Tech CEOs Won't Stop Trump, They Helped Create Him

Tech CEOs are frantically trying to figure out how to disrupt Donald Trump, according to the Huffington Post. But it's probably too late, unless they acknowledge how they helped create him. I don't think they will.

Technology creates productivity. But the secret of productivity is that it can lead to fewer jobs. What Trump voters want, more than anything else, are decent jobs that let them raise their families with dignity in depleted communities across America. And that's not what the tech industry, with its focus on highly skilled coding jobs and an insecure "gig economy," is providing.

Donald Trump likes to blame China, and he's right, to some extent, that tech companies' global perspectives have meant that they've sought the least expensive labor globally, seemingly caring little or nothing for the local American communities they leave jobless.

But pure productivity has also been a problem for the Trump voters, as Vox points out. American workers aren't just being replaced by Mexican workers; they're being replaced by American robots. These two huge trends, globalization and mechanization, have sucked the air out of towns all over the United States. 

With little social safety net, that means fewer people are able to pay for the five Big Fixed Costs in this country: housing, food, transportation, education, and medical care. And while the tech industry has been doing a terrific job at disrupting entertainment, media, and our social lives, it's done relatively little to help with those big fixed costs. A stack of cheap TVs won't help if you can't afford rent or to go to the doctor.

In terms of housing, the tech industry has only made things worse by concentrating jobs in Northern California and New York rather than distributing them over the country. If tech could revitalize Buffalo and Milwaukee, it could do great things for America. But instead, it adds jobs to the nation's most expensive housing markets, including plenty of jobs that don't pay anything near a living wage.

Healthcare has also been a bust, because nobody can figure out how to loosen the grip of the insurance cartels while still guaranteeing quality of care. The problem there is that people don't make their most critical healthcare decisions when they have the leisure and peace of mind to think them through, so a "free" shop-around marketplace just becomes noise.

It doesn't help that where tech is creating jobs, beyond the coder elite, they're often lousy jobs with poor work/life balance and few worker protections. That's a big part of the resistance to radically remaking education through technology: teachers and other school employees don't want to see one of the last sectors with decent worker protections, salaries, and insurance evaporate. Overworked parents, meanwhile, aren't thrilled with the concept of adding to their own burdens by having to home-school everyone through Khan Academy and YouTube.

In transportation, Lyft and Uber are causing more social problems than they're solving, by only slightly reducing taxi rates for consumers in exchange for zeroing out worker protections. Elon Musk has great ideas about transportation, but they'll take years to trickle down, and in the meantime, he's going to put a lot of auto dealers out of work.

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The glib answer that you "move and retrain people" when industries get disrupted doesn't reflect human realities. The reality that people with families and communities may not want or have the financial resources to uproot themselves. It's also difficult for older workers to start new careers, whether that's because of sheer age discrimination or the fact that older workers with families have higher costs than younger or outsourced workers.

I need to make one thing clear: I think Donald Trump is a racist buffoon, and I don't believe about 70 percent of the things that come out of his mouth. I believe, if elected, he would plunge the country into either unprecedented paralysis or a deep recession. But I think he is absolutely, positively illuminating important problems that our country is having.

Perhaps if we all pulled together as a society to answer the question of how to help laid-off workers, letting them maintain their dignity and find new jobs that help them keep their standard of living, we wouldn't be here. But the libertarian, Randian streak that runs deep under Silicon Valley says you don't help people, you give them the tools to help themselves. And if they can't help themselves, they deserve their misery.

Well, they couldn't help themselves, and now they're voting for Donald Trump. What are tech CEOs going to do about that?