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In our modern technological society, billions of humans devote hours a day to algorithmic paradises they have created with their friends and family, communication platforms such as Facebook, Yahoo, and Reddit. Every day, humans consume messages from pundits on these platforms stating that that same beloved technology is stealing our jobs, too. The white paper, “Mounting a Response to Technological Unemployment” written by Andrew Stettner and published by The Century Foundation on April 26, 2018, is a clarion call that responds to the tension between our love of technology and its power to negatively alter the lives of hard-working people. The danger technology presents to the social well-being of society has been a growing element in Western discourse for over a century, but until the last 34 years, technological advances have tended to favor improved working conditions for humans, productivity gains, and net increases in new jobs.
In 1987, the popularization of the personal computer that fits in our pocket and performs exponentially more tasks increased the risk to our social welfare and economic well-being. The exigency is obvious to many, especially to me because I have been a 10-year participant in the building of automation that causes technological unemployment. To me, every solution to this problem seemed improbable at best, but after investing in a deep analysis of Stettner’s paper about his proposal called Technology and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TTAA) it does not seem so complicated. His paper leverages an efficient structure, legislative persona, and addresses both sides of the policy discussion by utilizing well-documented rhetorical strategies that effectively manage the many dualities in the discourse regarding income replacement to mitigate the economic risk of technological unemployment. Campbell’s seven elements of descriptive analysis can be found in this white paper in support of the argument that some form of income replacement is a good solution to the problem created by technological unemployment. I will focus primarily on Structure, secondarily on Persona, as well as two frequently used rhetorical techniques: analogy and negating. In addition, I will analyze how the author effectively deploys the “They Say / I Say” argument to address criticisms of his proposal quickly, so that he can devote most of his attention to setting the stage and elaborating the solution. Structure, how “materials are organized to gain attention, develop a case, and provide emphasis” (Campbell et al., 2015, p. 28), is the primary focus of my analysis because Stettner’s document provides a useful template for the final policy speech that I will present at the end of this class. The exigency that is my focus is familiar to our policy-making audiences, without being well-known, and as such requires a greater investment in staging context, current research, and approaches attempted, before progressing to any presentation of a solution proposal. I believe that one of this document’s greatest strengths is how it resolves the complexity inherent in this exigency by allocating space (text) very effectively to the constituent objects of the argument. Stettner’s white paper was produced to represent the position of the well-respected think-tank that supported it’s publication. Written for a virtual audience of policy makers who will read it, he makes assumptions about the priorities and objections of his audience and addresses them with a persona that implies he is an experienced legislator even though he is not. Frequently, the text presumes objections and foresees legislative challenges, directly addressing them using the two rhetorical techniques that I will analyze in detail. Analogy and negation have a natural relationship because they are both dichotomous rhetoric techniques best suited to build similarities and eliminate the complexity created by multiple, opposing entities. The entities in my exigency frequently conflict because they are poorly understood, and because they are relatively new observations that lack clear direction for policy proposals. In his white paper, Stettner minimizes complexity to undercut our anxiety about the competing options to resolve the exigency while also insisting that it is real and resolvable. Any worthy presentation – written or spoken to a live audience – must begin immediately and effectively, and this white paper does it well. The title, “Mounting a Response to Technological Unemployment” is a clear call to action that immediately presents the central idea that will be first contextualized by scoping the problem through evidence, then related to existing inertia observed in parallel policies, and finally elaborated into a more detailed solution that targets the stated problem. The paper is structured simply: introduction, problem context with historical and current perspectives, alternative or parallel solutions, proposed solution with answers to rebuttals, and conclusion. I am extremely impressed that his introduction is a mere 425 words and his conclusion even less, 131 words from a total 15,000 words; only 3.7% of text surround the body of his argument. Because I believe that the structure of this paper provides a template for my policy speech, it is important to further this analysis. After the introduction, the next 4,200 words (28%) provide the context and history, as well as current research about the problem. Stettner’s effort to stage the context and history that favor his solution reference several of the same citations that I used in my Problem Speech, although I found that his argument about the impact of ATMs on the employment of bank tellers did not include the additional demographic information that I had identified using the US Labor Statistics information about the relevant time-period. He stated, “But in fact, they’ve allowed banks to increase the number of branches, each with fewer tellers focused more on customer service” (Stettner, 2018, p. 3) whereas my argument dug deeper. Though our arguments were initiated by the same article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives written by David H. Autor in 2015 my speech included the following, per the outline, “Seeing that example from Autor, I found the overall US employment statistics for the same period… US had 91M workers in 1980 and 139M workers in 2010, a 55% increase, compared to the 10% increase in bank tellers after ATMs… Negative on jobs at both the micro-level of bank [tellers] and across the industry at a macro-level” [italics added for emphasis] (Frazier, 2021, p. 6). As I learned first-hand, an important aspect of the policy discussion about technological unemployment is the Luddite Fallacy. I presented it in my speech as the counterargument to the position that robots will take away our jobs. It may have been an oversight, but in my opinion, Stettner included the incomplete data about the ATM example to include a reference to the Luddite Fallacy counterargument that rounds out the historical context for technological unemployment, even though it detracts from his thesis. After the context and history of the exigency has been presented, he transitions to the current research: a thorough index of alternative solutions to employment problems and a deep dive into a program implemented in the 1960s to protect workers from job losses created by employment migration out of the United States caused by the progressive trade policies at that time. Of the previously noted 4,200 words prior to the solution proposal, his description of current research utilizes 2,900 words (nearly 20% of the entire document). This is a long section, which he acknowledges when he writes that his “paper goes into depth about the possibility and merits of expanding TAA, providing more details to an idea that has been briefly mentioned in the literature but not fleshed out” avoiding the challenges of building something new, deftly titling his solution section, “Expanding TAA to Include Technology: The Extra T in TAA” (Stettner, 2018, p. 21). He suggests that the Trade Adjustment Assistance program legislated in 1962 can be modified to include compensation to workers for technology-related job losses in addition to the existing benefits for job losses due to trade migration. He positions this program as the best option among the many alternatives listed in his index of solutions partly because he is just fleshing out an idea that was already approved by the United States Congress. This understated language belies Stettner’s persona throughout his policy argument which aligns to the publisher’s stated mission to be a “progressive, independent think tank that conducts research, develops solutions, and drives policy change to make people’s lives better” (The Century Foundation, About Us, 2021) by focusing the audience of policy makers on those humans about which they may have minimal direct personal knowledge, the middle class and the low-skilled labor in the United States. The last paragraph of his introduction begins with an assumption that reflects the inertia his argument is trying to leverage using a legislative voice, “the growing consensus on the types of tasks that are vulnerable to displacement” that finishes with a list of policy jargon such as “displacement… trade-related job losses… adjustment assistance… elements of a policy response to this risk… pilot program… underlying TAA program” (Stettner, 2018, p. 1). I hear him signaling to his audience his credibility as a policy thought leader who writes like a legislative insider. Aside from this strong presence at the beginning of this argument, though, he steps back to allow the context, history, and current research to tell the story, and the data to provide the evidence that supports the central idea captured in the title of his white paper. To mount a response to technological unemployment, Stettner builds a linguistic analogy between the existing TAA program and his solution that uses semantic likeness as a technique to generate confidence in his proposal. Because this “analogy is a fresh comparison that strikes the audience as highly apt, it has considerable persuasive force” (Campbell et al., 2015, p. 99). By investing almost 1,700 words (11%) in a detailed description of the benefits, successes, and improvement opportunities related to the TAA program, I see a good example of how to utilize Campbell’s opinion of analogy, “[a]s a rule, a figurative analogy is more powerful when it is more comprehensive; that is, when there are many points of similarity” (Campbell et al., 2015, p. 99). Stettner has been comprehensive by including extensive historical and contextual perspective, as well as current research in the form of the existing TAA program, which enables him to use analogy to bridge to his solution proposal by simply adding an “Extra T in TAA” (Stettner, 2018, p. 21). After his effort to build many strong connections between the existing program and his proposed response to the problem of technological unemployment, Stettner dedicates the next 25% of his text to the solution. To reduce the apparent complexity of his solution proposal and in contrast to the detailed lists of policy requirements, goals, and mitigations, he refers to the “TTAA” program that is his proposed solution as “[t]his straightforward expansion would make the same mix of services available to both trade- or technology-certified workers” (Stettner, 2018, p. 25). This is a great example of negating as described in our textbook, “negation underlies all comparisons and contrasts, including those involved in literal and figurative analogies… but comparisons are also involved in definitions” (Campbell et al., 2015, p. 170) in this case trying to reset any anxiety that may have developed in his audience as they progressed through his solution proposal. Almost immediately after using “straightforward” he again uses negation “to characterize a person or thing” (Campbell et al., 2015, p. 188) by describing the benefits provided by the existing program he wants to mimic as a “current menu of standard options” (Stettner, 2018, p. 25) as if the audience were seated at a restaurant reviewing a list of entrees from which to choose their meal. This familiar language understates the complexity of his argument, effectively leveraging the analogy to simplify the policy argument. The solution can be further bisected into a closing rebuttal to what he believes are the two primary ambiguities that might stymie his plan. As a paper directed to policy makers, he addresses their first concern like a legislator, “many forms of artificial intelligence and automation, like autonomous vehicles, may need Congressional or regulatory permission to expand. These may provide political opportunities for enacting a program like TTAA in exchange for government approval of the technology” (Stettner, 2018, p. 26). Any concerns about how to qualify industries and workers for the program, he calls “a seemingly minor but important detail… unemployment records typically track the workers industry” (Stettner, 2018, p. 26) unifying both ends of the classification problem using those final two words cited and addressing the challenged relationship between workers and industry as minor but solvable through the well-known unemployment assistance program. I found a comparable semantic problem examined in a paper published by the MIT Technology Review that described Andrew Yang’s challenge with presenting Universal Basic Income to Americans as resolved when “he workshopped multiple options before landing on ‘freedom dividend’” qualified by the author’s opinion, “After all, capitalism has become synonymous with the American dream, and what’s more capitalistic than a dividend? And freedom ... well, that part speaks for itself” (Guo, 2021). Stettner’s and Yang’s figurative analogies, workers industry and freedom dividend, characterize the effect of the programs to create a definition of the solution and the impact it will have on people. I see this as a great example of Campbell’s definition of negation. Finally, to address several negative findings related to the existing TAA program, Stettner uses “They say/I say” as swift rebuttal, removing counterarguments quickly. For example, “This is not simply a failing of the program or its model, but rather reflects the fact that TAA recipients are laid off in communities with few good jobs,” (Stettner, 2018, p. 18) to further deepen our concern about the unemployment problems that relate to his argument. He goes further when he adds, “In short, it’s time for a closer look at the results of TAA, and to put to bed the idea that it’s an ‘ineffective’ program” (Stettner, 2018, p. 18). Like his use of “menu” cited earlier, and the use of “workers industry” and “freedom dividend” as well, phrasing opposition’s argument as being ready for bedtime diminishes their power. These semantic analogies link the concepts being discussed to familiar, non-threatening, aspects of daily life. He has heard the counterarguments to his proposal, which focus on perceived challenges to the existing TAA program’s success rate, and he quickly responds by adding that the challenges were already, and continued to be, in the affected communities. A great strength of this paper is that is does not try to reinvent the wheel to solve a problem that is roughly 34 years old. Often, new problems lead one to think deeply about new solutions. Instead, this argument eloquently relates the technological unemployment problem to an issue that has existed for almost twice as long, trade-related unemployment. This approach enables a frequent use of analogy, instead of mind-numbing explanations of complicated, new solutions, to support his argument and to focus on his central idea, mounting a response to technological unemployment as proclaimed by the title of his paper. There are so many risks with engaging the problem of technological unemployment in a way that will effectively mitigate it with an equitable solution that does not interfere with the natural capitalistic imperative to create new gadgets, bots, and algorithms that simplify our life while enriching the wealth of creators. As I have discussed above, this paper published by The Century Foundation avoids those risks by investing semantic resources in an effectively designed structure that efficiently allocates the most text where it is most needed, exposing and resolving the dualities inherent in this exigency with effective use of implicitly dichotomous rhetorical techniques, while quickly addressing disagreements and presumed challenges with “They Say / I Say” arguments. The solution to this problem has always seemed complex to me, as it does to most people, but maybe not so much anymore. The author’s Technology and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TTAA) program does not exist yet, but I can see it clearly now. That is the strength of analogy. Andrew Stettner’s proposed program addresses the risk to social cohesion created by rapid advances in technology without limiting the opportunities for wealth and convenience that are required by our capitalistic, freedom-loving American society. References
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