Gaslighting Attention Away From Workforce Investments
Gaslighting Attention Away From Workforce Investments
It won’t surprise anyone that I was a nerd in high school (still am!). But one of the best things about being a nerd in the high school I attended (North Catholic in Pittsburgh’s Troy Hill neighborhood) is that nerds were funneled into Mr. Lease’s calculus class in senior year.
I always liked math, partly because it was fun to find ways to simplify even the most complex and messy equations into less messy equivalents and then sort out the answer. Algebra, trigonometry, and geometry classes were filled with problems that were like puzzles. You could always find a clear answer if you followed the logical rules of math to simplify, simplify, simplify.
But then came Walt Lease’s class in calculus. Calculus puts math in motion. Calculus, specifically derivative calculus, doesn’t seek “an answer” to an equation with a specific set of variables. Rather, it seeks to describe how the answer changes as the values of multiple variables in an equation change. Change is not random. Change itself has underlying patterns that can be identified. And those patterns are lurking inside the original equation if you learn how to derive them. Mr. Lease didn’t just teach us the technical methods to derive those underlying equations. He took the time to explain what it all meant.
When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon, I learned how to use the methods of calculus to uncover the dynamics of more complex systems in science classes like physics and chemistry, where these methods could unlock our understanding of how change occurs in the physical world.
Yet I was even more fascinated to learn how such insights could be applied to understanding change in the even more complex realm of social relations. Social science classes like economics, political science, and organizational behavior, promised that we could estimate broad categories of equations to describe human behaviors by collecting lots of information about human behaviors in specific social settings, and all the factors that might influence human behaviors in those settings. We could then use calculus to unlock the patterns within those systems of equations by which human behaviors in specific social settings might change over time.
In graduate school at Harvard’s Kennedy School, I learned that different forms of social authority (leadership, coercion, ideologies, media, religion, etc.) can produce different patterns of human behaviors in different social settings. Consequently, one can actively change established patterns of behavior by using different forms of social authority to focus people on one set of factors and/or distract their attention from another set of factors.
This style of intervention in social relations is always fraught with deep ethical issues, but it is nonetheless pervasive in modern culture. Indeed, one of the savviest insights I learned in graduate school was how to identify aggressive efforts to change patterns of behavior by getting people to ignore certain factors that are causing a problem by distracting their attention, so they focus on other factors. The most extreme example of this type of intervention is known popularly as gaslighting.
Gaslighting uses a form of social authority to get people to ignore obvious factors that are causing a problem by distracting their attention to less central, albeit real factors, or even to factors that are simply not relevant to the situation. The goal is to manipulate the attention and the behavior of people in some way that benefits the gas lighter.
So how does this discussion relate to workforce investments, as promised in the title?
Most political observers these days agree that American politics currently is experiencing an historically important realignment. Key to that realignment are questions about how political identity in the U.S. is being changed by fundamental transformations that are underway in the American economy and the sources of American national security as well as how the American economy and American national security relate to our integration with the rest of the world.
Economists and military analysts have agreed since the 1950s that the most important common factor in both American economic growth and American national security has been the rapid advance of technological innovation. While both national political parties have embraced the need to facilitate new technologies, the two parties have often differed about what role(s) the Federal government should take in creating new systems to help individuals, groups, and whole communities cope with the consequences of technological innovation.
Until recently, the most important implication of technological innovation for most people has related to their ability to obtain new workforce skills to keep employed. Rapidly evolving digital technologies have transformed the nature of the workforce system by reducing demand for the kinds of manual skills that previously defined most blue-collar and pink-collar occupations.
The New Deal alignment of American politics in the 1930s created a Democratic Party aligned strongly to the growth of labor unions among blue-collar (and much later pink-collar) workers and a Republican Party aligned mostly to non-unionized white-collar workers. The alignment of the Democratic Party with the growing union movement at the time sparked early discussions about what types of comprehensive workforce development programs could create lifelong learning opportunities for the public so that blue-collar workers could experience more long-term income security in a fast-changing world. These ideas percolated in the 1950s, but they gained no political traction during the Eisenhower era.
The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s fractured the Democratic Party’s unity and changed millions of former Dixie-crats into Republicans, especially in southern states. It also pushed millions of white-collar Republicans into the Democratic Party. This realignment of power in Washington cut short the ability of the “New Deal” faction of the Democratic Party during the Carter years to establish a unified push to establish new, comprehensive Federally funded programs that would have created income supports and extensive job training programs for employed blue-collar and pink-collars workers who were being dislocated by the initial waves of technological innovations of the digital economy.
By the time that much larger waves of plant closures and job losses hit the American economy during the early 1980s, however, the bipartisan policy consensus in Washington that included most leading Republicans and many Democrats during the Reagan years was that Federal policies should give priority to speeding up the process of technological innovation as part of the overall push to ensure American national security and American competitiveness at the end of the Cold War.
Slowing down technological innovation to help individuals, groups, and communities adapt to change was considered too risky for national security. This policy consensus continued to hold throughout the Clinton years as well, despite the best efforts of many liberal Democrats. Once the War on Terror took hold of American foreign policy after 9/11, this policy consensus remained in place through the end of the Obama years.
Political pressures for comprehensive Federal workforce investment programs were diffused during these decades by bipartisan gaslighting. Leaders focused the attention of reformers on the narrower goal of using Federal workforce programs to target the so-called “hard-core unemployed” workers in America’s cities, most of whom were (and are) African American men who were victims of racism in the labor force. Federal workforce training programs became part of the larger War on Poverty. Comprehensive reforms to achieve something like broad-based lifelong learning for all Americans were bypassed.
Programs for so-called dislocated workers remained but were severely limited in funding and very difficult to administer because of complex eligibility requirements, minimal income supplements for workers, and limited options for which skills dislocated workers could learn.
The results of continual efforts by Washington’s bipartisan policy consensus over the past four decades to distract attention away from comprehensive workforce development reforms in favor of encouraging rapid technological innovation have been mixed. On one hand, the process of technological innovation in America’s civilian economy and in American military capabilities has advanced without many barriers. Economic growth has exploded. Tens of millions of workers have found their own ways to adapt their skills. Entrepreneurial communities have thrived. American technological superiority has continued.
On the other hand, tens of millions of American workers have experienced substantial downward mobility as hundreds of traditional communities have experienced painful economic declines and social disarray.
These changes have fueled an era of transformational populist political backlash that has taken over the national Republican Party and has enhanced the power of the political left within the Democratic Party. Ironically, the extreme divisiveness of American politics since 2016 has pulled the rug out from underneath most officials who once comprised the Washington bipartisan policy consensus. We are about to learn what a new wave of MAGA governance in Washington will produce.
Yet the overall context for thinking about comprehensive workforce investment is already beginning to transform into something much, much bigger than before. All indicators point to an upcoming wave of technological innovation that will make the digital revolution look modest. We are on the cusp of something entirely new: a genuine, non-human, Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The implications of AI are just beginning to be discernable. There is so much we don’t yet understand. But one implication seems quite possible. The rapid growth of AI in today’s world may cause a sharp collapse in demand for most jobs that rely on mental skills just as digital technologies eliminated the need for many manual skills over the last fifty years.
Yet unlike that previous era, the impact of AI won’t evolve over decades. And its effects won’t be limited to specific parts of the nation. It will progress much faster and its consequences will pervade every city and state.
This upcoming threat to the financial security of tens (hundreds??) of millions of workers could create a powerful movement to slow down the development of this unprecedented type of technological innovation. Concerns about the consequences of losing the AI race to non-American competitors, however, (especially those in China) have already led to a dramatic new era of gaslighting from the incoming MAGA political coalition.
The star feature so far in the new era of gaslighting, in my opinion, is the issue of mass deportation of undocumented workers. Is the issue of undocumented workers a real issue in America? Yes. Is it the most important issue facing the future of the American labor force? No, not even close. Focusing the public’s attention on this issue, however, siphons a great deal of political pressure away from any organized attempt to slow down the development of AI.
Companies that are firmly inside the boundaries of the American national security environment are leading at this time in almost all aspects of AI development. The national security imperatives of maintaining that lead are thought to override the importance of all other economic and/or political consequences. That’s the justification for gaslighting.
Yet once the consequences of AI become more apparent in the complex equations that describe the labor market, gaslighting will no longer work. The scale of disruption will become too large to deflect with distractions. That’s when real public policy interventions will need to occur to prevent a populist backlash from American workers that will make today’s MAGA coalition (less than 50% of the 2024 Presidential election) look small in comparison.
AI will restructure the nature of work in ways we cannot fully anticipate. It will also restructure the role that wage-earning work plays in the economic security of most workers in advanced industrial economies.
Any package of public policy reforms that can address this new challenge will, in my opinion, require large-scale comprehensive workforce investments to create some sort of lifelong learning system that will be available to all adults. This policy vision, rooted in ideas from the New Deal, may finally come to fruition within American politics.
All the variables that comprise the equations that describe human behavior in the workforce are likely to change in the next few decades. Some form of comprehensive, complex, lifelong learning system would have the flexibility to adapt to the unpredictable patterns of change that will emerge as humans and AI co-produce new forms of economic growth and prosperity.
I’ll never have the technical skills to help design such a system, but thanks to what I learned from Mr. Lease in high school, I’ll have the capacity to understand what they’ll be trying to create.
Bob Gleeson