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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: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:01PM (10 children)
Hey you, libertarian cum stain! You know we had those Bush Tax Cuts and what happened? The job creators piled up shit tons of money and didn't use it to create jobs. The job creators got their fucking incentive and they're still not doing their fucking job of creating jobs. Lowering taxes on the greedy doesn't fucking work, you moron. But you already know that. You're just another greedy piece of shit who wants lower taxes because you want to get rich quick and taxes will only slow down your meteoric rise to the billionaires club. FUCK YOU.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Justin Case on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:13PM (4 children)
You are aware Bush wasn't a libertarian, right?
Also, I'm sorry you failed your basic economics class. Pay attention next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:39PM (3 children)
Shit, I got an A in economics, and it shows. My economics teacher was the most foul mouthed motherfucker who ever taught.
You are aware that high taxes incentivize job creation right? Because the job creators have two choices. They either give their surplus money to the government in tax, or they get rid of their surplus money by paying people to do jobs. The one thing they don't get to do is remove money from the economy by stockpiling tons of money. If the job creators choose to pay tax, then the government receives a surplus of money, and the government can afford to pay people to do jobs.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:57AM (2 children)
The unicorns make it go right? Looks like your economics class was shit. A key problem is that the same tax savings can be achieved by either paying foreign workers instead or investing in automation. Anyone who has been awake at some point during the past half century would have noticed this.
Let us note that job creation was one of the many "modest" benefits rationalized by Jonathan Swift when he discussed the considerable utility of Irish children as a nutritious food source.
You can rationalize anything from anything, especially if you outright ignore what happens in reality. It doesn't make it a good idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:38PM (1 child)
You're an idiot Khallow.
The reason why high taxes on the wealthy create more jobs is not even difficult to understand. You're showing Aristarchusian levels of incompetence with your posts here.
Higher taxes on the wealthiest discourage them from just building the largest possible estate. Knowing that after that first million dollars that you're going to be seeing less and less of the money you make beyond that is a great incentive to allow the workers to keep more of that. The workers keeping more of that means that they have more money to spend on the goods and services that they need and want. Which increases the economic activity.
Investing doesn't generate wealth in most cases. It only generates more wealth if there's sufficient demand for the things that the investments are being placed in. It doesn't matter how many pork belly futures you invest in if you're expecting to sell them in a majority Muslim country you're not generating wealth. However, if you're expecting to sell them in China you might well make a ton of money on it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:36AM
I quite agree on the understandability of the argument. It's a typical free luncher argument. It's good for me, therefore I'll pull a bunch of reasons out of my ass to rationalize in my mind why it's good for everyone else. But maybe it's time to come up with a better understanding divorced from what benefits you personally.
Building the largest estate would a) create jobs, b) reduce the wealth of the wealthiest in a direct transfer of wealth to everyone else, and c) look pretty. It's pretty much the same effect as government wealth transfers except that we get some gaudy buildings and jobs.
Yet another reason to note that your economics training or whatever is crap. I'll note here that every job I ever had was due to investment on someone's part.
If instead, you're planning to sell them in Canada, a notorious bacon sink, you just made an investment. Yes, there's some rudimentary due diligence that you should do with an investment in order for it to actually be an investment. But you do realize that people do that, right?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:46AM (4 children)
Those tax cuts were for the top rich right? not for small business or the inventor type?
Tax cut for HP makes the top richer and produces more entertaining cat-fiona-fights. Tax cuts for Joe's fuel monitor production gives more employees because that enables expansion and thus more profit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:12AM (3 children)
The problem is Apple and Amazon and Alphabet don't use tax cuts for expansion. They just hoard money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:07PM (2 children)
You realize that the ludicrous tax laws in the US aren't helping? Things like a high base rate, and taxing money earned outside the country? Most of them are sitting on a lot of cash, but they're sitting on a lot of cash _outside the US_, because if they brought it back in to use it they'd take a huge tax hit. Last time there was a tax holiday on that particular rule they brought a huge amount back to invest. Try it again and see if the same thing happens. It's called experimentation. If it works, reform the tax law.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:40PM (1 child)
The problem isn't them having the money overseas and not bringing it into the US. The problem is that they're allowed to book the losses from those overseas ventures without repatriating profits. It allows them to get out of paying the taxes that they're supposed to be paying.
This isn't an issue of the taxes being too high, this is an issue of the tax code allowing them to evade taxes and there being no penalties in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:44AM
And we could fix that problem by not caring about what Apple's "fair share" is supposed to be. That tax revenue is going to be flushed down some drain just like it currently is. I'd rather have serious business than serious cronyism and government corruption.