Electric cars are actually bad for the American economy though…
Each one takes less labor to build and the overwhelming majority of factories capable of producing ev batteries are overseas.
So while we can make evs domestically with less labor we now have fewer jobs and one of the most expensive parts of the car is being imported anyway, exerting downward pressure on the domestic workers in assembly.
So every electric car that replaces an internal combustion car is reducing the gdp in measurable terms.
Not that gdp is a good measure, but there’s a hard undeniable kernel of truth to the statement that electric cars are bad for the economy and specifically in a way that hurts working class Americans most.
You sound like an economist. They cost less to build and maintain. Which means the money is freed up to do other things. Only an economist would want to bailout inefficiency.
how are the ostensible productivity gains from evs going to be used to help american workers?
it’s hard to believe that the reduced demand for skilled tooling, die and machining labor will translate into some kind of gain for the communities and people that rely on that work to survive.
and we’ve seen how anemic reskilling efforts are and how the usual boilerplate response, “learn to code”, is completely defunct with the combination of LLMs and the cheap overseas junior dev labor pool.
american conservatives are trotting out these arguments to appeal to people who feel like they’re being forced to give up their lifestyle (driving cars with cheap gas), and materially are actually being heavily pressured to get evs without fully understanding the economics of this new class of Second Most Expensive Thing Most Americans Will Ever Buy, but that doesn’t mean that the realities that appeal is built on aren’t there.
Yeah an economist. Backwards ass logic of having more money in your pocket means you are poorer. A car factory is not a work program, it is a factory to make cars. Technological progress shouldn’t be crippled because some special interest group paid you to convince every single person to spend more money for an inferior good.
Goose chasing meme: more money in whose pocket, motherfucker?
Seriously. We’re talking about shitcanning a third of the us auto jobs. Who’s gonna get the money from that nightmare?
How can we expect those communities to take it lying down when they saw what happened and continues to happen to coal country?
This isn’t fake made up handwavey bullshit. These are the real effects of domestic ev production and we can’t just say “anyone who opposed evs is a conservative piece of garbage or a head-in-ass neoliberal economist.”
No really, the parts/labor breakdown of an ev skews farther to parts than an ice car. Who gets that money in their pocket in exchange for all the jobs?
What happens to the families and communities that depend on the jobs that are going away?
Have we learned anything from the failed reskilling of Appalachian coal country?
Come on, is the best insult you got that I sound like it’s my job to defend workers?
Really and truly, where will the labor cost savings go? There’s going to be one, so who gets it? How will that be enforced?
What’s gonna be done for the people whose labor isn’t needed anymore? Bear in mind we’re not just talking about the protagonists of the now forty year old song “Allentown”, but entire industries that support ice car production like die making and machining. Surely we have some idea of what happens here aside from “theyre fucked, some people’s blood and bonemeal grease the rails of progress”.
You can’t just handwave away the real effects of changes in productivity in the name of abstractly defined technological progress.
If you can’t seriously engage with the effects of a transition to producing electric cars then it’s no wonder American conservatives are making so much hay over it.
Because if it were, the big car makers would be rushing the hell out of pushing for killing off ICE cars and switching to 100% EVs like yesterday.
But yet most of them have put out a mediocre effort at best, offering maybe 2 models to attract the younger market. And even then, good luck actually getting one. You are on a wait list for at least a year, have to deal with dealerships that haven’t bothered to learn anything about them, and if they do miraculously have one on the lot, they’ve been using it as a loaner car, so it’s not even brand new. And while I was shopping around, I ran into multiple instances of the dealership taking the $7500 tax credit for themselves(because the tax credit is tied to the car, not to you buying it) and then having the gall to also mark up the sticker price, “due to high demand”.
Then other brands have basically outright resisted making them, or will make them, but it seems like they are only doing it to say they are going green. They’ll make like 2000 of the the dopeyiest looking car they can and trickle them out, make no effort to advertise them or mass produce them in any meaningful way. Then claim, “the demand just isn’t there”.
Like if what you said was true, we would be seeing things like dodge challengers, Ford mustangs(ones that actually look like a mustang, not just a crossover with a horse logo), dodge rams, Ford f150s(yes these exist, but they are trickleing them out, so good luck getting one), jeep Wranglers. Nobody is taking their tried and true cars and making them electric. Well VW is, but not in America with things like the golf and GTI lines.
We don’t see lots of high drag coefficient evs that look like mustangs because all the features of the mustang that make it look boxy and aggressive are there to accommodate the reality of making air go places it’s needed, across the radiator and into the engine.
We don’t see ev jeeps because jeeps are (or used to be) relatively lightweight, high torque vehicles whose design choices favor ground clearance over aerodynamics. Evs are relatively heavyweight and benefit most from low ground clearance and good aerodynamics.
When automakers try to put those designs in an ev buyers react negatively to them, to the point that they have to have ersatz engine noise to be accepted.
Indeed the wrangler and mustang are so disconnected from normal buying trends that they kept stick shift long after the industry wide move to automatics!
Those are popular models, but they’re extreme outliers in terms of design.
Let me address the top part of your reply with a question: if evs are so great and such a slam dunk why has Toyota, famous for not making the wrong choices, stuck with hybrids up until very recently?
Ford has plans to build a battery plant in the US which will bring about 2,500 jobs with it. Not doing anything and letting the rest of the world make and deliver the cars to the US would be much worse for the economy than doing nothing at all.
They’re planning on building four, and they paused construction recently as a power play in negotiations when the uaw said battery workers should get the same pay as the machinists.
I saw that those plants will be making batteries for the new f150, not the much smaller evs that everyone else drives.
Battery manufacture is part of its own can of worms though, and one that doesn’t make evs look great either.
I wanna also say that I’m not against spinning down the ice auto industry, but no one who’s suggesting doing that or making fun of people who recognize that it’s the consequence of things that are already happening has a real plan for it.
To be fair, the F150 has been the best selling vehicle in America for something like 40 years. If the Lightning can hold on to that market, that will be a lot of vehicles, even if all it does is that one.
That being said, I’d rather we invest in better infrastructure and transit that reduces the dependance on cars. I don’t know exactly how many jobs that would create vs the auto industry. But across infrastructure, bikes, trains, potentially getting people back into retail shops and out of online everything… It’d image it would be a lot of jobs.
they’re gonna be a hit with the people who’ve been buying them instead of sedans lately, but the fleet and rural markets are gonna be less inclined to use em and needing a big battery service periodically is gonna change the long term value proposition of a full size truck for a lot of people.
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. They do have some interesting utility. They can be used of power tools directly off the battery. The front trunk can allow for tool storage when the bed is full of whatever. They can be hooked up to your home to provide power during a grid outage. These are all pretty cool, but there will still be a lot of anxiety around running out of power, and the things you mention.
Professional philosophers don’t take Sam Harris seriously. He’s a smart guy, but his take on free will is dismissive of established philosophical literature. That is, he could do more to read and then engage with published philosophy; but maybe he doesn’t think he has to since his work isn’t intended for academics.
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