The Genius of Data Centers Isn't Blue Collar Job Creation, It's Their Erasure

Conservatives and libertarians must stop pandering. They’ve long done it with taxes and education, and now they’re doing it with data centers.

To see where this is going, let’s start with taxes. The right reveled in the fact that more than 75% of the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts went to taxpayers earning less than $500,000/year.

Translated, the right cheered a tax cut that on its own wouldn’t drive much growth, and decidedly would not boost opportunities for those earning less than $500,000/year. And that’s because there are no companies, no entrepreneurs, and no jobs without capital, and earners above the $500,000/year income strata provide 99.99999% of capital. If growth meant to lift all boats is the aim of the right, then it should persistently and energetically push enormous tax cuts for the seriously rich.

Moving to education, the right routinely tell the poor that their educational outcomes will be enhanced if the schools they can attend aren’t limited to their zip code. It all sounds good, but as the right have long pointed out perpendicular to blaming zip codes for bad schools, monies spent on schooling don’t necessarily associate with better educational outcomes.

Worst of all, the notion that money is to blame for poor educational outcomes reeks of the victimhood mentality that conservatives and libertarians long disdained. Rather than create victims, conservatives should point out what’s true: schools are always bad where parents are uninterested and kids don’t care, while they’re always good where parents are interested and kids do care.

Which brings us to data centers. In their attempts to sell them to the public more broadly, members of the right invariably lead with the number of blue collar jobs that the construction of data centers will enable. It’s lousy PR combined with soft bigotry of low expectations imagery. Particularly in the United States.

That’s because Americans are all about aspiration. While politicians and pundits like Oren Cass have long romanticized factory and mill work, those working in the factories and mills worked diligently while frequently risking life and limb so that their kids wouldn’t have to. As S.L. Price’s spectacular (review here) 2016 book Playing Through the Whistle made plain, the children of J&L Steel mill workers were desperate to escape the blue-collar working conditions endured by their parents.

Back to the “blue collar” work required to build data centers, that’s by far the least appealing quality of them. And the bet here is that blue collar workers would be the first to tell politicians and pundits (who’ve near monolithically never worked in factories or outside) just that. Again, Americans are aspirational.

Without speaking ill of the very real work involved in construction, factory/mill work, and farming, Americans have long yearned to escape what is frequently and figuratively backbreaking. Which speaks to the genius of data centers. Precisely because their existence represents staggering amounts of mechanized work, they’re poised to erase all manner of formerly exhausting human toil.

Think about what this means. As herculean amounts of human function are taken over by machines and robots, the humans who populate the U.S. and the rest of the world will see the value of their own effort multiply thanks to trillions of mechanized hands and machines doing for them what they used to have to do. Which is the point.

It begs conservatives to stop pandering. The genius of data centers isn’t in the blue-collar work enabling their construction, it’s in the brilliant fact that data centers will forever relieve individuals of having to work in blue-collar fashion.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.