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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: 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?