Why they are wrong
The recent wave of elections and electoral campaigns made it clear that the new real political divide is mainly between supporters of open and liberal societies on one side and nationalist/populist movements on the other, rather than between the traditional left and right.
The arguments in favour of the first group are mainly of two types. First, open and tolerant societies require cooperation between different countries, which brings interdependence and peace. If we look at the military tensions currently underway in several geographical areas of the world, this feature appears more and more important.
Moreover, from an economic viewpoint, there is a strong consensus on how free trade, globalisation and technological improvements benefit the society as a whole. In this context, multilateralism plays a crucial role since it allows the creation of a common and unique set of rules and standards to which companies have to comply.
Of course, such phenomena imply changes that may have undesirable short term effects. Indeed, the nationalist rhetoric focuses precisely on these effects by claiming, for instance, that machines and migrants steal the job from the ordinary people.
However, the historical evidence tells a very different story. The most relevant case is the technological improvement that dramatically cut the number of people working in the primary sector. The roughly 95% of workers who lost their job in the agricultural field didn’t end up unemployed, but were able to move to the industry, while the remaining workers multiplied their productivity thanks to the help of the new machines. Besides, apart from this mass scale episode, history is full of other examples. The introduction of the ATMs, say, didn’t eliminate the bank tellers; or the introduction of digital computation didn’t make the accountants disappear.
This brings to a fundamental principle: following the introduction of new technologies, workers - far from becoming massively unemployed - either specialise in more specific and value-added tasks of the same supply chain, or are absorbed in other/new sector of the economy.
Against this backdrop, also low-skilled migrants are not a threat at all. Indeed, there is no evidence of permanent loss of jobs due to migration episodes. On the contrary, being employed in manual and repetitive tasks, they tend to push natives toward higher-level jobs, in a process almost similar to the one occurring with new machines.
All this gives tangible support to the main point: the long run improvement in the living standard is precisely created by new technologies, and in general by new factors, which free human capital that comes to be employed in more modern and advanced sector of the economy. This is how the society moved from the primary to the secondary sector, and then to the tertiary and to the advanced tertiary, generating the greatest and fastest improvement in the living standard ever experienced in human history.
A political movement arguing against all this is implicitly admitting its incapacity in managing the adjustment process toward new and better equilibria. On the other side, liberal parties should more openly stand up for these values, clearly explain the benefits they bring to the development of the society, and create the proper tools helping workers to adapt to the evolving environment.
2018.05.23