The New Slaves--Offshoring v. Triple Revolution

It may not be possible to bring offshored manufacturing jobs home even if we were to bring manufacturing home.

Years ago, as an undergraduate, I hung out at a campus coffeehouse where the professors and graduate students in sociology and community development gathered. I never actually read the books they discussed; I simply listened in on the conversations of the local intelligentsia. I was not expected to contribute anything intelligent to the conversation. That was not my role. I was a sweet young thing—curvy and curly—and I was there to be seen but not heard.

The group in the coffeehouse talked about something called The Triple Revolution. The Triple Revolution predicted a future (around now) when robots would do all work. Comes the (Triple) revolution, only a few people would earn the honor of real jobs that would allow them to earn real wealth. The rest of the population would live on a generous government dole. The government would pay unemployed people to be consumers to keep the economy going. The government would be able to afford the dole because the economy would thrive on all that cheap robot labor.

Comes the (Triple) revolution, the population would stop being rabble and start to fill their days by pursuing higher education for its own sake and by becoming skilled artists and crafters who would barter their handmade craftwork amongst themselves.


Somehow the logical flaws in this theory—flaws that today strike me as so obvious—all went unnoticed sitting in that coffeehouse in the 1960’s. Comes the (Triple) revolution and a bored populace starving for education, professors were to be among the elite who deserved real jobs. Perhaps that part of the predictions made the theory more attractive and plausible to the guys in the coffeehouse than it otherwise might have been.

So far the Triple Revolution has not come to pass, although some of its predictions seem to be coming true after a fashion. Cheap labor abroad presumably slowed the development of robotics and reduced the prosperity of industrialized nations as well. True wealth flows to the producers of products; the “industrialized nations” are no longer engaged in production.

As good jobs (for both skilled and unskilled labor) grow more and more scarce, unemployment grows rapidly in America and Europe as the theory predicted. The financial resources that would be used to pay the unemployed underclass to be professional consumers have not materialized. If manufacturing jobs did come back to America and Europe in our lifetimes, it is reasonable to assume that a lot of the labor would be automated and no new jobs would be created.


Perhaps something like The Triple Revolution is coming true in our lifetimes, albeit in a distorted form lacking the predicted opportunities for self-fulfillment.