Andrew Yang, now on the presidential candidates’ stage in the Democratic debates, made a bold promise: He would create 100,000 new jobs with startups, based on the model of Teach for America.
His program is called Venture for America. He failed.
So far, he has created 4,000 new jobs and still struggling.
This parallels TFA’s bold promise to “close the achievement gap” and change the trajectory of students’ lives, simply by placing a recent college graduate with five weeks of training in urban and rural classrooms for two years (in some cases, three).
The achievement gap on NAEP has not budged in the past decade. TFA has been at the job of closing it for 30 years.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Looks like closing the achievement gap, for many, is a diversion from their not closing but widening the financial gap.
well said: the growing but mostly hidden and unaddressed financial chasm allows the wealthy to argue that they have the right to impose more and more rules for ‘helping’ poor children — rules which will, instead, tighten and solidify the financial separations
Large scale unemployment and/or low wage employment is not a necessary outcome, but it IS where mainstream economics based on maximizing profits for a few is leading us.
We could decide as a society that this is not where we wish to go and that we wish to have a society where ALL people are paid a living wage, not for producing “stuff” or performing a service (that some economist has deemed valuable*), but so they can live a dignified existence.
But to do that, we have to completely reorient our priorities as a society.
It could happen but it certainly WON’T happen under economics and business as usual.
*uS GDP does not even include the value of work by homemakers (housework and childcare) which tells you how arbitrary and ridiculous the current valuation system of our economics is. Of course, the economists who created the system claim it is “objective”, which is a bunch of nonsense. Economics is based on completely subjective criteria, which is why it can never be a real science)
No YANG for me.
Yang’s point about the coming displacement of workers by technology and AI is an important one. And it’s not just driverless trucks, folks. The daughter of an acquaintance of mine just graduated from the University of Chicago law school. She told me that at her orientation, one of the speakers said that the students were lucky to be going to Chicago because in the very near future, most lawyers would be replaced by software programs. Right now, you can go online and do an incorporation, draw up a lease, find a noncompete or freelance services or divorce agreement, etc. Lord knows that are general run of politicians is not thinking about this looming future of joblessness, even though we have already experienced vast dislocation of the workforce from agricultural and manufacturing jobs to lower-paying, part-time, benefit-free service industry ones.
Yikes our, not are. LOL.
I do not think there will be long term joblessness. We have been through this before, transitioning from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy to a service economy.
In 1900, 41% of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. In 2000 that had dropped to 1.9%. This did not create massive long run unemployment because those people did something else besides farm.
We are wealthier because we have figured out how to get more and more using fewer and fewer people, freeing up those people to do something else.
Well, I hope you are right, TE. Any prognostications about where the displaced will go, what they will be doing? All those truck drivers and lawyers and teachers and Amazon warehouse workers and delivery people? It’s a fascinating question, and I do not have an answer to it.
One possibility, of course, is what Yang talks about–that we are undergoing a phase shift from a job-creating economy to one in which there are large numbers of expendable, unnecessary people.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610005/every-study-we-could-find-on-what-automation-will-do-to-jobs-in-one-chart/
Bob,
Of course, this time could be different, but we have had long experience with disposing of jobs (but of course not people, as people are not there jobs).
Where did the the people that were ice cutters, gandy dancers, knocker-upers, lamplighters, milkmen, switchboard operators, typesetters, elevator operators, lectors, computers (in the original sense), hemp dressers, pin setters, breaker boys, and a thousand other occupations that no longer exist all go? They went to other things that were more valuable to society.
There will be short term displacement, but the only solution to that would be for people to give up alarm clocks and contract with a knocker-uper and ban refrigeratos in favor of an icebox. It would seem to me to be a terrible waste of resources to do that, however.
Before my large class starts I always play music. When I am talking about economic growth i will play Peg and Awl performed by Bruce Molsky or James River Blues by Old Crow Medicine Show to remind my students that our present standard of living rests on a pile of discarded occupations.
Love that list of occupations, TE. Sometimes, however, circumstances effect more profound changes. The invention of agriculture. Where, exactly, will all those displaced workers go? It’s difficult to imagine replacement jobs that cannot/will not themselves be replaced. We may be talking here about truly disruptive technology, and robots and AI are, of course, only a couple of the majorly disruptive technologies now emerging. Predicting the future is difficult indeed. There are always these disjunctions. I suspect we are going to see a whole lot of “and now for something completely different” in the near future.
Unemployment is not the problem today. We’ve digressed into a second Guilded Age, “transitioning” to a tech-Uber-gig and Amazon warehouse economy where jobs are back breaking, long hours, low wage, transitory, non-union, no pension, and not sustaining. One can work two jobs and still be undernourished, unable to visit the hospital, or live in a car. One can be a highly educated university professor and be unable to move beyond part time adjunct. So much for a chicken in every pot. But Jeff Bezos gets to spend a billion dollars a year on an extraordinarily phallic rocket so he can play Buzz Lightyear. That’s not progress.
Have a look at the Amazon logo. I bet Jeff thinks this quite funny.
Hold up, Bezos, that’s no smile! Oy vey. I saw another billionaire on 60 Minutes last week who reminded me of Bill Gates’ push for charter schools, merit pay, classroom video recording, and otherwise amateur science experiments. This one has a submarine instead of a rocket. If you can stomach watching, here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W7wLJwA_ltY
These are our current masters of the universe. Sick, sick people. Use people up. Maximize profit.
TE, I don’t think one can view those as just two parallel transitions in a [projected] [benign] continuing sequence.
The transition from agricultural to industrial not only maintained the working and middle classes onboard, but supported millions of immigrants brought in to meet the labor demand, expanding both classes.
Our so-called “service economy” is what’s left to do after much mfg is automated, and most of the rest offshored. Sure, there’s an elite class “servicing” the global market via finance/ legal/ engrg/ IT, but the services that support them [middle-class jobs] are already mostly gone [automation], & their own upper-mid-class jobs will be supplanted to a continuing degree by automation. Meanwhile the vast remaining “service” jobs are fringe services for the elites– neither well-paid nor (in most cases) secure/ supported by solid benefits [i.e., no unions]. That includes mainstream healthcare and education workers, plus all the boutique-y services sprung up to round out the QOL for elites [me: for-lang for elite PreKs; my sons: contemporary music/ rock-etc bands for elites’ kids & audio production for wannabe stars; we can add personal fitness trainers, salon-spa workers, masseuses, Starbucks baristas & chefs & waiters & countless other customized frills catering to/ suspended from the elite job framework. And infrastructure is neglected, due to the collapse of mfg, so another constriction on # of trade jobs.
Clearly automation will progress, which just continues the trend noted. Any adaptation/ transition in the future will likely have to be of a different nature entirely, because the “transition to service economy” is all about fewer & fewer jobs, period.
Yep. A future of, “Will you be taking that latte on the veranda, Mr. Gates.” No thank you.
Correction: not fewer & fewer jobs – more & more jobs divvying up the finite % reqd to service the elites. The “service economy” is essentially overhead [15%?] to the global elite.
Large scale unemployment and/or low wage employment is not a necessary outcome, but it IS where mainstream economics based on maximizing profits for a few is leading us.
We could decide as a society that this is not where we wish to go and that we wish to have a society where ALL people are paid a living wage, not for producing “stuff” or performing a service (that some economist has deemed valuable*), but so they can live a dignified existence.
But to do that, we have to completely reorient our priorities as a society.
It could happen but it certainly WON’T happen under economics and business as usual.
*uS GDP does not even include the value of work by homemakers (housework and childcare) which tells you how arbitrary and ridiculous the current valuation system of our economics is. Of course, the economists who created the system claim it is “objective”, which is a bunch of nonsense. Economics is based on completely subjective criteria, which is why it can never be a real science.
Lct
Focusing solely on the percentage who are unemployed paints a very incomplete picture.
But it’s typical for economists to focus on figures that provide such an incomplete indication of the state of the economy. Another such figure is GDP, which does not even include the value added by stay at home mothers who care for their children, do housekeeping, laundry, taxes and other household work .
GDP just includes what the economists (mostly men) have decided is important.
There’s never been a law saying you need a lawyer to do any of those things and many people have done them without lawyers. But lawyers aren’t going away anytime soon because most lawyers work (directly in-house or indirectly through private law firms) for big companies. No big company is going to trust their leases and non-complete agreements (not to mention the zillions of other contracts lawyers do) to some computer program. Big companies like complicated legal procedures because it forces other companies to hire lawyers, which keeps out the small fry competition.
In any case, DIY leasing or licensing or trust and estate planning, etc. are not easy processes. I managed to bring my husband and his daughter to this country without an immigration lawyer, but it was rough going – not a process most people are prepared to handle on their own. The firm I work with now handles licensing. An awful lot of what we do is bail out people who tried to go through the process themselves and ended up in trouble.
And that’s to say nothing of litigators. You know what they say about someone who represents himself in court – he has a fool for a client.
Another reason to think that lawyers will be protected. We keep electing them to political office, and they will protect their own.
BTW, that sounds like precisely the kind of arrogant bragging that makes UChicago such a distasteful place, and I say that as a graduate of The College (undergrad). Lawyers from other law schools are and will continue to be gainfully employed, but they just won’t carry the $200,000+ in student loan debt that UChicago grads will.
A few years ago, a relative of mine went to his Harvard reunion. He told me about what he said to one of his buddies there: “Wow. It’s great to be back here. It’s like, I’ve been walking around in Smallville for the last couple decades, and here I am back on Krypton.” Yes. That’s how a lot of these people think.
Don’t worry about the U. of Chicago grads. The school will hook them up with nice corporate law jobs where they will be on track to make partner and spend the rest of their lives protecting corporate criminals.
He undoubtedly left Krypton for Klepton (aka, Wall Street)
What disturbs me is that TFA has not failed. While the demand for fake teachers is lower, TFA has morphed into aggressive lobbying machine that has infiltrated the halls of Congress. Their chief work is to figure out ways to move public money into private pockets while undermining public education. Since they are backed by lots of dark money, there is no end to their schemes and manipulations.
Exactly right, and TFA has almost $400 million in the bank and a corporate board loaded with Republicans and billionaires.
I like Yang and I hope he can stay in this primary as long as possible.
Agreed
After the last debate, I came to think Yang could be the one. But this article makes me question his judgment: VFA sounds like a half-baked idea to me.