Mr. Sasse, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Nebraska. This is adapted form a speech he delivered to Colorado’s Steamboat Institute. He is a conservative, intellectual star in the GOP rsk
I am a historian, and that usually means I’m a killjoy. When people say we’re at a unique moment in history, the historian’s job is to put things in perspective by pointing out that there is more continuity than discontinuity, that we are not special, that we think our moment is unique because we are narcissists and we’re at this moment. But what we are going through now—the past 20 or 30 years, and the next 20 or 30 years—really is historically unique. It is arguably the largest economic disruption in recorded human history. And our politics are not yet up to the challenge.
There have been four kinds of economies: hunter-gatherers, agriculture (settled agrarian farmers in their villages), industry (mass urbanization and immigration), and whatever we’re entering now. Sometimes we call it the information-technology economy, the knowledge economy, the service economy, the digital economy. Sociologists call it the “postindustrial” economy, which is another way of saying “we don’t have anything to call it.”
What it really means is that jobs are no longer permanent. It used to be that you did whatever your parents and grandparents had done. Hunter-gatherers and farmers never even thought about it. There was no such thing as job choice, only becoming 7 and 10 and 12 years old and taking on more responsibilities to earn your keep.
Industrialization brought a massive disruption. At the end of the Civil War, 86% of Americans still worked on the farm. By the end of World War II, 80 years later, 60% of Americans lived in cities. One of the most disruptive times in American history was the Progressive Era. And what was Progressivism? Not much more than the response of trying to remake society in an era of mass immigration, industrialization and rising cities. But it turned out not to be as disruptive as people feared, because once you got to the city, you got a new job, which you’d probably have until death or retirement. And the social capital that used to be in the village tended to be replicated in urban ethnic neighborhoods.
What’s happening now is wholly different. The rise of suburbia and exurbia, and the hollowing out of mediating institutions, is an echo of the changing nature of work. In the 1970s, it was common for a primary breadwinner to spend his career at one company, but now workers switch jobs and industries at a more rapid pace. We are entering an era in which we’re going to have to create a society of lifelong learners. We’re going to have to create a culture in which people in their 40s and 50s, who see their industry disintermediated and their jobs evaporate, get retrained and have the will and the chutzpah and the tools and the social network to get another job. Right now that doesn’t happen enough.
Think about qualitative survey data—polls that ask, “What are the top three or four things you’re worried about?” Ten years ago, nowhere on the top 10 of that list was anything about prescription drugs. Today opioids are a major concern. People are scared about drug abuse in largely middle-aged populations. That’s a symptom of the economic disruption.
I don’t mean to be exceedingly pessimistic. There are plenty of wonderful opportunities for American families and innovators in this new economy. For one thing, there are fewer middlemen complicating transactions instead of adding value. So we’re going to get a lot more visibility and transparency into product offerings, and consumers are going to get higher-quality and lower-cost stuff.
In other industries, we don’t know how to price for things that turn out to matter quite a lot. Think of the news media. We are going from a world in which we had too much central control by a few large organizations, to one in which everybody, everywhere can deluge us with information. What is likely to happen next is not a lot more higher-quality journalism. We’re going to have higher-volume journalism, and some of it will be good. A free, thriving, and independent press is critical to self-government, so this is a big challenge.
