After President Trump won in 2016 and ascended to the presidency, many in the media and the nation’s elite were stunned. His win was blamed on Russia, racism, and sexism, among other things. While some of these factors may have played a role — although somewhat unquantifiable — hindsight is always 20/20. Looking back, the issue was right under our noses: many working-class jobs were and continue to be replaced by robots at a rapid pace. In his campaign, Trump bashed “bad trade deals” and the “influx of low-skill illegal immigrants” as the primary causes, and won the support of many mid-western working-class voters who saw jobs leaving their communities. Of course, immigration and trade have much to do with these issues, and they are problems that we should work to fix. However, I worry that Trump has overlooked another major cause for this massive displacement of workers: automation and the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Automation isn’t coming soon — it’s already here

The chart above shows the top five jobs state-by-state. As you can see, truck drivers and sales workers top the list in many states, with cashiers, retail salespeople, and customer service representatives filling in much of the rest. Nearly 1/3 of American service jobs have the potential to be replaced by automation in 10 years, and 50% of jobs around the world have the potential to be automatable in the coming years (McKinsey). Moreover, companies like Amazon and Tesla are increasingly testing self-driving trucks, which are already on the road. To put this in perspective, truck driving is a job that employs nearly 4 million Americans, mostly older white men who haven’t graduated high school.

The effects of automation and AI aren’t problems just facing Middle America. The Atlantic recently reported that “employment in New York City clothing stores has fallen three years in a row, the longest period of decline on record, going back to the early 1990s.” They continue by pointing out that “department stores have lost 18 times more workers than coal mining since 2001.” And it doesn’t stop there — we will lose 83% of jobs that earn $20/hour or less to automation by 2030 (2016 White House annual economic report). No matter what part of the country, globalization and a rapid rise in technology are crushing workers in manufacturing, coal mining, retail, truck driving, call centers, and many other jobs. This trend has, arguably, been the catalyst for the rise of populist politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump. It’s important to note, however, that it is not only low-skilled work that will face changes. As Thrive Global reports:

Surprisingly it’s not just blue-collar workers who will feel the brunt of this but long established respectable jobs across the board. Lawyers will increasingly see their work dry up as more and more individuals choose the cheaper automated services for legal work.

To make matters worse, it is taking longer for unemployed Americans to find new areas of work, even as the unemployment rate drops:

Futurism addressed this same issue when reporting on MIT’s 2017 study on this same topic:

“…from 1993 to 2007…every new robot replaced around 5.6 workers…During that 14-year period of time, the number of industrial robots quadrupled and between 360,000 and 670,000 jobs were erased. And as the authors noted, ‘Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, we do not find positive and offsetting employment gains in any occupation or education groups.’ In other words, the jobs were not replaced with new jobs.”

In this vein, President Trump has made it a point to capitalize on his “success” of keeping American companies inside America. While it has spurred economic growth, it hasn’t accomplished the goal of saving those lost jobs. Job loss in this way is especially devastating for small towns in which these large companies often have a near-monopoly on labor.

In 2018, The New York Times published an excellent exposé on the Carrier plant situation in Indianapolis. With these companies opting to stay in the United States, they still need to remain competitive with other companies who leave for Mexico and China to cut costs. They do this by investing in automation and reducing their amount of employees. After the deal in which President Trump claimed to have “saved many jobs,” the CEO of Carrier commented that they would “make a 16 million dollar investment in that factory in Indianapolis, to automate, to drive the costs down,” to stay competitive. He then added, “What that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs.”

‘Deaths of Despair’

Job loss is a prospect that many low-skilled Baby Boomers are worried about, and in many cases, it has played a role in rising rates of depression, feelings of hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and even suicide — particularly in the places that voted for President Trump. The Center for Disease Control recently reported that American life expectancy has dropped for the first time in decades, which was “largely driven by deaths from drug overdose and suicide.” Many researchers see a closely correlated trend between job loss and suicide.

Princeton University’s Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton released a shocking study just after Trump’s win in 2017 on white working class suicide rates. Bloomberg reported that “their findings point to a cycle of despair that’s deepening: Middle-aged whites today are more likely to report pain and mental-health problems than their predecessors and are experiencing symptoms of alcoholism at a younger age.” They tied it in with the harsh effects of globalization and technological growth which have added fuel to the fire of distress. In a study conducted by NCBI, they found that “voters in counties in which life expectancy stagnated or declined between 1980 and 2014 were much more likely to vote for Trump.”

Democratic Presidential Candidate, Andrew Yang — a staunch supporter of “Universal Basic Income” as an antidote to the harsh effects of automation — correctly pointed out in a recent interview with Joe Rogan that men deal with joblessness very poorly. Studies show that substance abuse goes up, community volunteering goes down, antisocial and self-destructive behavior (including suicide and alcohol abuse) skyrockets. These trends are happening as coal miners, truck drivers, and manufacturing workers are threatened with job loss — jobs predominantly performed by older men, often with limited education, who are providing for their families (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Moving Forward

According to a comprehensive and landmark study by McKinsey in late 2017, countries will need to address four critical areas in managing this rapid pace of workforce transitions:

Maintaining robust economic growth to support job creation, Scaling and reimagining job retraining and workforce skills development, Improving business and labor-market dynamism, including mobility, and Providing income and transition support to workers.

President Trump visits a Foxconn facility, Thursday, June 28, 2018, in Mt. Pleasant, Wis. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Many 2020 candidates, like Democrat Pete Buttigieg and Republican Bill Weld, have stressed the need for job retraining programs. However, many people dismiss the impact that this will have on the American workforce, pointing to retraining programs that have failed to teach older Americans — without a college degree or even a high school diploma — to code, for instance. Not to mention, the American government is historically bad at implementing successful re-training programs. This idea that older truck drivers and coal miners, who are supporting families with an income of $60,000 to $80,000 per year, can somehow just turn their life around and learn how to “code” has been seen as an elitist jab at the working class (see: “Learn to Code” controversy). Either way, with 78% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck (CareerBuilder, 2019) and the threat of 400 million to 800 million individuals worldwide being displaced by automation by 2030 alone (McKinsey), telling older folks who haven’t turned on a computer before to “learn to code” is, in many ways, unrealistic.

We’ve seen candidates like the aforementioned Andrew Yang bring this topic forward. Yang, a self-described “serial entrepreneur” sees automation as the biggest threat to our country today. As of mid-March of 2019, Yang is polling higher than some of the Democrat heavyweights, like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and more. In February, he out-raised Sen. Kamala Harris by over $100,000. As of March 11, he has officially passed the DNC’s threshold of 65,000 individual donations to get on the debate stage.

Interestingly, what seems to be a bi-partisan grassroots movement in support of Yang has taken hold online with both Bernie supporters and disillusioned Trump supporters. This is interesting because Yang is focusing his campaign on an idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as an antidote to the job losses that have occurred and will continue to happen at a higher rate. UBI and other redistributive policies are not traditionally popular ideas in conservative and libertarian circles, but he seems to be making the case effectively to rural voters and people who voted for Trump in 2016. It is important to note that many people who voted for Bernie in the Democratic primaries voted for Trump in the general election.