I think it's not the only factor myself) by promoting the idea that the new economy is unfair. Of course they mainly meant unfair to blacks and hispanics but whites got the message anyway. If we want to help people thrive in capitalism, we need to avoid leftist narratives that are wrong, i.e. the narrative that education won't improve one's situation because capitalism always screws the little guy. [0] http://inequality.stanford.edu/publications/20-facts-about-us-inequality-everyone-should-know http://inequality.stanford.edu/publications/20-facts-about-u...
• treenyc 10y ago
  US president has remarkably little power to make any change to the existing system. The real change has to be done on the local grass root level.
  • ambicapter 10y ago
    He has a republican senate and house.
• Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > what policies can be put in place specifically to help this demographic? The overall tenor of change in recent decades is flat-out throwing them under the bus. In almost every way, the global society moves in directions that conspire to make this whole class of people extinct. Short of stopping global progress, I see no long-term "solution" for them.
• jasonjei 10y ago
  The problem is automation and technology is getting so good that we don't need that many people working anymore. Autonomous vehicles have a very good shot of displacing a lot of jobs in a few decades. You can't also tell people in their 50s and 60s that you'll educate them for a new profession. I remember an MIT economist Zhou Lin said this would be one of the big problems of our generation. I suspect Basic Income would have helped in the interim.
• bjourne 10y ago
  The unemployment rate in the US has shrunk from about 10% in 2009 to 4.9% in 2016. The homicide and violent crime rates has also continued to shrink from a peak in 1992. By any statistical measure you can think of, the US population is doing better today than in 2008.
  • james_pm 10y ago
    Except that 4.9% rate is a) an average across the country, and b) not reflective of the true rate of unemployment. ShadowStats suggests the real rate (including those who have given up on finding work) is more like 23%. In certain areas of the country (the rust belt, for example), it's higher than that.
    • bjourne 10y ago
      I've only made a cursory glance, but the statistics on that site appears to be the work of an MBA named John Williams. A lot of other sites claims to have debunked ShadowStats.com and that their data is flawed. In addition to that, no other source claims that the US employment rate has stayed constant since 2010. Oh, and to explore the data he is using to draw the graphs you need to be a SGS subscriber which costs $89 for six months. In Pennsylvania (which I think is the center of the Rust belt) unemployment has decreased from a high of 8.7% to 5.3%. It is important to note that even if you believe the numbers are fudged, they aren't more fudged today than they were in 2008. Even if the real unemployment rate is double, that just means the decrease is from 17.4% to 10.6% instead.
      • aianus 10y ago
        > It is important to note that even if you believe the numbers are fudged, they aren't more fudged today than they were in 2008. No, it's certainly possible that more and more people have given up finding work since 2008, widening the spread between real unemployment and reported unemployment.
        • bjourne 10y ago
• james_pm 10y ago
  I'm so happy to see this at the top of the comments. It gives me hope that more people recognize that a vote for Trump in many cases wasn't a vote for the man, but rather a vote for some amount of hope that someone, somewhere recognized that their towns and cities were hurting and that they saw some path forward out of their situation. I don't know what the solutions are, but I have to believe that if we can talk about sending people to live on Mars and make cars that drive themselves, that we can come up with solutions to get jobs and economic prosperity to areas of the country that have been badly hurt over the last decade.
• sxates 10y ago
  Maybe we could subsidize decent health insurance? Raise the minimum wage? Build safety nets and expand social services? Except they just voted against all that.
  • ahartman00 10y ago
    Minimum wage was very popular. "Yet voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington all look set to approve ballot initiatives raising their states’ minimum wages" http://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/2016-election-results-coverage/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/2016-election-results-c...
• serge2k 10y ago
  > I'm less worried about the accusations of racism Why? They elected a guy endorsed by the KKK and white supremacists. At the very least this is a kick in the pants to minority voters (although 8% of black voters and 29% of latino voters went for trump).
• mythrwy 10y ago
  For the immediate, I think Trump addressed this in his victory speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL_wh-d1pP4&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL_wh-d1pP4&feature=youtu.be Rebuilding infrastructure. Construction (and associated services) jobs.
• WheelsAtLarge 10y ago
  Education is the way to prosperity. We can look at Trump's win a loud scream from citizens that are in financial pain. The current government has not met their needs and they spoke out loud with their vote. The greatness of our constitution is that every so often governmental changes happen without bloodshed. We can thank the wisdom of our founding fathers for that. The government's job now is to make sure that all it's citizens prosper as the global economic system changes. The tragedy of this election cycle is that the focus was not on how to make education available to all. We have a K to 12 system that does not produce a person that's ready for the workforce. It's expected that college is the next step. Yet college is such a financial burden on young adults that it becomes a problem rather than a benefit. First, we can't let that continue for the benefit of all. We need to make sure that education reform becomes the priority. Reform in terms of getting a person ready for the future rather than babysit them in schools. People like to focus on spending more money and adding technology but that's not the solution. It's a deeper problem in the structure of the education system and parental support. I hope for our good the new president can see that and move forward with reform.
• rmc 10y ago
  Socialism. Neoliberal capitalism isn't work. Why not take the wealth from the very wealthy and give it to those who don't have it? Income and wealth redistribution>
  • mmmpop 10y ago
    What a poorly thought-out out and even sophomoric thing to post.
    • ubernostrum 10y ago
      Want to have some fun? Read Alexis de Tocqueville on early American inheritance law. Using the law to redistribute, as a preventive measure against generational accumulation of wealth (and thus power), was woven into the fabric of the United States early on. Being against this type of redistribution, or deriding it as "sophomoric", is the new and non-traditional thing in America.
• pdx 10y ago
  This was posted separately, but flagged for some reason. It talks about what Trump will do first 100 days in office. https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/_landings/contract/O-TRU- https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/_landings/contract/O-TRU- 102316-Contractv02.pdf
• Nelson69 10y ago
  Is this a policy problem? I'd entertain a discussion that it was a policy problem and we should have had plans as we engaged in freer trade and globalization and saw imports starting to eat away at these jobs. I don't think there is a policy to put the genie back in the bottle now and I don't think these people want anything else but that. (to speak in gross generalizations) The old school manufacturing base provided jobs where a single earner with no notable education could buy a home, raise a family, maybe send his kids to college. And he had a union. It's hard to imagine it being that way ever again. You can re-train them but they aren't going to just become knowledge workers; worse they have to want retraining and this election sure didn't make it sound like they want that.. Capitalism and competition can be rough. Ways of life, jobs, ways of doing things, products, all that stuff can go away with ruthless efficiency in a free market.
• stcredzero 10y ago
  Now that the voices of the disenfranchised blue collar workers have been heard, what actually can be done to help them? My advice to progressive and left-leaning 20-something, 30-something people in the Bay Area: Stop denigrating that demographic! Donald Trump was a stealth 3rd party candidate, fueled by the dissatisfaction of huge swath of the US public whose fortunes are falling from majority middle class to minority lower class. Denigrating them only serves to divide our society further. The Democratic party needs to think of such people as constituents -- as it had once in the past. If you dump on them, they're of course going to dump back. It's only the upper 1% that benefits from that. It's called "divide and conquer."
  • Grishnakh 10y ago
    What, you don't think deriding them as "deplorables" is a good way to convince them to vote for a more progressive candidate?
• ocschwar 10y ago
  The big northern European takeaway is the principle of "protect the worker, not the job." Ironically, at this point, the Scandinavians are better free marketers than Americans, because they're willing to let entire companies go under if the market so dictates. The social safety net protects the workers, but not their jobs. Meanwhile, we get into so many interventionist contortions protecting COMPANIES, that our version of the free market is a sick joke.
• atlantic 10y ago
  Well, you could roll back globalisation and implement some form of protectionism, which is precisely what Trump has suggested. Outside the ivory tower of economic models, it does actually make sense. If a country is severely restricted in its capacity to import (an exception being made for raw materials), and has to produce most types of goods itself, then the economy tends to approach something like full employment. Meaning that although overall GDP is not maximised, but everyone has a job, and every industrial sector thrives. An additional advantage of protectionism is that it would put the brakes on global economic growth, which is the major driver of climate change and ecosystem destruction, but without the side effect of mass unemployment which would be inevitable if free trade remained operative.
• TYPE_FASTER 10y ago
  https://backchannel.com/canary-in-the-code-mine-903884eca853#.ih06l94bc https://backchannel.com/canary-in-the-code-mine-903884eca853...
• Nerdoid 10y ago
  This is going to rapidly become an image problem for the Bay Area and the tech industry as workers in other places and industries become obsolete. So it may well be in our own best interest to take the initiative. Is it possible for the tech world to seize the issue of worker retraining and a general safety net like it did with net neutrality? Brand and promote the hell out of it? I don't think the existing strategy of trying to fly under the radar will work for long.
• boggydepot 10y ago
  Karl Marx have put a great deal of time thinking about this. He's ideas are the basis of the Soviet Union. I believe he's analysis of our current system/economy is a real mind-opener and a must-read. Here's a quick intro on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWF_0lkBhjY&list=PLvoAL-KSZ32f2WAqejJdLM2ByZWKpREt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWF_0lkBhjY&list=PLvoAL-KSZ3... Imo, this is the system we need + human humility (e.g. to prevent corruption). Implementing it tho, will need everyone's cooperation; hence my writing of this comment.