Planet Money - Never have I ever

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

The world of economics has these two different sides. One one side, there are the economists in their cozy armchairs and dusty libraries, high up in their ivory towers. On the other, there's the messy world we're all living in, where those economics are actually playing out. Sometimes, researchers will write about something that they themselves have never actually experienced. Sure, they've thought about it, theorized, come up with smart analyses...but that's not the same as getting out of that armchair and into the real world.So, in this episode, we play our own version of Never Have I Ever. We dare two researchers to go places and do things they have never done before, in hopes of learning something new about the economic world around us. (Okay, fine, it's maybe more like Truth or Dare...but go with us here.)Today's episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Sally Helm, fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money, from NPR. A few weeks ago, I found myself standing around the storied office water cooler, chatting with my colleague Darian Woods, from our sister show The Indicator. He was telling me about this kind of fun new economics paper he'd just come across. The researchers had used cell phone tracking data to map out socioeconomic diversity in America, and they identified the place where the widest array of people from across the researchers had used cell phone tracking data to map out socioeconomic diversity in America. And they identified the place where the widest array of people from across the socioeconomic spectrum were most likely to actually rub shoulders in the same physical location.

And that place was pretty surprising. It turns out that according to this cell phone data, rich and poor and middle class people are most likely to mingle not in public parks or in the pews of a church, but inside of moderately expensive chain restaurants, places like Applebee's or Olive Garden, or the Australian-themed Outback Steakhouse. Now, I happen to know that Darian is part Australian. So when he then told me that never had he ever been to an outback steakhouse, that got my attention. And when he reminded me that he was also a vegetarian, I knew we didn't really have a choice. I had to take Darian, the Australian vegetarian, on an adventure. Darian Woods! Alexei Horowitz-Gazi!

Good to see you! Fancy seeing you here outside the Outback Steakhouse! A few days later, we found ourselves at an Outback Steakhouse in Bayside, Queens. We were mostly there to cross an item off of my bucket list for Darian. Right, reason enough. But we also wanted to get some anecdata about whether or not it's true that people of all income levels are hanging out together at the Outback Steakhouse. But first, of course, we had to eat. So they're highlighting this thing called the Bloomin' Onion, which is a 1,620 calorie dish made out of a deep fried onion.

Good on them for telling us. I've never seen this in Australia. I thought blooming onions just grew everywhere. Yeah, I mean, deep fried already. Possibly a figment of the owner's imagination about what they do in Australia. In any case, back to our investigation. We chatted to staff as we waited for our meals, asking whether they thought this really was an economic melting pot.

We asked our waiter, Veronica Hughes. Oh yeah, I definitely see people of all sorts of financial backgrounds coming in and eating. We tried sidling up to people sitting in their boots. Yeah, but most didn't want to talk. No, no thank you. Boo! After a disturbingly filling meal, we left. Bye guys, thank you.

But we still hadn't gotten any great anecdata, so we loitered in the parking lot, staging a stakeout out the back of the Outback Steakhouse. Walking out of the restaurant was Julia D'Antonio, a paralegal. And we were pretty relieved. Julia was a trove of anecdata. You know the TV show Cheers? Absolutely, where everybody knows your name. Yes, honestly, that's how I feel, and a lot of people come here because that's the way they feel. Have you met folks from kind of like different socioeconomic backgrounds at the bar when you're kind of like Oh, absolutely. So what's really interesting is I've actually met some physicians, right? So pretty high rollers. Yes. But however, you know, just regular folks, social workers,

high rollers. Yes, but however, you know, just regular folks, social workers, people like me, secretaries, nurses, engineers, I mean, a variety of people. Have you ever met up with somebody afterwards that you met in the ABAX day cast? Oh yes, yeah. I made friends here for sure, yeah. Which, you know, that's a really good thing, right? Talking to Julia felt like a huge success. I mean, sure, she's just one person, but she confirmed the paper's finding that the Outback Steakhouse is this economic melting pot. And not only that, she's made friends there. This is important.

There is a growing body of evidence that cross-class friendships are good for economic mobility. So we left the Outback Steakhouse feeling like we'd actually learned something. And this whole escapade gave me an idea. The fact that never had you, Darian, ever been to an Outback Steakhouse, that gave us this reason to go out into the real world, to turn what might have otherwise been a sort of dry econ paper into a whimsical jaunt. And I thought, what if I could do that with some of the writers and researchers out there?

Drag them out of their cozy armchairs and dusty libraries. You know, rip them right out of the ivory tower. Well, Alexei, this is where I leave you. Yes, thank you for your bravery, Darian. Go back and enjoy those creature comforts of the cubicle. Good luck out there. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Today on the show, Planet Money plays our version of Never Have I Ever. We dare two researchers to go places and do things they have never done before in hopes of learning just a little bit more about the

economic world around us. Okay, so I'd set myself this kind of silly mission. I was going to dare writers and researchers to do something that never had they ever done before. And I thought it would be best if they were doing something that they'd written about, but never actually experienced. And so not too long after I dragged my favorite vegetarian to a steakhouse, I gave LA Times tech columnist Brian Merchant a mysterious invitation. Meet me at a random repair shop in an industrial part of Brooklyn. He didn't seem to have trouble figuring out who I was on the street. The big microphone's a giveaway there.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Where are we here? Welcome to Industrial East Williamsburg. I guess you're probably wondering why we've come to American Commercial Equipment Repair. I have some guesses. Brian had some guesses because he just published a new book about the Luddites.

As longtime Planet Money listeners will know, the Luddites were a group of English textile workers around the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. For generations, they'd been weaving cloth from the comfort of their own homes. But then, in the early 1800s, a group of proto-tech titans are setting up factories filled with new machines, like the water frame and the power loom, things that automated a lot of textile work. Wages tanked, many workers lost their jobs, so the Luddites went on a campaign to destroy those machines, smash them to pieces. Brian had written this whole book about the Luddites, and yet he admitted to me that never had he ever smashed even one single machine, not even a tiny one. And I was like, yeah, we gotta change that. So I booked us a room at a place called The Rage Cage, a business where for a

nominal fee, you can take out your pent-up rage by destroying an assortment of office electronics. Are you ready to commune with the Luddites? I'm always ready to commune with the Luddites. Let's head in. We get inside, put on helmets and goggles, get zipped into these full body suits. Looks like a gentler hazmat suit almost. It's got a hood and it's got some booties. I hope you brought your pen up rage at our kind of industrial world. I sure have, but there's plenty of it to go around. Brian says he decided to write this book now because, like the Luddites, we are all living through a moment when a wave of new technologies is threatening to destroy a lot of jobs. Technologies like AI and new kinds

of automation. And if you're against those things today, people might accuse you of being a Luddite. In the tech world where Brian spent his professional life, that word is basically just an insult. Just an epithet for somebody who hates technology or doesn't understand it or rejects it outright. So somebody who's, you know, oh, I've never gotten an iPhone. I'm such a Luddite. Or I can't get my DVR to work. I'm such a Luddite. So that is how I mostly understood the term because that's how it was lodged in the popular consciousness. But about a decade ago, Brian says he stumbled onto some research arguing that the Luddites had really been misunderstood, maybe had even been the victims of a smear campaign.

And I really wanted to dive deeper into why do we think it's a bad thing to protest against any even sort of sliver of technology? Why did that get such a bad rap? Why did these Luddites get such a bad rap? Brian set out Luddites get such a bad rap? Brian set out to solve this historical whodunit. Who had done the Luddites dirty? He found that at first, the people who would become the Luddites were totally peaceful. They were literally just knitting at home with their families. And when these powerlooms started upending their lives, they didn't take out their hammers right away. For years, they petitioned Parliament to pass laws to help them. They had different policy proposals that we would recognize today. Things like minimum wage laws or, hey, what if you taxed a little bit of the cloth that was produced by the machinery and use that to sort of fund welfare benefits or job retraining programs. But they're completely rebuffed.

Not only that, but by now, they're starving. And so the cloth workers decide to lash out at the factory owners by targeting the machines. They band together under the banner of a probably apocryphal figure named General Ned Ludd. That's how they become known as the Luddites. And they start breaking into factories, destroying the looms with sledgehammers. Though, Brian says, they're not just smashing everything in sight. Notably, they would only break the machinery that was automating their work or, quote, stealing their bread, as they put it. The other machinery in the factory that had

been used for a long time was left intact. At first, a lot of people loved the Luddites. They're like Robin Hood, protecting the poor workers from the greedy, rich factory owners. New Luddite cells start popping up across England. But then the powers that be crack down. The government makes the breaking of machinery punishable by death. Bryan says the straw that broke the Luddites back came one night in April of 1812, when that broke the Luddites back came one night in April

of 1812, when a band of Luddites attack a major factory in West Yorkshire. And it just goes disastrously. The factory owner, he's prepared for it. He has all manner of defenses lined up. He has slots built into the windows where his workers can put their guns and be protected from fire. He has like cauldrons of tar ready to pour on the Luddites if they get inside, which they never do. It is a resounding defeat. Several Luddites are killed. And in the aftermath of the attack, a small group of Luddites actually assassinates another local factory owner in cold blood. And that act of violence helps turn public sentiment against them. That was just too far for many people. You know, they had been cheered like Robin Hood, and now they're gunning people down in the streets. And

that kind of spoiled some of that mythology. A murder trial follows, and that's when people begin to talk about the Luddites as this horde of ignorant reactionaries. This is kind of the moment Brian was looking for, the moment when the word Luddite becomes an insult. You know, history is written by the victors, and the crown crushed the Luddites. the Luddites. So they really sell this story at every opportunity that these are anti-technology dummies, basically, who are fighting against the prosperity of England, fighting against progress. They're just stuck in the past. So all of these ideas that we still have bound up in the term Luddite today are really just kind of inaugurated instantly and sort of pushed from the highest offices of the land. Now, there was, of course, some truth in that

argument. The automation the Luddites were fighting fueled the industrial revolution. Goods got cheaper, and that materially improved life for people around the world. But that economic progress also came at the expense of huge numbers of people. Not only the workers who were replaced, but the armies of child labor that followed and the slavery and plantation system that developed in order to supply raw materials for these factories. The Luddites recognized this fundamental fact, that new technologies almost always come with a human cost. And when Brian looks at the current moment as AI threatens to replace untold numbers of modern workers, he's like, I think it's time to rehabilitate the Luddites. Not that Brian

thinks we should murder executives or smash AI server farms, but he does think that when we use the word Luddite as an insult, we're forgetting that they had a point. He thinks too many people have internalized the idea that new technology is always good and fighting against it is always stupid when that is clearly not true. Do you see yourself as something of a Luddite? 100%. Yeah, I see myself as a full card-carrying Luddite in the modern sense. You know, I don't, I was about to say I don't have a hammer, but I do have a hammer. I have a sledgehammer. I have not used it to smash any machinery.

At least, not until I dragged Brian to the Rage Cage in industrial Brooklyn. Now, unfortunately, we were not able to procure the actual machines the Luddites themselves would have destroyed. There were no power looms or water frames available. Instead, when we walked into our Rage Room, we found a stack of modern machines, printers, computer monitors, and keyboards, along with a selection of baseball bats.

Did the Luddites have, like, a saying or anything when they were about to destroy an implement of the Industrial Revolution? Well, they would hold their hammers up, which were made by Enoch, the blacksmith, who also made some of the automating machinery, and they'd say, Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them. All right. Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them. It was time to smash.

Whoa. All out the names of some of these machines as you do it in between. Gigmill. Shearing frame. Power loom. Gearing frame. Power loom. Time's up. Thank you. Woo!

We've done a fair amount of destruction. How does it feel? It feels pretty satisfying. Brian had spent the whole interview reminding me that the Luddites were about so much more than smashing. They had a prescient social critique about the perils of unfettered technological change. But after having just absolutely demolished a printer with Enoch's baseball bat, you have to admit, the smashing had

to have been a big part of the appeal. There is an element of catharsis, and it's not something I really look at too much in the book, that I examine, you know, how they must have felt. But, yeah, imagine seeing these machines that were doing your work, doing a worse job, you know, driving down the amount of money that you got paid, and then finally, after years and years, just going in and smashing them. It must have felt good. It must have felt liberating. Brian Merchant is the author of Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.

After the break, our game of Never Have I Ever brings us to the modern workers confronting the latest wave of new technology. It's what to expect when you're expecting obsolescence. A couple weeks ago, I walked into the main square of an 1830s historical village in central Massachusetts. I was there to meet up with Kevin Lang, a labor economist at Boston University. Kevin Lang, thanks for joining me in the 1830s here. No problem.

We had not come here to churn our own butter or visit the piggery, which is a real place where they keep the pigs. For this round of Never Have I Ever, I was going to challenge Kevin to hop aboard a very particular kind of vehicle with a very particular kind of driver. So what are we looking at? Somebody is driving a team of two horses. It's pulling a bunch of people crowded into benches, roughly an equivalent of a bus. It's the last remaining Teamster in the United States. Teamsters are extremely rare these days. Most people probably know the word from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

That's the union that represents truck drivers and many other workers. It's one of the biggest unions in the country. But originally, a Teamster was what you called the person who drives a team of horses, which was a big industry back in the day when horse-drawn trucks were the way to move freight around American cities. Kevin and I walk over to the trolley and climb aboard up near the front, where the Teamster at the reins, a guy named George King, is herding tourists into their seats.

This is the last ride of the day. This is going to be a one-way trip over to the Bullitt Tavern. So if we're leaving anybody's husband, wife, or mother-in-law behind, I hope it's intentional. All right, I'd like to ask that everybody please remain seated at all times. Please keep your arms and legs in the wagon, okay? I lean over to Kevin. Don't be scared.

I've heard that the mortality rate is extremely low. That's right. And just like that, we were off on our tour. Now, the reason Kevin and I had traveled a grand total of 195 miles and almost 200 years into the past was because of a paper he and a few colleagues had been working on, looking at how labor markets respond to the threat of disruptive new technologies. The whole thing started when Kevin and one of his research partners started thinking about what's happening to truck drivers. It seems relatively certain that a new technology, self-driving trucks, will be taking over the roads someday soon, destroying millions of jobs. But also?

Self-driving trucks have been five years away for a long time. That's definitely my impression. Which is to say, truck drivers don't know when exactly machines will make their skill set obsolete. And Kevin and his co-authors wanted to know, how does the labor market respond to a situation like that? Is it still worth becoming a trucker? Or is it actually time to leave trucking? When and how do you make those decisions if you know that this industry may be in its final throes? As Kevin is thinking this through, he's like, well, those calculations should be different depending on your age. So if you're 21, 22, 23 years old and you're thinking about becoming a long-distance truck driver,

you might think about the fact that at age 30, you might be out of a job and that you might not want to invest in being a long-distance truck driver. Right. So you're thinking about the kind of skills and the time and the money that would be required to become a truck driver and whether or not how that stacks against other investments and other possible careers? Absolutely. You should be thinking about, you know, what are the other choices that I have out there? And if I'm a young person thinking about one of my options being a truck driver, it doesn't look like a great idea right now. Which may be one of the reasons there's been a massive reported shortage of truckers over the past few years. And a shortage like that can drive wages up. That's actually happened in trucking. So Kevin explains, say you're on the older side of the workforce, like in your late 50s, and you're thinking about leaving a lower paying job to get into truck driving before you reach retirement age.

Then the calculations look different. You might say, well, I think truck driving is going to be around for a while. And they're having a hard time getting people to become truck drivers. So wages are pretty high right now for truck drivers. Maybe that's actually a good thing for me to get into. So Kevin and his colleagues come up with a theory about what's likely to happen when a workforce is reckoning with the threat of impending obsolescence. We very quickly came to the conclusion that what we should see, first of all, that wages should be rising,

that we should see employment falling relative to what would happen if there were no self-driving trucks on the horizon, and we should see the occupation getting older. Over the next few months, Kevin and his colleagues refine their hypothesis and work on the math. But what they really need to do is find some real-world data, see if their ideas hold up. And they can't just look at the labor market for truckers because that story is still unfolding. They need to do some historical sleuthing to find data for an occupation that had gone through the entire cycle from carefree full employment to total obsolescence. They look around at different professions until they finally ask the question lurking in plain sight. What happened to the people who were delivering goods

before motorized trucks arrived? And eventually, we came up with the idea of looking at people who drove horse-drawn trucks when motorized trucks were on the horizon. In other words, the Teamsters. Now, to figure out how the Teamster labor market responded to the rise of motorized trucking, Kevin and his co-authors dug into census data. They needed to know how many workers identified as Teamsters in every decade starting in 1900. That way, they could track changes in the size of the workforce and how old everybody was. But parsing

the census data was not easy. They had to be careful to exclude a bunch of slightly different horse-specific occupations. There were a bunch of new words that I learned that I had not previously known about. There were the draymen, for example, people who delivered beer. Or there were the hostlers. Hostlers are, I believe, people who are taking care of horses, if I remember properly. For some people, it must have been kind of a side hustle. Right. They used the census info to track employment demographics. Then they pulled wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to track how Teamster pay changed over the decades. And here is the story all that data told. For a decade or so after the invention of the first combustion engine truck in 1896,

motorized trucks weren't even close to threatening the horse-drawn truck trade. Kevin and co. call that the pre-shock period. And then we think of the period of roughly 1910 to 1920 as what we call the anticipatory dread period. It's where... Sorry, what? the anticipatory dread period. It's where... Sorry, what? The anticipatory dread. They are dreading the motor trucks coming and leaving them either with very low wages

or having to find a new job. It's a very dramatic name. Well, I've got a clever co-author. And what Kevin and Co. saw in the data seemed to match their predictions. Young people see more and more trucks on the road. They realize horse-drawn trucks will become obsolete, and they start to avoid the teamster trade.

Wages rise, and then older workers from lower-paying jobs choose to become teamsters at a higher rate. They're retiring soon anyways, so why not cash in? Then, in the 1920s, the disruptive new technology finally takes over. These self-driving trucks of that moment. Though, in this case, they're just regular trucks. Hold the horses. And that anticipatory dread becomes real dread.

There's just a dramatic decline in employment of Teamsters. Okay, so the Teamster labor market kind of falls apart over the course of the 20s? Very much so. Kevin thinks that cycle is already happening right now in the trucking industry, and maybe in other industries too. What do you think of as the kind of big takeaways from this work, from this paper? So I think there are a number. I think one is that people often think, well,

the job's paying well, this occupation must be doing well. And it can, in fact, be a sign that the occupation is not doing well in the sense that people don't think it's going to be around very long. That may be the obsolescence premium that you're seeing. That is. That's exactly what it is. So Kevin says, as we all survey the changing vocational landscape before us, we should not be fooled by the obsolescence premium. Just because wages are rising does not mean that particular job has longevity. Maybe we need to be thinking now about finding avenues for truck drivers who are going to be displaced at an unknown time in the future. Right. And that seems like it applies to a lot of things that might be facing obsolescence in the face of automation or AI or all these other new technologies. That's right. How is that going to change the demand for radiologists or journalists or professors?

You know, these are all things we need to be thinking about. Yeah, we may all be feeling a little bit of anticipatory dread. I think there's a lot of that going around. As for our friends, the Teamsters, after trucks, that occupation started to dwindle away toward extinction. Until you couldn't even really see it anymore in the job fossil record. So the last time we can find it in the census is 1960. There still may be Teamsters around. They're probably very rare.

You probably see them at county fairs and the like. Have you ever ridden with a Teamster or ridden on a horse-drawn carriage? I have not. No, I wouldn't mind some time, but it hasn't happened. Which is the admission of never having ever that initially brought Kevin and me to that old 1830s village, where we got into a horse-drawn trolley

driven by a guy in a floppy hat named George King. When Kevin and I met him, George had been ferrying fussy tourists around in his carriage for five hours. Do you ever identify as a teamster? I am a teamster. That's what I do, sir. Yes. How does it feel being a teamster in the 21st century? Not very good today. It's been quite a day. Have a good day, sir. Thank you so much. Have a good day, sir.

Thank you so much. As we watch George flick the reins and trot off into the 1830s historical sunset, Kevin and I take it all in. Were you surprised to hear that guy identify as a teamster? I was a little bit, I have to say. I mean, maybe it says something that with a version of that skill set, you can still find employment. Yeah, I think for somebody who really enjoys it,

the job still exists, and you can still find people who are driving teams of horses, probably not very many for delivery purposes, but... Delivering smiles onto the faces of visiting tourists. Right, and young children in particular, as we saw. Well, what do you think we've learned? Learned it's nice to come out to central Massachusetts on the three-day weekend in the middle of October. Sometimes you got to get out of the ivory tower, Kevin.

Yep. Glad you left the library. It's important to get this fresh fall air. Today's episode was produced by Emma Peasley with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Sally Helm, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to Maxim Masenkov and Nathan Wilmers, who wrote that paper about cell phone location data.

You can hear more about their work on our sister podcast, The Indicator. Search for Outback Steakhouse. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Author Douglas Preston had a suspicion that ChatGPT was created, in part, by reading his books. It knew my characters. It knew their names. It knew the settings. It knew everything.

What happens when tech companies gobble up copyrighted material without asking? That's on the next Planet Money podcast from NPR. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.