Jobs on the River

Where New Madrid is:  from Google Maps

The largest earthquake ever in the continental US happened in 1811-12,
near New Madrid, along the Mississippi River.

People had not anticipated a quake in the middle of the plate on which we sit.  Most quakes happen along the edges:  the Rim of Fire that circles the Pacific Ocean, and our own west coast, for instance. 

Deep pressures jammed the plate until it buckled, rising in relation to its broken half by almost thirty feet.  The result was that the Mississippi River suddenly had a dam across it, causing the water to pile up and run backwards along the river bed until the irrepressible power of the water buildup broke through the new dam. 

The river will have its way.

We have managed to do something similar:  we have created a river of money that runs uphill.  I will not try to cite the astonishing statistics showing how much of American wealth runs uphill to the very rich.  I am not talking about little eddies of the well-to-do along the edges, or little streams of millionaires here and there.  There are a very top few who control enormous currents of our wealth. 

And people are madder than hell about it.  Ordinary people used to think that if they got a job along the river of money in our economic system--maybe a job at General Motors, or in the steel mill, perhaps driving a truck for the coal mine--that they could admire how the river of money running past them was a good thing. 

And people are dumber than hell about it, too.  "A rising river floats all boats!", they used to say, and they still do.  Something like that, anyway.  They thought they understood how rivers run:  downhill.  And they do, so long as the whole landscape does not heave and send it in another direction.  We voted for keeping the rich rich.  How else, we said, are we going to get a trickle of what they've got?

The earthquake in our economic system is what happens when the old industrial world becomes a technological world, a global river of transactions bigger than the Missouri and the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers combined.  The car production went somewhere else--Germany, or Japan, or Korea, or Mexico, or Tennessee--and the steel mills learned how to replace muscle with machines.  The trucks don't need drivers; can't use drivers in the cab:  it is too brutal.  There are electronic controls, and a skilled, computer-savvy guy who controls the truck, and the flying drones, and the coal mine is simply too filthy and poisonous to live with:  try natural gas, or hydrogen, or solar panels, or wind power. 

The river of money is running upstream.

There are two truths we have to face:

• The old economy is not coming back, any more than that we will all return to a small farm economy.  That was the previous economic and social revolution.  We figured that one out just in time to discover the next one.
• There are a lot of people whose jobs and skills are not what the new economic realities need, and they are hurting big time.  They are madder than hell that they are ignored, and they have every right to be.

Nature did not cause the river of money to run backwards:  we did.  We were not thinking about each other, and what the new economy would do to people whose whole livelihoods were dependent on the old industrial society.  We were just thinking about how to design better computers, how to find cheaper and cleaner energy, how to move fresh vegetables across continents and oceans, and how to get one of those cars that runs on electricity.

We need to figure out how the money from the new economy can be channeled so that the real people who get hurt when things change do not have to pay the whole price for everybody else.  That means changing where a lot of the money goes.  It means thinking hard about how to provide meaningful work for people who aren't ever going to be engineers or computer programmers or physicists. 

There is a lot of work that needs to be done in this country.  We just have to channel the river of money to provide jobs to do it.