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What if I told you that, contrary to the alarming headlines and eye-catching infographics you may have seen ricocheting around social media, new technologies aren't shaking up the labor market very much by historical standards? You might think I was as loopy as a climate-change denier and suggest that I open my eyes to all the taxi drivers being displaced by Uber, the robots taking over factories, and artificial intelligence doing some of the work lawyers and doctors used to do. Surely, we are in uncharted territory, right?
Right, but not in the way you think. If you study the US labor market from the Civil War era to present, you discover that we are in a period of unprecedented calm – with comparatively few jobs shifting between occupations – and that is a bad sign. In fact, this low level of "churn" is a reflection of too little, not too much technological innovation: Lack of disruption is a marker of our historically low productivity growth, which is slowing improvement in people's living standards.
A new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) examines this trend in detail using large sets of US Census data that researchers at the Minnesota Population Center have curated to harmonize occupational classifications over long periods. ITIF's analysis quantifies the growth or contraction of individual occupations, decade by decade, relative to overall job growth, and it assesses how much of that job churn – whether growth or contraction – is attributable to technological advances. The report concludes that, rather than increasing, the rate of occupational churn in recent years has been the lowest in American history – and only about one-third or one-quarter of the rate we saw in the 1960s, depending on how you measure contracting occupations.
[...] Aside from being methodologically suspect and, as ITIF shows, ahistorical, this false alarmism is politically dangerous, because it feeds the notion that we should pump the breaks on technological progress, avoid risk, and maintain the status quo – a foolish formula that would lock in economic stagnation and ossify living standards. Policymakers certainly can and should do more to improve labor-market transitions for workers who lose their jobs. But if there is any risk for the near future, it is that technological change and productivity growth will be too slow, not too fast.
So, let's all take a deep breath and calm down. Labor market disruption is not abnormally high; it's at an all-time low, and predictions that human labor is just a few more tech "unicorns" away from redundancy are vastly overstated, as they always have been.
IOW, it's all in your imagination.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:22PM (3 children)
Previous drivers of accelerated development were WWII, space race, and the cold war. Something similar is needed to make the necessary push to drive people. The "blue sky" projects are gone, that is a problem. During WWII researchers and inventors were almost given labs and equipment to get going instantly. Bureaucrats were in many cases left out.
My suggestion: Push for Mars. Alternatively, asteroid mining.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:38AM (2 children)
Here's a crazy idea: Make America Great Again.
Note that my notion differs from Trump's plan to make America WHITE again.
We could repeat what worked 8 decades ago by rebuilding USA's crumbling infrastructure:
fix the roads that are full of potholes;
fix the bridges that are falling into rivers;
fix the railways that are so awful that trains can't go fast on them;
fix the water systems that leak as much as they deliver and/or that poison the populace they serve.
We could even enter the 21st Century and have 10Gb internet for everyone.
We could get serious about cybersecurity and have an internet that isn't constantly being pwned.
I'm sure that others can think of things where unemployed/underemployed people could improve USA--rather than watching USA continue its path to becoming a Third World country with a tiny number of very rich people.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @11:53AM (1 child)
They never stopped doing what worked 8 decades ago. They're still building new infrastructure. The problem is that building politically sexy new infrastructure doesn't maintain politically unsexy existing infrastructure.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 29 2017, @01:56AM
Obviously the problem is political....
There should be a priority list such that the core of the railways, roads, electrical, fiber connections are maintained at a set level. Otherwise the country could face the scenario of actually not getting around, when it matters.
A volcano eruption combined with heavy snow weather would make it really difficult to get anywhere since airplanes would suffocate in the dust and rail and road would be blocked snow etc.
Hmm.. Let's make Mars great again! ;-)