Never have I ever

0:00Support comes from our 2025 lead sponsor of Planet Money, Amazon Ads. Less than half of customers fully trust their financial institutions. Amazon Ads helps financial brands build that trust through relevant ads using first-party signals to reach the right customers. More at advertising.amazon.com. This is Planet Money from NPR. A few weeks ago, I found myself standing around the storied office water cooler, chatting with my colleague Darian Woods from our sister show The Indicator. He was telling me about this kind of fun new economics paper he'd just come across. The researchers had used cell phone tracking data to map out socioeconomic diversity in America, and they identified the place where the widest array of people from across the socioeconomic spectrum were most likely to actually rub shoulders in the same physical location.

0:57And that place was pretty surprising. It turns out that, according to this cell phone data, rich and poor and middle-class people are most likely to mingle not in public parks or in the pews of a church, but inside of moderately expensive chain restaurants, places like Applebee's or Olive Garden, or the Australian-themed Outback Steakhouse. Now, I happen to know that Darian is part Australian. So when he then told me that never had he ever been to an Outback Steakhouse, that got my attention. And when he reminded me that he was also a vegetarian, I knew we didn't really have a choice. I had to take Darian, the Australian vegetarian, on an adventure.

1:45Darian Woods! Alexei Horowitz-Gazi! Good to see you. Fancy seeing you here outside the Outback Steakhouse. A few days later, we found ourselves at an Outback Steakhouse in Bayside, Queens. We were mostly there to cross an item off of my bucket list for Darian. Right, reason enough. But we also wanted to get some anecdata about whether or not it's true that people of all income levels are hanging out together at the Outback Steakhouse. But first, of course, we had to eat. So they're highlighting this thing called the Bloomin' Onion, which is a 1 ,620-calorie dish made out of a deep-fried onion.

2:24Good on them for telling us. I've never seen this in Australia. I thought Bloomin' Onions just grew everywhere in Australia. Yeah, I mean, deep-fried already. Possibly a figment of the owner's imagination about what they do in Australia. In any case, back to our investigation. We chatted to staff as we waited for our meals, asking whether they thought this really was an economic melting pot. We asked our waiter, Veronica Hughes. Oh yeah, I definitely see people of all sorts of financial backgrounds coming in and eating. We tried sidling up to people sitting in their boots. Yeah, but most didn't want to talk.

2:57No, no thank you. Boo! After a disturbingly filling meal, we left. Bye guys, thank you. But we still hadn't gotten any great anecdata. So we loitered in the parking lot, staging a stakeout out the back of the Outback Steakhouse. Walking out of the restaurant was Julia D 'Antonio, a paralegal. And we were pretty relieved. Julia was a trove of anecdater. You know the TV show Cheers. Absolutely, where everybody knows your name. Yes, honestly, that's how I feel. And a lot of people come here because that's the way they feel. Have you met folks from kind of like different socioeconomic backgrounds at the bar when you're kind of like hanging?

3:34Oh, absolutely. So what's really interesting is I've actually met some physicians, right? So pretty high rollers. Yes, but however, you know, just regular folks, social workers, people like me, secretaries, nurses, engineers. I mean, a variety of people. Have you ever met up with somebody afterwards that you've met in the RBAC Stakehouse? Oh, yes. Yeah. I made friends here for sure. Yeah. Which, you know, that's a really good thing, right? Talking to Julia felt like a huge success. I mean, sure, she's just one person. But she confirmed the paper's finding that the Outback Steakhouse is this economic melting pot.

4:15And not only that, she's made friends there. This is important. There is a growing body of evidence that cross-class friendships are good for economic mobility. So we left the Outback Steakhouse feeling like we'd actually learned something. And this whole escapade gave me an idea. The fact that never had you, Darian, ever been to an Outback Steakhouse, that gave us this reason to go out into the real world, to turn what might have otherwise been a sort of dry econ paper into a whimsical jaunt. And I thought, what if I could do that with some of the writers and researchers out there? Drag them out of their cozy armchairs and dusty libraries.

4:54You know, rip them right out of the ivory tower. Well, Alexei, this is where I leave you. Yes, thank you for your bravery, Darian. Go back and enjoy those creature comforts of the cubicle. Good luck out there. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi. Today on the show, Planet Money plays our version of Never Have I Ever. We dare to researchers to go places and do things they have never done before in hopes of learning just a little bit more about the economic world around us.

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6:12Earn unlimited 1.5 % cash back on every purchase every day. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. Okay, so I'd set myself this kind of silly mission. I was going to dare writers and researchers to do something that never had they ever done before. And I thought it would be best if they were doing something that they'd written about but never actually experienced. And so not too long after I dragged my favorite vegetarian to a steakhouse, I gave LA Times tech columnist Brian Merchant a mysterious invitation. Meet me at a random repair shop in an industrial part of Brooklyn.

6:55He didn't seem to have trouble figuring out who I was on the street. These are the big microphones to give away there. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Where are we here? Welcome to industrial East Williamsburg. I guess you're probably wondering why we've come to American commercial equipment repair. I have some guesses. Brian had some guesses because he just published a new book about the Luddites. As longtime Planet Money listeners will know, the Luddites were a group of English textile workers around the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. For generations, they'd been weaving cloth from the comfort of their own homes.

7:29But then, in the early 1800s, a group of proto-tech titans are setting up factories filled with new machines, like the waterframe and the power loom, things that automated a lot of textile work. Wages tanked. Many workers lost their jobs. So the Luddites went on a campaign to destroy those machines, smash them to pieces. Brian had written this whole book about the Luddites, and yet he admitted to me that never had he ever smashed even one single machine. Not even a tiny one. And I was like, yeah, we gotta change that. So I booked us a room at a place called The Rage Cage. A business where, for a nominal fee, you can take out your pent-up rage by destroying an assortment of office electronics.

8:19Are you ready to commune with the Luddites? I'm always ready to commune with the Luddites. Let's head in. We get inside, put on helmets and goggles, get zipped into these full body suits. Looks like a gentler hazmat suit almost. It's got a hood and it's got some booties. I hope you brought your pen up rage at our kind of industrial world. I sure have, but there's plenty of it to go around. Brian says he decided to write this book now because, like the Luddites, we are all living through a moment when a wave of new technologies is threatening to destroy a lot of jobs. Technologies like AI and new kinds of automation.

8:59And if you're against those things today, people might accuse you of being a Luddite. In the tech world where Brian spent his professional life, that word is basically just an insult. Just an epithet for somebody who hates technology or doesn't understand it. or rejects it outright. So somebody who's, you know, oh, I've never gotten an iPhone, I'm such a Luddite. Or I can't get my DVR to work, I'm such a Luddite. So that is how I mostly understood the term, because that's how it was lodged in the popular consciousness. But about a decade ago, Brian says he stumbled onto some research arguing that the Luddites had really been misunderstood.

9:40Maybe had even been the victims of a smear campaign. And I really wanted to dive deeper into why do we think it's a bad thing to protest against any even sort of sliver of technology? Why did that get such a bad rap? Why did these Luddites get such a bad rap? Bryant set out to solve this historical whodunit. Who had done the Luddites dirty? He found that at first, the people who had become the Luddites were totally peaceful. They were literally just knitting at home with their families. And when these power looms started upending their lives, they didn't take out their hammers right away. For years, they petitioned parliament to pass laws to help them.

10:22They had different policy proposals that we would recognize today. Things like minimum wage laws or, hey, what if you taxed a little bit of the cloth that was produced by the machinery and used that to sort of fund welfare benefits or job retraining programs? But they're completely rebuffed. Not only that, but by now they're starving. And so the cloth workers decide to lash out at the factory owners by targeting the machines. They band together under the banner of a probably apocryphal figure named General Ned Ludd. That's how they become known as the Luddites. And they start breaking into factories, destroying the looms with sledgehammers.

11:01Though, Brian says, they're not just smashing everything in sight. Notably, they would only break the machinery that was automating their work or, quote, stealing their bread, as they put it. the other machinery in the factory that had been used for a long time was left intact. At first, a lot of people loved the Luddites. They're like Robin Hood, protecting the poor workers from the greedy, rich factory owners. New Luddite cells start popping up across England. But then the powers that be crack down. The government makes the breaking of machinery punishable by death. Brian says the straw that broke the Luddites' back came one night in April of 1812, when a band of Luddites attack a major factory in West Yorkshire.

11:43And it just goes disastrously. The factory owner, he's prepared for it. He has all manner of defenses lined up. He has slots built into the windows where his workers can put their guns and be protected from fire. He has, like, cauldrons of tar ready to pour on the Luddites if they get inside, which they never do. It is a resounding defeat. Several Luddites are killed, and in the aftermath of the attack, a small group of Luddites actually assassinates another local factory owner in cold blood. And that act of violence helps turn public sentiment against them. That was just too far for many people.

12:23You know, they had been cheered like Robin Hood, and now they're gunning people down in the streets, and that kind of spoiled some of that mythology. A murder trial follows, and that's when people begin to talk about the Luddites as this horde of ignorant reactionaries. This is kind of the moment Brian was looking for, the moment when the word Luddite becomes an insult. You know, history is written by the victors, and the crown crushed the Luddites, so they really sell this story at every opportunity that these are anti-technology dummies, basically, who are fighting against the prosperity of England, fighting against progress.

13:08They're just stuck in the past. So all of these ideas that we still have bound up in the term Luddite today are really just kind of inaugurated instantly and sort of pushed from the highest offices of the land. Now, there was, of course, some truth in that argument. The automation the Luddites were fighting fueled the Industrial Revolution. Goods got cheaper, and that materially improved life for people around the world. But that economic progress also came at the expense of huge numbers of people. Not only the workers who were replaced, but the armies of child labor that followed, and the slavery and plantation system that developed in order to supply raw materials for these factories.

13:51The Luddites recognized this fundamental fact, that new technologies almost always come with a human cost. And when Brian looks at the current moment, as AI threatens to replace untold numbers of modern workers, he's like, I think it's time to rehabilitate the Luddites. Not that Brian thinks we should murder executives or smash AI server farms, but he does think that when we use the word Luddite as an insult, we're forgetting that they had a point. He thinks too many people have internalized the idea that new technology is always good and fighting against it is always stupid when that is clearly not true.

14:29Do you see yourself as something of a Luddite? 100%. Yeah, I see myself as a full card-carrying Luddite in the modern sense. You know, I don't, I was about to say I don't have a hammer, but I do have a hammer. I have a sledgehammer. I have not used it to smash any machinery. At least, not until I dragged Brian to the rage cage in industrial Brooklyn. Now, unfortunately, we were not able to procure the actual machines the Luddites themselves would have destroyed. There were no power looms or water frames available. Instead, when we walked into our rage room, we found a stack of modern machines.

15:09Printers, computer monitors, and keyboards. Along with a selection of baseball bats. Did the Loddings have like a saying or anything when they were about to destroy and implement of the Industrial Revolution? Well, they would hold their hammers up, which were made by Enoch, the blacksmith, who also made some of the automating machinery, and they'd say, Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them. All right. Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them. It was time to smash.

15:45Whoa. I'll add the names of some of these machines as you do it in between. Gigmil. Shearing frame. Powerloom. Time's up. Thank you. Woo! We've done a fair amount of destruction. How does it feel? It feels pretty satisfying. Brian had spent the whole interview reminding me that the Luddites were about so much more than smashing. They had a prescient social critique about the perils of unfettered technological change. But after having just absolutely demolished a printer with Enix baseball bat, you had to admit, the smashing had to have been a big part of the appeal. There is an element of catharsis, and it's not something I really look at too much in the book, that I examine, you know, how they must have felt.

16:41But yeah, imagine seeing these machines that were doing your work, doing a worse job, you know, driving down the amount of money that you got paid. And then finally, after years and years, just going in and smashing them. It must have felt good. It must have felt liberating. Brian Merchant is the author of Blood in the Machine, the origins of the rebellion against big tech. After the break, our game of never have I ever brings us to the modern workers confronting the latest wave of new technology. It's what to expect when you're expecting obsolescence.

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18:49Terms and conditions apply. A couple weeks ago, I walked into the main square of an 1830s historical village in central Massachusetts. I was there to meet up with Kevin Lang, a labor economist at Boston University. Kevin Lang, thanks for joining me in the 1830s here. No problem. We had not come here to churn our own butter or visit the piggery, which is a real place where they keep the pigs. For this round of Never Have I Ever, I was going to challenge Kevin to hop aboard a very particular kind of vehicle with a very particular kind of driver. So what are we looking at? Somebody is driving a team of two horses.

19:31It's pulling a bunch of people crowded into benches, roughly an equivalent of a bus. It's the last remaining Teamster in the United States. Teamsters are extremely rare these days. Most people probably know the word from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. That's the union that represents truck drivers and many other workers. It's one of the biggest unions in the country. But originally, a teamster was what you called the person who drives a team of horses. Which was a big industry back in the day, when horse-drawn trucks were the way to move freight around American cities. Kevin and I walk over to the trolley and climb aboard up near the front, where the teamster at the reins, a guy named George King, is herding tourists into their seats.

20:19This is the last ride of the day. This is going to be a one-way trip over to the Bullitt Tavern. So if we're leaving anybody's husband, a wife, a mother-in-law behind, I hope it's intentional. All right, I'd like to ask that everybody please remain seated at all times. Please keep your arms and legs in the wagon, okay? I lean over to Kevin. Don't be scared. I've heard that the mortality rate is extremely low. That's right. And just like that, we were off on our tour. Now, the reason Kevin and I had traveled a grand total of 195 miles and almost 200 years into the past was because of a paper he and a few colleagues had been working on, looking at how labor markets respond to the threat of disruptive new technologies.

21:07The whole thing started when Kevin and one of his research partners started thinking about what's happening to truck drivers. It seems relatively certain that a new technology, self-driving trucks, will be taking over the roads someday soon, destroying millions of jobs. But also... Self-driving trucks have been five years away for a long time. That's definitely my impression. Which is to say, truck drivers don't know when exactly machines will make their skill set obsolete. And Kevin and his co-authors wanted to know, how does the labor market respond to a situation like that? Is it still worth becoming a trucker?

21:45Or is it actually time to leave trucking? When and how do you make those decisions if you know that this industry may be in its final throes? As Kevin is thinking this through, he's like, well, those calculations should be different depending on your age. So if you're 21, 22, 23 years old and you're thinking about becoming a long distance truck driver, you might think about the fact that at age 30, you might be out of a job and that you might not want to invest in being a long distance truck driver. Right. So you're thinking about like the kind of skills and the time and the money that would be required to become a truck driver and whether or not how that stacks against other investments and other possible careers?

22:29Absolutely. You should be thinking about, you know, what are the other choices that I have out there? And if I'm a young person thinking about one of my options being a truck driver, it doesn't look like a great idea right now. Which may be one of the reasons there's been a massive reported shortage of truckers over the past few years. And a shortage like that can drive wages up. That's actually happened in trucking. So, Kevin explains, say you're on the older side of the workforce, like in your late 50s, and you're thinking about leaving a lower-paying job to get into truck driving before you reach retirement age.

23:05Then the calculations look different. You might say, well, I think truck driving is going to be around for a while, and they're having a hard time getting people to become truck drivers. So wages are pretty high right now for truck drivers. Maybe that's actually a good thing for me to get into. So Kevin and his colleagues come up with a theory about what's likely to happen when a workforce is reckoning with the threat of impending obsolescence. We very quickly came to the conclusion that what we should see, first of all, that wages should be rising, that we should see employment falling relative to what would happen if there were no self-driving trucks on the horizon, and we should see the occupation getting older.

23:46Over the next few months, Kevin and his colleagues refine their hypothesis and work on the math. But what they really need to do is find some real-world data, see if their ideas hold up. And they can't just look at the labor market for truckers, because that story is still unfolding. They need to do some historical sleuthing to find data for an occupation that had gone through the entire cycle, from carefree full employment to total obsolescence. They look around at different professions until they finally ask the question lurking in plain sight. What happened to the people who were delivering goods before motorized trucks arrived?

24:28And eventually, we came up with the idea of looking at people who drove horse-drawn trucks when motorized trucks were on the horizon. In other words, the Teamsters. Now, to figure out how the Teamster labor market responded to the rise of motorized trucking, Kevin and his co-authors dug into census data. They needed to know how many workers identified as Teamsters in every decade starting in 1900. That way they could track changes in the size of the workforce and how old everybody was. But parsing the census data was not easy. They had to be careful to exclude a bunch of slightly different horse-specific occupations.

25:08There were a bunch of new words that I learned that I had not previously known about. There were the Draymen, for example, people who delivered beer. Or there were the hostlers. Hostlers are, I believe, people taking care of horses, if I remember properly. For some people, it must have been kind of a side hustle. Right. They used the census info to track employment demographics. Then they pulled wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to track how Teamster pay changed over the decades. And here is the story all that data told. For a decade or so after the invention of the first combustion engine truck in 1896, motorized trucks weren't even close to threatening the horse-drawn truck trade.

25:51Kevin and co. call that the pre-shock period. And then we think of the period of roughly 1910 to 1920 as what we call the anticipatory dread period. It's where... Sorry, what? The anticipatory dread. They are dreading the motor trucks coming and leaving them either with very low wages or having to find a new job. It's a very dramatic name. Well, I've got a clever co-author. And what Kevin and Co saw in the data seemed to match their predictions. Young people see more and more trucks on the road. They realize horse-drawn trucks will become obsolete, and they start to avoid the Teamster trade. Wages rise, and then older workers from lower-paying jobs choose to become Teamsters at a higher rate.

26:38They're retiring soon anyways, so why not cash in? Then, in the 1920s, the disruptive new technology finally takes over. These self-driving trucks of that moment. Though, in this case, they're just regular trucks. Hold the horses. And that anticipatory dread becomes real dread. There's just a dramatic decline in employment of Teamsters. OK, so the Teamster labor market kind of falls apart over the course of the 20s? Very much so. Kevin thinks that cycle is already happening right now in the trucking industry and maybe in other industries, too. What do you think of as the kind of big takeaways from this work, from this paper?

27:19So I think there are a number. I think one is that people often think, well, the job's paying well. This occupation must be doing well. And it can, in fact, be a sign that the occupation is not doing well in the sense that people don't think it's going to be around very long. That may be the obsolescence premium that you're seeing. It is. That's exactly what it is. So, Kevin says, as we all survey the changing vocational landscape before us, we should not be fooled by the obsolescence premium. Just because wages are rising does not mean that particular job has longevity. Maybe we need to be thinking now about finding avenues for truck drivers who are going to be displaced at an unknown time in the future.