I think you are way off here. The Dems in disarray stories are just filler with a push by those who have a vested interest in depressing democratic involvement.
Right now, both the establishment and the progressive wing are working very well together. Look at Pelosi and AOC. HR 1 and the GND, etc.
Even Omar is serving a purpose here insofar as she is both keeping focus on lobbying money, and how AIPAC has gone off the rails with Netanyahu and Likud’s authoritarian, neocon policies and support. Just could be smarter about it.
During a talk at SXSW, an audience member asked Ocasio-Cortez about the threat of automated labor. “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work,” she said in response. “We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.”
Yup, very well put. Too bad she avoided answering the question as it pertains to reality. I guess, like everybody else, the real answer just boils down to “No plans to address it.”
True to an extent., if argumentatively stated. She should have added “…and a Universal Basic Income would be a good start to addressing these issues.” I’m a little surprised she didn’t. I mean, I understand most politicians pulling out the avoid-upsetting-those-scared-of-socialism tactics, but not sure why AOC would do that.
“Reality,” as regards human institutions, is a tricky thing. (See: Hornsby, Bruce, “The Way It Is”) Maybe over the long term it makes more sense to view automation as an opportunity for more leisure than as an occasion for existential terror. It will probably take generations to overcome the deeply trained response in modern humans that work=life, though.
There are too many unknowns about mass automation to have any sort of credible specific policies on it.
What matters is the approach we take to it as a society: something to be feared, something that drives income inequality forward, something that creates ever greater corporate profits - or something to be welcomed as it fundamentally changes the ‘need’ to work 40-70 hours a week and offering perhaps the greatest opportunity in the last couple of centuries at freeing humanity from the drudgery of mindless work.
To deride her for having an actual vision without having specific policies is sort of…missing the point.
Above anything else there is need for a proper philosophy of work which understands work not as that which it has indeed become, an inhuman chore as soon as possible to be abolished by automation, but as something ‘decreed by Providence for the good of man’s body and soul’. Next to the family, it is work and the relationships established by work that are the true foundations of society. If the foundations are unsound, how could society be sound? And if society is sick, how could it fail to be a danger to peace?
I am not aiming that at any one democrat, but at the whole. The Dems are about as diverse and outspoken as I can remember for a long time. In most cases that would not be a bad thing, but the current sound clips, if they continue, could prove troublesome. If the election was tomorrow I think the Dems would defeat Trump, but it is 18 months until that election.
Seconded. I’ve had similar thoughts, but she’s boiled them down to just a few short sentences. For me, this is the moment that AOC became presidential.
It will probably take generations to overcome the deeply trained response in modern humans that work=life, though.
No, it’s not missing the point. The point isn’t that she needs to have a specific plan all lined up for this issue, but that she at least give a shit about it. Her answer isn’t even an answer. You can take that exact same answer and apply it to pretty much anything. It’s so generic it might as well be a madlib, just replace stuff like “automated out of work” with “a slave to your student loans” or “divorced and bankrupted due to medical bills” and it would be the exact same non-answer.
I don’t want to hear how much better life would be “if only…”, I want to hear that someone out there is making it a priority to address the millions of Americans who will very shortly (in the grand scheme of things) be put out of work by things like automation, without having anywhere to go.
Yea, this is a frightening issue. Yea, we should be scared, or at the very least concerned, at least a little. I don’t want to see her or anybody else just hand-wave away issues with fanciful daydreams of socialist utopias that will never actually exist before the robot cars upend tens of millions of workers who do actually exist at this very moment.
Let her and every other politician have their dreams, by golly, but don’t let them get away with substituting in some vision where actual attentiveness is required.
I don’t want to see her or anybody else just hand-wave away issues with fanciful daydreams of socialist utopias that will never actually exist before the robot cars upend tens of millions of workers who do actually exist at this very moment.
We aren’t in Europe, and she doesn’t answer for Europe. She’s in America, and we aren’t ever going to transition to a European-style socialist utopia before issues like the very one she was questioned about kick our ass.
Why do you think I’m implying she answers for Europe?
Her message was:
we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.
It doesn’t require a socialist utopia to have a society where your citizens don’t routinely die from poverty related illnesses.
You’re asking for a plan on something that is currently unplannable. That’s silly. It’s not going to stop being silly.
I did a quick scan via my university library access for economics papers on automation. They are either micro focused, or philosophical treatises from the 1960s. I’ve never come across a peer-reviewed journal article on macroeconomic forecasting around automation and different methods of adopting & adapting to it, whether in my studies or research.
Why exactly do you expect a Politician to have firm answers on it?
Good luck with that. You’re shitting on the only politician who agrees with you that it’s a problem. Like that’s a way to encourage solving it or something…
