So where were we? Oh yes: everybody hates us. San Francisco’s recent Google-bus and “homeless trash” kerfuffles are symptoms of an increasingly broad, deep, and bitter anti-tech animosity. The Economist predicts: “The tech elite will join bankers and oilmen in public demonology.” The New York Times concurs: “Tech workers have, rightly or wrongly, received the blame. Resentment simmers.”
Such ingratitude! What’s wrong with these warped, blinded haters?
…Well, OK, it might be the very real sense that these days, with software eating the world, if you’re not in tech, or you’re not already rich, then you are probably basically screwed for life. “We are in the midst of the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has known.” Unemployment remains high, and many unemployed “may simply give up looking for jobs once their benefits lapse.”
Meanwhile, US income inequality today is the highest that it’s been since 1928 — which matters especially because “the decline in middle-class incomes owes as much to rising inequality as it does to the depressed state of the economy.” The NYT recently highlighted a Brooklyn neighborhood where
the top 5 percent of residents earn 76 times as much as the bottom quintile … addicts gather outside a food pantry a block from $2 million brownstones
The economic doldrums have hit Europe, too, outside of Germany. Don’t even get me started on Spain or France: and as for the UK, well, the BBC recently reported that, for the first time, “More working households were living in poverty in the UK last year than non-working ones … low pay and part-time work has prompted an unprecedented fall in living standards.”
So just go get a good education! Right? Sorry, no. Even if you have a Ph.D.:
The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. … Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labour markets virtually everywhere. One of the hot topics in labour market research at the moment is what we call “dualisation.” Dualisation is the strengthening of this divide between insiders in secure, stable employment and outsiders in fixed-term, precarious employment.
Hell, even law school is a disaster nowadays. And total American student-loan debt exceeded $1.2 trillion this year. At that price, for many people, paying for higher education is almost like dumping your life savings into a lottery, or a casino; great if it works out…but absolutely crippling if it doesn’t.
So everyone can move to the tech sector! Again, sorry, no — or at best, not any time soon. You cannot reasonably expect to retrain significant numbers of people into skilled engineers, and there’s little-to-no room for the unskilled. (Unlike most fields, bad software engineers actually add negative value to the projects they work on.) Engineering is hard. Most people aren’t any good at it.
So people who aren’t rich, and aren’t in tech — the vast majority, I hasten to remind you — will increasingly become part of the precariat:
This is not just a matter of having insecure employment, of being in jobs of limited duration and with minimal labour protection, although all this is widespread. It is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations … had come to expect as their due.
Meanwhile, the rich, as a class, are behaving with their usual elegance, taste, and restraint. Finding new ways to evict tenants so they can charge higher rents. Reshaping corporations into what The Economist calls “distorporations.” “Ruining art for the rest of us.” And it’s hard to wander amid San Francisco’s new-growth luxury boutiques, artisanal coffee shops, and opulent social events without getting the sense that techies, too, are making decadent hay of today’s inequalities. I mused the other day on Twitter:
Sometimes I feel like we in SF/LA/NYC live in the modern-day Belle Epoque. Which is, to be clear, a backhanded compliment at best.—
Jon Evans (
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