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My hypothesis: people are either consciously or unconsciously afraid that most jobs will disappear in the near to medium future. This is manifesting itself in m

My hypothesis: people are either consciously or unconsciously afraid that most jobs will disappear in the near to medium future. This is manifesting itself in many ways (nationalism, etc.). Adults feel it, children feel it. Our leaders are doing their best to make us feel like they have it under control but no one has a good solution, and until we come up with something these problems are just going to get worse and worse.

dv_dt 8y ago
Ineffective action on climate change is a big part of it too...
- ams6110 8y ago
  Well a few decades ago it was nuclear annihilation. I was a teen then, and it was more scary than climate change if you were the sort of kid who worried about stuff.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    With the Cold War, you might worry about being attacked, but could feel that your own nation was clearly taking action to protect your tribe. That's not the case with climate change.
    - sevensor 8y ago
      But that's the thing about nuclear annihilation. Nothing can protect you from it. All your leaders can promise is that the entire planet will be unlivable, and not just our side of it. Cold comfort for a cold war. Different apocalypse than climate change, but just as bad.
      - dv_dt 8y ago
        Right or wrong, it was very visible that the US blockaded navies, invaded nations, formed alliances - fought in every way against the primary threat of the USSR. I lived through the same time, it was very obvious the government did things frequently and in many levels to fight the Cold war. Doing something, even if it doesn't reduce the core risk, reduces anxiety. (And I'm sure many people would say that many cold war actions actually did reduce the core risk too..) I suppose we're still invading nations, but now it's for little apparent benefit, and certainly not connected to climate change. What has the US done at the national level, especially recently, that's even easily within reach against climate change? People know - they feel it.
        ams6110 8y ago
        > What has the US done at the national level, especially recently, that's even easily within reach against climate change? Nationally? Not sure. I don't pay much attention to national news or politics. But every day? I see wind farms and solar farms going in all over the place. I see more and more people buying EVs. I see all the major automakers devoting significant R&D to EVs (thanks Tesla, even though your cars are too expensive for me, I do appreciate the kickstart). I see local utilities decommissioning coal power plants or converting them to natural gas. I see people seriously talking about nuclear power again. People are acting, and whether it really makes a difference or not it feels like it does. That was not the case in the Cold War times, when you felt it was all out of your control as an individual, and everything that was or might have been happening was top secret and invisible.
      - rchaud 8y ago
        > But that's the thing about nuclear annihilation. Nothing can protect you from it. If it happens. The whole point of the nuclear arms race was for nuclear-capable countries to deter one another from attacking. No such luck with climate change. We can try to slow it down, but the damage has been done.
  - nkingsy 8y ago
    We no longer fear nuclear annihilation because we have a functional global society. Climate change is already causing huge damage to this. Syrian drought -> refugees -> anti-immigrant sentiment -> populist leaders -> ++boomLikelihood
    - jpindar 8y ago
      The phrase "fire and fury like the world has never seen" doesn't sound familiar? I grew up in the cold war but I was never as viscerally afraid as I was this past year.
  - techdmn 8y ago
    The nukes didn't exactly go away though. We're still welcome to worry about it. :-)
  - pantalaimon 8y ago
    For nuclear annihilation, someone actually has to press the button. For climate change we just have to keep on doing what we already do - and in fact we are still accelerating. Droughts and famine are no joke, it feels every more likely we might be the last generation to experience prosperity. I think the only sensible conclusion at this point is hedonism. Enjoy it while it lasts.
    - imtringued 8y ago
      I think hedonism is the root cause of this problem...
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    My pet prediction is that nuclear annihilation will solve climate change. Now that we've forgotten how bad nuclear war is and destabilized all the major superpowers, it's going to become very tempting for some splinter group (or orange-haired maniac) to press the Big Red Button and launch WW3. Nuclear winter has a global cooling effect that's significantly larger than the global warming effect of global warming, plus if you get rid of all the humans you get rid of human-caused climate change.
- kaybe 8y ago
  It feels like living on borrowed time, really.
lainga 8y ago
Precisely the same reason for rising anti-immigrant sentiment. I wonder if many people holding said sentiments would feel differently if the economy was growing steadily, adding jobs for both them and newcomers. But it isn't, so competition is inevitable, and thus anxiety over competition.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  The economy is growing steadily...it has for 4-5 years now...
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    GDP is an imperfect measure. For example, the number of people below the 50% poverty line grew too.
    - refurb 8y ago
      The poverty rate has dropped for the 3rd year in a row and is almost to same levels as pre-2008 crisis.[1] In fact, near record lows over the past 50 years. [1]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/09/poverty-rate-drops-third-consecutive-year-2017.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/09/poverty-rate-...
      - dv_dt 8y ago
        I think what you are saying about the data is misleading. Look at the chart. The reason the poverty rate had a three year drop was because it was at at 10 year high around 15% starting around 2010, and only recently started dropping significantly. The "50 year low" is very misleading. If you actually look at the graph, the poverty in 1970 was 12.6%, and in 2017 12.3%. That's not a "50 year low", that's 50 years of essentially no progress on the poverty rate, especially when ten years ago it was higher. If you look at the people falling below 50% of the poverty line (deep poverty), that's had it's ups and downs too, but has had an overall slow increase of rate over the same time frame. https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-united-states https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
dspig 8y ago
The poor dears! In our day we only had the threat of nuclear war to worry about. And Acid rain. And Chernobyl. And...
- etrautmann 8y ago
  These existential concerns are still relevant, now with climate change too
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  Apart from being threatened by those and additional dangers, where there used to be "at least" genuine ignorance and hybris, now many people can't even overcome the peer pressure and/or their fear in order to not belittle these things (and that includes pseudo-intellectual rationalizations for not really doing anything, with lip service to "grave concerns" or whatever), and have to pretend to have dreams and successes on solid ground -- when they to are just on a raft cobbled together with duct tape, in an ocean that could be drained as a whole by random strangers before you can say "whoops". I suspect that can make people sick at a level they don't even have access to. I can't "prove this" and I wouldn't even try, but for me personally, the fact that the sun could explode or whatever, and the asinine things people do and go along with, are in completely different ballparks. I can easily make peace with my mortality, I can not make peace with what people do. That's why I think people can become very sick because of what people do, even though everything ends eventually, anyway, regardless of what anyone does. Nuking ourselves, and the suns in the universe giving out, those might have the same end result for us, but it still feels different to think about each scenario. One is a bit sad, but still peaceful, the other is just horrible and insane and leaves a gaping wound.
- rchaud 8y ago
  The "So what? in my day, things were much harder" argument doesn't hold because your parents' generation likely suffered through the Great Depression and WW2. Chernobyl sounds like child's play by comparison.
monkeynotes 8y ago
I am not sure it's just about jobs. Wealth in general is evaporating from the lower/middle class rapidly. There was a time when middle-class wages were kept in-line with inflation, this doesn't happen any more. The wealth is being syphoned away from the economy at large into the coffers of huge corporations/individuals who just warehouse the wealth. There is very much a sense of resources being scarce and it's due to those resources and wealth being taken out of the economy.
- Domenic_S 8y ago
  warehouse the wealth? that's not how it works at all!
  - mo1ok 8y ago
    Not sure if this is a joke or not, but that's actually what's happening right now - many large firms are literally just stowing cash: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-5-us-companies-with-the-biggest-overseas-cash-piles-2017-04-26 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-5-us-compani...
    - isostatic 8y ago
      I suspect the argument is that when $BIGCORP puts $1t in the bank, the bank gives out $900b as new loans
      - mo1ok 8y ago
        Ah, I see. Good point.
      - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
        I think investment is actually a measured variable.
      - madhadron 8y ago
        But that's not how money works. Banks don't loan money they have on deposit. They loan money they create from thin air, and are required to have a certain amount of deposits to potentially cover that if their exchanges with another bank become too imbalanced. That's what's called "leverage."
rchaud 8y ago
This is something I've feared for a decade now (completed my undergrad just as the financial crisis hit). Even before that, there were worries about customer support jobs being offshored. Airbnb, Uber, Fiverr, TaskRabbit etc are big companies built on the premise of 'you are your own boss'. I've yet to meet an Uber driver who does it because of his entrepreneurial bent. He drives Uber because his day job isn't enough to make ends meet.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  I'm not really sure of that - I've met several who have other jobs, some surprisingly impressive. My last Lyft driver was pursuing a doctorate in business management - previously he was a chip designer after getting his master's in electrical engineering. I've got a friend who drove for Uber for a few months while owning a SaaS business that did about $750K/year in annual revenue - he wanted to see what all the fuss was about, plus at the time they gave you a free iPhone with the Uber driver app preinstalled if you signed up. I've got another friend down in LA who regularly shares stories of interesting Uberpools she's been in, and there are a lot of screenwriters and aspiring actors in the bunch - which may fall into the "day job isn't enough to make ends meet" category, but they certainly have an entrepreneurial bent.
pantalaimon 8y ago
I feel like the impeding doom is more due to climate change than the loss of jobs. The rest of your hypothesis holds true for that though.
euvitudo 8y ago
Mostly, I think we worry too much. From this (and I agree with what is quoted below, as I'm in that group of folks who studied one thing and am now performing a different job): https://www.delltechnologies.com/content/dam/delltechnologies/assets/perspectives/2030/pdf/SR1940_IFTFforDellTechnologies_Human-Machine_070517_readerhigh-res.pdf https://www.delltechnologies.com/content/dam/delltechnologie... Not only will workers have many jobs, the tasks and duties of the jobs they’ll perform will be markedly different from what they studied. The experts that attended the IFTF workshop in March 2017 estimated that around 85% of the jobs that today’s learners will be doing in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. This makes the famous prediction that 65% of grade school kids from 1999 will end up in jobs that haven’t yet been created seem conservative in comparison. Also from WEForum: http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/chapter-1-the-future-of-jobs-and-skills/#hide/fn-2 http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/chapter-1-the...
trophycase 8y ago
I disagree. I think a lot of children see their parents commute 30-60 minutes both ways to a job they don't really like for 40 years, have few hobbies and life outside of work, see the massive damage corporations have inflicted on this planet, and see the massively corrupt government and think that there is no winning no matter how you slice it. I think the anxiety stems from having to be part of a system that they don't really want any part of, but ultimately don't seem to have any power to change.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  Hell, I'm 26 and see/think this. It's definitely one of the major reasons I never want to have kids, too. I fear for the future of the students I'm teaching, especially coming from a rural area that's fairly anti-intellectual...
techsin101 8y ago
"Basic income". Society where robots do most work has no need for 100% capitalism. Society where all work is done by robots has zero need for it.

dv_dt 8y ago

Ineffective action on climate change is a big part of it too...

ams6110 8y ago
Well a few decades ago it was nuclear annihilation. I was a teen then, and it was more scary than climate change if you were the sort of kid who worried about stuff.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  With the Cold War, you might worry about being attacked, but could feel that your own nation was clearly taking action to protect your tribe. That's not the case with climate change.
  - sevensor 8y ago
    But that's the thing about nuclear annihilation. Nothing can protect you from it. All your leaders can promise is that the entire planet will be unlivable, and not just our side of it. Cold comfort for a cold war. Different apocalypse than climate change, but just as bad.
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      Right or wrong, it was very visible that the US blockaded navies, invaded nations, formed alliances - fought in every way against the primary threat of the USSR. I lived through the same time, it was very obvious the government did things frequently and in many levels to fight the Cold war. Doing something, even if it doesn't reduce the core risk, reduces anxiety. (And I'm sure many people would say that many cold war actions actually did reduce the core risk too..) I suppose we're still invading nations, but now it's for little apparent benefit, and certainly not connected to climate change. What has the US done at the national level, especially recently, that's even easily within reach against climate change? People know - they feel it.
      - ams6110 8y ago
        > What has the US done at the national level, especially recently, that's even easily within reach against climate change? Nationally? Not sure. I don't pay much attention to national news or politics. But every day? I see wind farms and solar farms going in all over the place. I see more and more people buying EVs. I see all the major automakers devoting significant R&D to EVs (thanks Tesla, even though your cars are too expensive for me, I do appreciate the kickstart). I see local utilities decommissioning coal power plants or converting them to natural gas. I see people seriously talking about nuclear power again. People are acting, and whether it really makes a difference or not it feels like it does. That was not the case in the Cold War times, when you felt it was all out of your control as an individual, and everything that was or might have been happening was top secret and invisible.
    - rchaud 8y ago
      > But that's the thing about nuclear annihilation. Nothing can protect you from it. If it happens. The whole point of the nuclear arms race was for nuclear-capable countries to deter one another from attacking. No such luck with climate change. We can try to slow it down, but the damage has been done.
- nkingsy 8y ago
  We no longer fear nuclear annihilation because we have a functional global society. Climate change is already causing huge damage to this. Syrian drought -> refugees -> anti-immigrant sentiment -> populist leaders -> ++boomLikelihood
  - jpindar 8y ago
    The phrase "fire and fury like the world has never seen" doesn't sound familiar? I grew up in the cold war but I was never as viscerally afraid as I was this past year.
- techdmn 8y ago
  The nukes didn't exactly go away though. We're still welcome to worry about it. :-)
- pantalaimon 8y ago
  For nuclear annihilation, someone actually has to press the button. For climate change we just have to keep on doing what we already do - and in fact we are still accelerating. Droughts and famine are no joke, it feels every more likely we might be the last generation to experience prosperity. I think the only sensible conclusion at this point is hedonism. Enjoy it while it lasts.
  - imtringued 8y ago
    I think hedonism is the root cause of this problem...
- nostrademons 8y ago
  My pet prediction is that nuclear annihilation will solve climate change. Now that we've forgotten how bad nuclear war is and destabilized all the major superpowers, it's going to become very tempting for some splinter group (or orange-haired maniac) to press the Big Red Button and launch WW3. Nuclear winter has a global cooling effect that's significantly larger than the global warming effect of global warming, plus if you get rid of all the humans you get rid of human-caused climate change.
kaybe 8y ago
It feels like living on borrowed time, really.

lainga 8y ago

Precisely the same reason for rising anti-immigrant sentiment. I wonder if many people holding said sentiments would feel differently if the economy was growing steadily, adding jobs for both them and newcomers. But it isn't, so competition is inevitable, and thus anxiety over competition.

akhilcacharya 8y ago
The economy is growing steadily...it has for 4-5 years now...
- dv_dt 8y ago
  GDP is an imperfect measure. For example, the number of people below the 50% poverty line grew too.
  - refurb 8y ago
    The poverty rate has dropped for the 3rd year in a row and is almost to same levels as pre-2008 crisis.[1] In fact, near record lows over the past 50 years. [1]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/09/poverty-rate-drops-third-consecutive-year-2017.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/09/poverty-rate-...
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      I think what you are saying about the data is misleading. Look at the chart. The reason the poverty rate had a three year drop was because it was at at 10 year high around 15% starting around 2010, and only recently started dropping significantly. The "50 year low" is very misleading. If you actually look at the graph, the poverty in 1970 was 12.6%, and in 2017 12.3%. That's not a "50 year low", that's 50 years of essentially no progress on the poverty rate, especially when ten years ago it was higher. If you look at the people falling below 50% of the poverty line (deep poverty), that's had it's ups and downs too, but has had an overall slow increase of rate over the same time frame. https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-united-states https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

dspig 8y ago

The poor dears! In our day we only had the threat of nuclear war to worry about. And Acid rain. And Chernobyl. And...

etrautmann 8y ago
These existential concerns are still relevant, now with climate change too
PavlovsCat 8y ago
Apart from being threatened by those and additional dangers, where there used to be "at least" genuine ignorance and hybris, now many people can't even overcome the peer pressure and/or their fear in order to not belittle these things (and that includes pseudo-intellectual rationalizations for not really doing anything, with lip service to "grave concerns" or whatever), and have to pretend to have dreams and successes on solid ground -- when they to are just on a raft cobbled together with duct tape, in an ocean that could be drained as a whole by random strangers before you can say "whoops". I suspect that can make people sick at a level they don't even have access to. I can't "prove this" and I wouldn't even try, but for me personally, the fact that the sun could explode or whatever, and the asinine things people do and go along with, are in completely different ballparks. I can easily make peace with my mortality, I can not make peace with what people do. That's why I think people can become very sick because of what people do, even though everything ends eventually, anyway, regardless of what anyone does. Nuking ourselves, and the suns in the universe giving out, those might have the same end result for us, but it still feels different to think about each scenario. One is a bit sad, but still peaceful, the other is just horrible and insane and leaves a gaping wound.
rchaud 8y ago
The "So what? in my day, things were much harder" argument doesn't hold because your parents' generation likely suffered through the Great Depression and WW2. Chernobyl sounds like child's play by comparison.

monkeynotes 8y ago

I am not sure it's just about jobs. Wealth in general is evaporating from the lower/middle class rapidly. There was a time when middle-class wages were kept in-line with inflation, this doesn't happen any more. The wealth is being syphoned away from the economy at large into the coffers of huge corporations/individuals who just warehouse the wealth. There is very much a sense of resources being scarce and it's due to those resources and wealth being taken out of the economy.

Domenic_S 8y ago
warehouse the wealth? that's not how it works at all!
- mo1ok 8y ago
  Not sure if this is a joke or not, but that's actually what's happening right now - many large firms are literally just stowing cash: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-5-us-companies-with-the-biggest-overseas-cash-piles-2017-04-26 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-5-us-compani...
  - isostatic 8y ago
    I suspect the argument is that when $BIGCORP puts $1t in the bank, the bank gives out $900b as new loans
    - mo1ok 8y ago
      Ah, I see. Good point.
    - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
      I think investment is actually a measured variable.
    - madhadron 8y ago
      But that's not how money works. Banks don't loan money they have on deposit. They loan money they create from thin air, and are required to have a certain amount of deposits to potentially cover that if their exchanges with another bank become too imbalanced. That's what's called "leverage."

rchaud 8y ago

This is something I've feared for a decade now (completed my undergrad just as the financial crisis hit). Even before that, there were worries about customer support jobs being offshored. Airbnb, Uber, Fiverr, TaskRabbit etc are big companies built on the premise of 'you are your own boss'. I've yet to meet an Uber driver who does it because of his entrepreneurial bent. He drives Uber because his day job isn't enough to make ends meet.

nostrademons 8y ago
I'm not really sure of that - I've met several who have other jobs, some surprisingly impressive. My last Lyft driver was pursuing a doctorate in business management - previously he was a chip designer after getting his master's in electrical engineering. I've got a friend who drove for Uber for a few months while owning a SaaS business that did about $750K/year in annual revenue - he wanted to see what all the fuss was about, plus at the time they gave you a free iPhone with the Uber driver app preinstalled if you signed up. I've got another friend down in LA who regularly shares stories of interesting Uberpools she's been in, and there are a lot of screenwriters and aspiring actors in the bunch - which may fall into the "day job isn't enough to make ends meet" category, but they certainly have an entrepreneurial bent.

pantalaimon 8y ago

I feel like the impeding doom is more due to climate change than the loss of jobs. The rest of your hypothesis holds true for that though.

euvitudo 8y ago

Mostly, I think we worry too much. From this (and I agree with what is quoted below, as I'm in that group of folks who studied one thing and am now performing a different job): https://www.delltechnologies.com/content/dam/delltechnologies/assets/perspectives/2030/pdf/SR1940_IFTFforDellTechnologies_Human-Machine_070517_readerhigh-res.pdf https://www.delltechnologies.com/content/dam/delltechnologie... Not only will workers have many jobs, the tasks and duties of the jobs they’ll perform will be markedly different from what they studied. The experts that attended the IFTF workshop in March 2017 estimated that around 85% of the jobs that today’s learners will be doing in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. This makes the famous prediction that 65% of grade school kids from 1999 will end up in jobs that haven’t yet been created seem conservative in comparison. Also from WEForum: http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/chapter-1-the-future-of-jobs-and-skills/#hide/fn-2 http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/chapter-1-the...

trophycase 8y ago

I disagree. I think a lot of children see their parents commute 30-60 minutes both ways to a job they don't really like for 40 years, have few hobbies and life outside of work, see the massive damage corporations have inflicted on this planet, and see the massively corrupt government and think that there is no winning no matter how you slice it. I think the anxiety stems from having to be part of a system that they don't really want any part of, but ultimately don't seem to have any power to change.

dorchadas 8y ago
Hell, I'm 26 and see/think this. It's definitely one of the major reasons I never want to have kids, too. I fear for the future of the students I'm teaching, especially coming from a rural area that's fairly anti-intellectual...

techsin101 8y ago

"Basic income". Society where robots do most work has no need for 100% capitalism. Society where all work is done by robots has zero need for it.