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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:37PM (6 children)
You guys suck so I'm keeping all my disruptive ideas in my garage.
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:46PM (2 children)
Isn't he the dude getting blowjobs from Ayn Rand?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:47PM (1 child)
Dude, Ayn Rand was like totally hot.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:06AM
Perhaps, but you should try to refrain from sticking your dick into crazy.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:30AM (2 children)
Bob the Angry Flower [angryflower.com]
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:39AM
The tech valley billionaires have the solution: more H1B.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:11PM
For example, Rearden knew how to make his alloy from start to finish, not merely "I only know how to pay people to create new alloys!" Probably not good enough for the making of lunch, but he wasn't the helpless flower as portrayed in the cartoon. Meanwhile the "looters" (the various antagonists of the Atlas Shrugged story) didn't even know how to do that.
And does the "Bob the Angry Flower" comic creator know how to pay people to create new alloys? Perhaps that knowledge isn't as trivial as it is made out to be.