By Mike Montgomery
On Tuesday night, America was hit with an earthquake. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. What Tuesday showed is that we are a country that is even more deeply divided than many of us thought.
At the heart of that division is a schism between the haves and the have nots. People who feel they have been left behind by the government and the economy may not have been heard by pollsters but they made themselves heard loud and clear Tuesday when they voted for radical change at the top level of government.
While it may be an uncomfortable situation, those of us in the tech space need to talk about the role technology played in that divide.
Those of us living in the iPhone bubble may believe that things like online banking, video calls and streaming music are part of the everyday life of all Americans but that’s not true. We still live in a country that has a very real digital divide.
Studies from the Pew Research Center show that people who earn less money and are less educated also have less access to the internet. While 88% of adults earning more than $150,000 per year have broadband at home, only 45% of those earning under $30,000 a year have the same access. Ninety percent of people at the top income level have smartphones compared to 53% of those at the bottom.
As more and more of the services that people rely on move online, those at the bottom are truly being left behind. They have less access to things like employment websites, online education and new banking options. Without fast access to the internet they are increasingly isolated.
Then there’s the very real problem of job displacement. While technology has made many things easier in our lives, it’s also made a lot of jobs redundant. By 2020 robots will have replaced an estimated 5 million jobs, according to the World Economic Forum. Those people who feel that the jobs they once relied on are deserting their communities — they’re right.
But here’s the thing. I also believe that technology can help solve these problems. Knowing the benefits that come from more people having access to the internet we can put policies in place to close the digital divide. We need policies that encourage states to upgrade their infrastructures to bring broadband to everyone.
We need to accept the reality that the economy, and with it the future of work, is changing fundamentally and it’s not changing back. We can’t pretend that we’re headed for a resurgence of reliable factory jobs.
Instead, let’s enact policies that train people for the jobs of the future. Let’s have a minimum wage so that those in the growing service industry earn enough to take care of their families. And let’s seriously consider things like wage insurance so that when people move into jobs that have less consistent income, they can still count on steady earnings.
But let’s also make sure that at a state level, we don’t overcorrect and put so many regulations in place that we chill new businesses. If the economy is going to grow, we need to encourage our tech entrepreneurs to continue to come up with new ideas that are going to drive the economy of the future.
These ideas are not liberal or conservative, they’re common sense. They are ideas that people on both sides of the aisle can, and should, come together to support.
With the election behind us, it’s time for both sides to work together to heal the problems we saw so nakedly exposed on Tuesday night. Our future depends on it.