[It] has become almost cliche to complain about good, well-paying factory jobs that have degraded into far less lucrative and reliable positions at Walmart. The few good working class jobs that remain are those that—at least so far—have been exempt from the forces of both globalization and automation. Jobs such as long-haul driving. Indeed, truck driving is arguably one of the final barricades protecting a traditional world where diligent effort exerted in a blue-collar profession is respected, essential—and well compensated.
But those well-compensated jobs may not be around much longer:
The Otto technology enables complete autonomy on highways: trucks can navigate, stay in their lane, and slow or stop in response to traffic conditions completely without human intervention. Otto’s equipment currently costs about $30,000, but that is certain to fall significantly in the coming years. It seems highly likely that competition between the various companies developing these technologies will produce practical, self-driving trucks within the next five to 10 years.
And we have no choice but embrace driverless trucks because lives are at stake:
And once the technology is proven, the incentive to adopt it will be powerful: in the US alone, large trucks are involved in about 350,000 crashes a year, resulting in nearly 4,000 fatalities. Virtually all of these incidents can be traced to human error. The potential savings in lives, property damage and exposure to liability will eventually become irresistible.
A little context: truck driving is "one of the most common jobs in the United States," the Guardian notes. More than 3.5 million people work as truck drivers, according to the American Trucking Association, with another "7.3 million people employed throughout the economy in jobs that relate to trucking activity." And—again—truck driving is one of the few jobs out there for blue-collar workers that pays well. One of my uncles is a long-haul truck driver, and he was able to support himself, buy a home, and put his two sons through college on his income.
But fuck my uncle—and fuck everyone else out there driving trucks—because shifting to driverless trucks could save 4000 lives annually since driverless vehicles don't get into accidents. Yes, yes: shifting to driverless trucks will eliminate millions of jobs—and not just jobs in trucking—but we have to embrace driverless trucks. Lives are at stake, people.
Anyway... we're in the midst of another health care debate, thanks to the GOP's efforts to repeal Obamacare and strip millions of Americans of their health insurance—an effort that would be comic if the stakes weren't so high—and progressives are once again talking up Medicare for all, a.k.a. a single-payer health care system. And here's the funny thing... whenever someone starts talking about a single-payer system, conservatives and corporatists cite potential job losses in the health insurance industry as one reason—often one of the top reasons—to oppose single payer. Won't someone think of all those people out there who get paid to figure out ways to deny Americans health care!
Bernie Sanders says he can save Americans $6 trillion over the next ten years. The problem: To get there the economy may have to shed as many as 2 million jobs.... Kenneth Thorpe, a well-respected health care expert from Emory University says in an email that the number of folks who are employed by insurance companies and billing firms that could lose their job may number in the hundreds of thousands.
The negative impact on the economy goes well beyond higher taxes. Given the proposal's absolute ban on private insurance, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, currently employed in the health insurance industry, would lose their jobs. The impact of these job losses, felt by vendors serving those employers as well as the varied merchants patronized by the employees, would be profound.
So we can't do away with the immoral health insurance industry because up to two million people will lose their jobs but we must embrace driverless trucks and eliminate the jobs of up to 3.5 millions truck drivers because lives are at stake. Take it away, Harvard University:
Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a new study published online today by the American Journal of Public Health. That figure is about two and a half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2002. The study, conducted at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993. “The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors, and baseline health,” said lead author Andrew Wilper, M.D., who currently teaches at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease—but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”
That study was published in 2009, pre-Obamacare, and the number of Americans without health insurance has plummeted. Twenty million Americans have gained health insurance under Obamacare, but 29 million Americans remain uninsured. "In 2010, the year that the Affordable Care Act became law, 48.6 million Americans, or 16 percent of the population, lacked insurance," CNBC reported in the fall. "Since then, the uninsured rate has been cut almost in half, and the trend has only continued this year.")
So the annual death rate from lack of access to health insurance has presumably fallen—from Harvard's pre-ACA finding of 45,000 to maybe 22,500 today. Now math is hard and I am dum. But I'm pretty sure 22,500 is more than 4000 and 45,000—the annual death toll preferred by Paul Ryan—is way more than 4000.
The "incentive to adopt" driverless trucks is powerful—irresistible even—because doing away with human truck drivers will save 4000 lives annually and that's worth sacrificing 3.5 million jobs. But we can't have Medicare For All even though a single-payer system would save somewhere between 22,500-45,000 lives annually at the cost of just 2 million jobs.
The math doesn't make sense until you remind yourself who works as truck drivers (blue collar, didn't go to college), who works in the insurance industry (white collar, college educated), and who pundits and politicians and think tank thinkers are likelier to know personally or live next door to. Then it all makes sense.
