Whitcomb: Millionaire Migration?; Adapting to AI; Tear It Down; Dig It Up
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Millionaire Migration?; Adapting to AI; Tear It Down; Dig It Up
“I’ve spent the last few years with an eraser,
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTtrying to uncover the masterpiece under the canvas,
scratching at the crusted-over surfaces:
were there windows? Certainly
there were gaping spaces and cherubim on bicycles
painted over with a dog and a few affairs…’’
--- From “Long Island,’’ by Ira Sadoff (born 1945)
“One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.”
--- Phyllis Rose (born 1942), American critic and essayist
“If you wish to avoid foreign collision, you had better abandon the ocean.’’
-- Henry Clay (1777-1852), American politician, statesman and diplomat
“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.’’
--- Hazel Rochman (born 1938), American literary critic and historian
“If the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole author, that would mark the end of books.”
-- Norman Maclean (1902-1990), teacher and author, most famously of the classic A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, when Knopf, after rejecting that book, his first, offered to look at his next manuscript
The profusion of fast-growing life at this time of year makes it seem that various species are jockeying for position so as not to get left behind in the race for water, sun or shade and good soil. Meanwhile, more and more pollen fills the air, as does the aroma of wet soil, and a lot of us are sneezing. Next, the lilac flowers, with their sickly (to me) sweet aroma, will put on a show, reminding some of us of final exams.
In much of the world, May Day (which is next Friday this year) is still a day to celebrate working people, in a somewhat more socialistic way than hyper-capitalist America’s Labor Day, in early September. American exceptionalism.
Welcome to the lushest time of the year.
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A big problem for those in business and elsewhere trying to make plans about anything that might be affected by Trump’s war against Iran is simply that he lies so much. His response to virtually any serious question is to lie. As with many sociopaths, his lying creates few or no visible signs, facial or otherwise, of anxiety. And he changes his stories second by second. What to do in response?
Will his cult followers ever tire of him? Most people eventually weary of extreme narcissists. Some of the sucking up to the Orange Oligarch is amusing. Consider his boy toy, House Speaker Mike Johnson’s slavishness.
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I’ve usually supported Israel because it’s the only (if fraying) democracy in the Mideast and traditionally has had values more humane than not, in comparison with regimes in its tough neighborhood. (Turkey is only marginally democratic.)
But I fear that while it has won many battles against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, it may lose the long war because of the enmity and thirst for revenge brewed by Israeli attacks that have killed tens of thousands and devastated Gaza and parts of Lebanon.
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Bay State voters’ decision to end Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests, and thus throw more authority to determine students’ competency, and the right to graduate from high school, to local school districts has resulted in lower standards. That will hurt the state’s competitiveness. But some people, including a lot of teachers, don’t want pushback from students and parents complaining that the MCAS was too tough. It wasn’t, assuming adequate teaching.
James Peyser, who was state education secretary under former Gov. Charles Baker, has argued that Massachusetts has gone from having some of the America’s highest statewide high-school graduation standards to having none at all. He notes that letting local districts accept low passing grades in core courses obviously no longer guarantees that students have mastered essential skills. All this leads to an increase in “social promotion’’ (move’ em out!) in which many students leave school without the skills to deal with our complicated and unpredictable world.
Some, especially in teachers unions, complain that the MCAS led teachers to “teach for the test.’’ Well, yes, teaching and learning need the discipline of having a clear coherent goal. And pretty much everyone has to pass tests to get through life in one piece.
While we wait to see if something like the MCAS can be brought back, at least schools can do such things as banning cellphones from classes, implementing more in-class exams to diminish cheating via artificial intelligence and lobbying for curbs on social-media access by young people.
The AI Avalanche
"O brave new world, / That has such people in't"
-- From The Tempest (1610-1611), by William Shakespeare; Brave New World is a 1932 dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley
We’re hearing to the point of tedium how artificial intelligence is upending the economy and much of the rest of life. It will clearly destroy many jobs, apparently especially in techie places like Greater Boston. It will also create some jobs, though it’s unclear exactly where. The Tufts University report below projects that the worst risks will be for those in information technology; finance and insurance, and professional, scientific and technical services. (These groupings are defined in somewhat murky ways.) The golden age for coders is over – too bad for all those young people who were strongly encouraged to go into that field.
Thus some fields that up to recently seemed very inviting for young people now seem to be vaporizing.
Occupations that don’t seem very problematic are skilled trades that require an element of physicality, such as builders (including carpenters, electricians, roofers and heating-and-cooling system installers and maintainers), and maybe restaurant and some other food-related fields. (However, some wait- staff jobs are being threatened by table-top meal-ordering devices.)
Maybe (paradoxically?) because of the sometimes very idiosyncratic creativity needed, Web designers will do all right in the AI world.
Still, the fact is that we just don’t know how fast and devastating the jobs losses (and perhaps threats to democracy and civil society) will be. My guess is that given the greed and capitalist imperialism of so many AI moguls, and the pressure on big companies to “maximize shareholder value” by slashing head counts to boost ASAP “shareholder value,” everything will happen faster than we handle in an orderly way. The only useful advice is to stay flexible and prepare for stretches of unemployment, perhaps long ones. How much can government help support millions more unemployed people?
A bit of fatalism is always helpful in facing the future. Remember another line from The Tempest:
“….And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve….
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Providence’s Amtrak Station is being renovated, and from what they’ve done so far I can see the station is being much improved -- bigger, more seating. more light and better services. It’s an important station, serving most of Rhode Island, southeastern Massachusetts and a sliver of Connecticut.
The improvements will be a strong and needed draw for downtown Providence.
By American standards, we’re very fortunate around here when it comes to passenger-rail service. Most of the country is a desert when it comes to public transit. But even southern New England could use more trains and more tracks to put them on.
Will they ever fix Amtrak’s terrible, labyrinthine website?
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The love that many have for the broken Crook Point Bascule {railroad} Bridge, over the Seekonk River and stuck at a 64-degree angle since 1976, eludes me. And now some legislators want to create an independent corporate authority to acquire, develop, and maintain the bridge. Better to finally tear down this “iconic” eyesore and put a pedestrian bridge there and – as I dream on – eventually build a new span next to it as part of a plan (taking years to complete) to restore rail passenger service to Aquidneck Island.
To me, the old bridge represents civic sloth.
I suppose that many would think that a new bridge, pedestrian or otherwise, might be a good place from which to fish, though I’d be leery of eating them; too many chemicals and other nasty stuff still flowing down from the mighty Blackstone River, though it’s a hell of a lot cleaner than it was half a century ago.
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House prices continue to jump in Providence in part because so many people want to move there, especially to the East Side. And a lot of that is directly and indirectly because Brown University is in Providence, however irritating some of Brown’s policies and actions (such as tearing down old houses) might be from time to tim.
When to Dig It Up
Some readers may be aware that the Trump administration is preparing to let a Chilean mining company extract precious and other metals near the beautiful and remote National Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in northeastern Minnesota, north of Minnesota’s famous Mesabi Range open-pit iron mines. That range played a big part in the steel industry, which played a key role in America’s economic rise. (It also played a part in my mother’s family: My grandfather, who grew up on farms in Upstate New York, made much of his living as a Duluth lawyer for mining companies; He was probably a tough guy.)
Many Minnesotans fear, probably with good reason, that the proposed new mines will result in much pollution leaking into the heretofore protected wild area. But others look forward to the promised well-paying jobs. In any case, I hope that the Trump move doesn’t presage massive development of other wilderness areas, especially by insider companies connected with the most corrupt regime in American history.
Still, development questions can be environmentally complicated.
Consider the question of whether to develop an area of rocks on private land at Pennington Mountain, in far northern Maine, that has elevated concentrations of rare earth elements (a group of 17 elements) plus additional elements, niobium and zirconium. These are all used in the renewable-energy sector. And as the results of Trump’s war against Iran remind us yet again, we need to reverse backsliding and accelerate toward a renewable-energy future for national security and environmental survival. Yes, carefully mine the Maine stuff if it looks economically viable.
Oceanic Revenge
So who needs the Gulf Stream? It’s part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, now being rapidly weakened by man-made climate change. Global warming is melting ice sheets, pouring fresh water into the North Atlantic, and interrupting the density that the AMOC needs to sink and circulate.
An AMOC collapse would be quite exciting for New England, as it would cause water to pile up along the coast, adding to the flooding already underway as ice melts faster and faster in the Arctic and Antarctic. More ocean views! And of course, our climate would rapidly change, though not as much as in Western Europe, whose mild climate owes much to the Gulf Stream.
See what Mainers are thinking about as they see the water rising, in the new, very colorful and, we think, important book Rising Tides: Adapting to Coastal Maine’s Future, by William Perna and edited by yours truly.
Private-Jet Me Outta Here!
The spring, as state and local governments try to nail down their tax policies and budgets for the next fiscal year, is high season for very rich people to threaten to leave this or that jurisdiction (such as Rhode Island) if those places raise taxes on them. This includes many who pay very little in taxes as a percentage of their revenue because, among other things, tax codes favor investment income rather than “earned income” (from salary and freelance work, etc.)
Although it could be argued, as did Theodore Roosevelt, that the rich benefit more than other groups from what taxes provide in physical infrastructure (roads, water supplies, etc.), such services as police, firefighting and public education, and the rule of law, some very wealthy people seem to think it an insult if they’re asked to help pay for such stuff. Some of the techno billionaires are particularly intense about this, because they think they’re such geniuses that we should be paying them for letting us sit in their glorious glow.
Of course, a few irritated plutocrats do leave to go to “low-tax” states, many of which have high sales taxes, which hit the poor and middle class the most, but most stay where they are, because of family, friends and business connections. And states with high broad-based taxes still tend to be the richest ones because those levies pay for essential (to most people) infrastructure and services. An exception is New Hampshire, which has no broad-based tax. It prospers off rich Massachusetts next door.
Only about 2.4 percent of millionaires migrate to another state annually—lower than the general population rate of 2.9 percent, according to admittedly rather old data.
In The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight, sociologist Cristobal Young wrote, “People almost never move when they are at the advanced career stage — a time when they are most likely to face a millionaire tax.” But their complaints come fast and furious.
Maureen Kennedy, in a recent article in The Hill, noted that the Fiscal Policy Institute reported that “the millionaire population in New York state had grown after tax hikes were instituted in 2017 and 2021. After Proposition 30 went into effect, California state revenues increased by $7 billion-$8 billion per year, according to the California Budget & Policy Center — a sure sign the tax didn’t empty the state of millionaires. More recently, the Institute for Policy Studies found the same when they studied the number of millionaires in Washington and Massachusetts after they passed tax hikes on the rich in 2022.’’
As for “low-tax” nirvana Florida, the thrill is gone:
Of course, few people enjoy paying taxes, and levies on the rich can be high enough to drive some of them out of state, but that is rare. What’s too high? As the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart quipped in a free speech/pornography case: “I know it when I see it.’’
And after all, many politicians tend to worship and fear the rich, and want their campaign contributions. They’ll usually be very nice to them.
Of course, it’s important that the wealthy, and everyone else, see their taxes being spent as efficiently as possible for the public good. The perception of public waste and corruption will send some people packing. Waste and corruption in the private sector don’t seem to bother us much.
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One way to help address the national housing crisis is to think differently about single-family houses, the legally and otherwise privileged species of American dwellings for many decades. I came across this:
“Following its debut at the Princeton University School of Architecture (SoA), The House Transformed presents new ideas for domestic architecture. Featuring participants from local and global contexts, the exhibition rejects conventional notions of nuclear family and a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to the house. These models and drawings explore alternative concepts for collective living, multigenerational households, and caregiving.’’
Zoning and other issues will often arise, but this is worth a read: