It reminds me of an article I wrote a long time ago, where I looked at how common people in Geneva in the 1540s and 1550s asserted that the weather had gotten worse since Geneva had converted to Protestantism. They would say things like "When the priests still said the Mass, it wasn't so cold." (and they were perhaps right to see such changes - one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age was 1560-1580).
Anyway...
1. Are they wrong? Given NAFTA, I can see automation efficiencies as the only thing that keeps jobs in America, albeit fewer of them. So without automation, the effects of NAFTA might be worse. Whereas without NAFTA, the effects of automation would be similar. Right now manufacturers have two choices for investing capital that eliminates jobs: build a foreign factory or automate a domestic one. As a worker in Michigan, I would rather see them automate my factory, probably rolling out automation slowly and hopefully making some adjustments through natural attrition. Option B, see the place shuttered two days after the new line opens in Mexico, is harder to stomach. The scale of job loss due to automation is greater (at least according to that one study), but the nature of it is different.
2. Humans are terrible at connecting causes and effects unless they are truly direct. I bet if you talked to a worker who was fired the day after the robots came online at his factory, he might feel differently. As NFFC says, this interview is with the guys who are left.
3. We tend to overlook causes that are structural or hidden in favor of causes that have a "point source". Automation is happening one machine at a time. An automated factory is still running. Somehow it feels "right," it feels like "progress." But "American" cars made in Mexico? That feels wrong. Those are jobs that should be in America and were stolen.
Automated jobs are gone and therefore invisible. The jobs lost to NAFTA still exists, just elsewhere and therefore were stolen. If I have a pool of water open to the sun in Arizona and I lose 1000 gallons per week to evaporation, maybe I'm not bothered. I may not even really understand it's happening. But when I catch my neighbor filling his 500-gallon tank weekly, I'm incensed. "I told you to use your own water!!!" But if I were focussing on preserving water, I would buy a pool cover, not a surveillance system. But I'm guessing more people would buy the cameras.
4. We're more sensitive to loss than to gain. The "American" cars made in Mexico represent stolen jobs, but the "Japanese" cars made in Kentucky represent American know-how and work ethic. [irrelevant fun fact: a single dealership in California sells more Japanese cars than the combined total of American brands sold by Japanese dealers].
5. We prefer to focus on problems that can be fixed. NAFTA can be fixed. Automation can't be.
6. We have a cultural bias to see technological progress as good and we use the term "luddite" as a way of denigrating people, even though the actual Luddites were 100% correct. But having fought and lost, nobody wants to be seen as a Luddite today except jokingly (as in "Ha! I still have a flip phone. I'm a Luddite"). Being a Luddite is lumped in with climate disruption deniers, chemtrails and anti-vaxers as deluded thinking.
7. Personal interest impairs our ability to do basic math. They've done experiments such as the following
Trial one asks people:
We have two drugs for treating stomach ulcers. The results are as followed
Drug A: Administered to 1000 people, 450 had their ulcers cured
Drug B: Administered to 500 people, 350 had their ulcers cured
Which drug should we prefer?
30% of people get it wrong. So for trial 2, we use the 70% who can do basic math. But now instead of asking the question about a random drug for some basic condition, they change it so that the question concerns a hot-button issue like gun control, abortion, etc. And guess what, the second group, 100% of whom are capable of doing the basic math tend to get the same calculation wrong when the answer disagrees with their world view.
