Via Wilson Quarterly:
…technological advances have not reduced overall employment, though they have certainly cost many people their jobs. But now, with the advent of machines that are infinitely more intelligent and powerful than most people could have imagined a century ago, has the day finally come when technology will leave millions of us permanently displaced?
Judging by the popular press, the answer is yes, and there is plenty of alarming data leading some people to support that view. Between January 1990 and January 2010, the United States shed 6.3 million manufacturing jobs, a staggering decrease of 36 percent. Since then, it has regained only about 500,000. Four years after the official end of the Great Recession, unemployment is still running at a recession-like rate of around 7.5 percent, and millions of Americans have given up even looking for work.
Economists, struggling to disentangle the effects of technology, trade, and other forces, don’t have a certain answer to the question of whether this time is different.
Points:
- “Reading through the literature of the period [1960s], one is struck—and humbled—by how wrong so many smart people could be. Yet some got the story largely right. Automation did not upend the fundamental logic of the economy. But it did disproportionate harm to less-skilled workers. And some of its most important effects were felt not in the economic realm but in the arena of social change.”
- “They [1960s thinkers] tended to view the challenge of automation as a problem of abundance—machines were finally yielding the long-promised benefits that would allow human beings to slough off lives of endless and usually unrewarding labor without sacrificing the good things in life.”
- “…they [1960s thinkers] misunderstood the nature of abundance itself. Although the principle that human wants are insatiable is enshrined in every introductory economics course, it was somehow forgotten by intellectuals who themselves probably weren’t very materialistic, and who might only have been dimly aware of the great slouching beasts of retailing—the new shopping malls—going up on the edge of town.”
- “Related to this misunderstanding about consumerism was the idea that the time was nigh when people would hardly have to work at all. Harried families in today’s suburbs will be astonished to learn that some critics even worried about what we would do with all that leisure time.”
- “…the diminishing role of brawn had put us on the path toward a world in which gender roles would converge.”
- “Instead of automating repetitive tasks, technology today is climbing the cognitive ladder, using artificial intelligence and brute processing power to automate (however imperfectly) the functions of travel agents, secretaries, tax preparers, even teachers—while threatening the jobs of some lawyers, university professors, and other professionals who once thought their sheepskins were a bulwark against this sort of thing.”
- “Perhaps the biggest lesson we can learn from the midcentury thinkers who worried about automation is that while there is cause for concern, there is no other way but forward. Like trade, automation makes us better off collectively by making some of us worse off. So the focus of our concern should be on those injured by the robots, even if the wounds are “only” economic.”
