I wrote this the other day.
With the CARES act, Congress has given us a future of Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Government. Small business is being wiped out by a combination of the the virus itself, the government lockdowns, and the new minimum wage of $600 a week (plus state unemployment benefits). The Democratic Party gets the future that it wants, and the Republican Party goes along with it.
In the remainder of this essay, I will imagine an alternative future. It will not actually happen, given the current state of political leadership, the media, and the public. But I present it as a fantasy.
Education
Education and training will be core activities. Both adults and children will be trained and coached to take advantage of online resources. Someone in the most remote rural area or the most blighted urban ghetto will have access, via the Internet, to the best training and education that the world has to offer.
Young people will get their learning on line. Some may stay at home. Others will gather in what amount to day-care centers. These day care centers will provide Internet connections, supervision, opportunities for play, and meals.
Beginning around age 15, many young people will pursue vocational training. Businesses will be involved with this process. Firms may hire and train workers directly for their specific needs, such as call center staff. Or they may indirectly stimulate training by articulating general needs, such as a need for plumbers or automobile mechanics.
Other young people will pursue education in arts, sciences, and humanities. This education will be largely self-directed, with guidance from mentors.
Health Care
Health care will be provided by integrated corporations. Licensing of individual health care workers will no longer be necessary. The corporation may assign whatever tasks it wishes to any individual worker. The corporation will be responsible for the overall quality of its services, not for the credentials of any particular worker.
Within this framework, health care corporations will be flexible in their use of tele-medicine, small clinics, specialty centers, and general hospitals. If they operate as health maintenance organizations, they will probably provide advice and incentives to their members to choose healthier lifestyles.
Housing and neighborhoods
Right now, our economic geography determines job opportunities. Some urban centers cater to high skilled workers paying high rents, with services provided by low-income workers who struggle to find housing. Other cities and towns with reasonable living costs tend to have many fewer high-paying jobs.
In the fantasy future, economic geography will be less skewed. More work will be done remotely, and industry clusters will be less important. People will work in finance without being in New York City. People will work in software without being in San Francisco or Seattle. Higher education will take place without centralized college campuses.
More people will be able to choose where they live based on lifestyle considerations, rather than having to locate in particular cities to have access to job opportunities. There will be less concentration of wealth in the current centers on the East and West Coast. Instead, other cities and towns that offer pleasant surroundings will experience a revival.
Many people will want to have multiple residences. They may have close friends or family members in different locations. New forms of house sharing or rental arrangements may emerge.
Getting from here to there
In order to get from the current state to this alternative future, we would have to allow new systems of education, health care, remote work, and home ownership/rental to emerge. Government would have to get out of the business of providing schooling. It would have to get out of the business of licensing health care workers. It would have to eliminate regulations that impede remote work and make it expensive for households to relocate. It is unlikely that such changes will take place.
I don’t see why this future won’t happen given the jump in quality there will be in virtual reality/augmented reality by 2025 and especially by 2030 and this will continue into the 2030s.
The only line that I think will be wrong is the last one.
The internet was supposed to do all this. I’ve read the same stuff since the 1990s. Do we really think better graphics is the hold up?
If anything the coronavirus should give healthcare workers more status to demand protection of credentials, people who got their kids foisted on them on short notice are going to associate this period with “what home schooling is like”, and the single family home in a car dependent low density area is going to rise is value as one of the best things to have had during the outbreak.
I’d never heard the internet (of the 1990s) was supposed to produce virtual and augmented reality. Paul Krugman made this error in a 1998 article that he repeated in 2014: He assumed that the internet is nearly the same as the telegraph and so expansion begins with the most important nodes and then returns likely grow slowly or diminish. Even by 2005, there were enough broadband users with much more powerful computers compared to the internet of 1994 which used phone lines. Skype is far more reliable today than when it was released in 2003 or even compared with 2010.
Virtual reality has only been commercially viable since 2014 when almost nobody used that. From what I’ve read, the quality of VR and AR has notably increased in just five years and that will easily continue for the next ten years if not twenty. It looks like VR/AR will be widely used by 2025 and at a better quality than today.
Sure, AR and VR will increase in quality. How does that change anything about the advantages of industry clusters and in real life interactions and networking? How does AR or VR replace going to lunch, getting drinks, going to a birthday party, etc.?
VR and AR wouldn’t replace going to a bar or having parties. With respect to the rest, unlike now with Skype, etc., you would feel you are in the same space as a coworker. Obviously, that would change a lot of human interactions beyond the work place as well.
I guess what I am arguing is that the existence of industry clusters is due the benefits of in-person networking. I lived in a city with an IT cluster, and I cannot remember going to a social function in which I didn’t meet a new person who either was working in IT or working for an IT company. Because of this, I know dozens of people who could give me job leads should I ever choose to pursue a career in software. I see this kind of phenomenon as the main reason for the continued existence of white collar industry clusters, and I don’t see how AR/VR change that. Now maybe they somehow allow more places to reach a critical mass and density so that you have more metros with large industry clusters, but than you still have the same type of clustering, just in more places.
I work from home and use Webex/Zoom/Skype to share work. I don’t see how VR/AR would help me do that any better, in fact I think it would be worse. Basically a distraction.
To the extent I’ve go to in person events its because I’m afraid off the record decisions will be made for which being physically present is the only way to be a part of that process.
I’m curious about your thoughts on housing and neighborhoods. First, what “lifestyle considerations” would popularize multiple residences? Second, how does CARES entrench geographic determinism? It seems to me that this is orthogonal to CARES or other recent government action but now proving itself as possible for many jobs. What am I missing?
Education is tricky as all involved, teachers and students, have been broken to the classroom by the time they finish 3rd grade. Those students who aren’t fully, leave education either dropping out or in a non-educational career. Those who prospered in the classroom, even found it enjoyable, become teachers or advocates of the school in its present form.
In addition, schools do not reward real learning, they reward getting good grades, as do parents, employers, co-workers. A student who spends time learning broadly about a topic in school, will likely not get a good grade and will find sharing any of this knowledge in class disincentivized. Head down, mouth shut, glean the lecture for the test questions/answers, is a winning strategy for school.
So to flip the classroom to a school with students on very loose schedules using computers to take lectures and doing exercises in labs with teachers on hand to help them over the rough patches, would be hard to get buy-in. We may see more of the best students take up online schooling but also pursing real depth on topics since they won’t be limited to the slow teacher-revelation of what will be on the test via lecture. Expect “educators” to pushback on the loss of good/motivated students since Progressive education demands good students, or in the parlance of desegregation, white students, be mixed with poor students. I do hope to see a shift but it will be generational.
“The Republicans go along with it…”
Curious way to put it given Republicans hold two veto points plus an activist court.
Because they don’t want to seem “uncaring” or “mean”. They believe (and may well be right) that it would be electoral suicide.
My male Senator has filed a bill that would give every man, woman, and child in the country $2,000 a month for the indefinite future. If Republicans aren’t afraid of being seen as uncaring and mean, they will attack it unmercifully. That’s not how I’m betting.
y’all are nuts, from Arnold’s dystopia to some of the bizarro land notions about what public education is now.
A wonderful fantasy. Hopefully we can move in that direction. Even a little.