For the Last Time, Robots Do NOT Cause Unemployment
Technophobia distracts people from real economic problems
Scott Winship | Brookings
Parts of the nation’s commentariat have been seized with a nasty bout of technophobia.
To judge from the symptomatic hand-wringing the epidemic is spreading, we are on the verge of mass unemployment as work becomes increasingly automated.
Technophobia is an affliction we have yet to cure even after decades of evidence-based ameliorative efforts. We might not have expected much resistance to the disease in earlier times, before evidence accumulated that the fears it inspired were irrational.
The computer was invented and subsequently the fastest one increased in speed by a factor of 100,000.
Unemployment fell to around five percent from 1930’s nine percent.
Median earnings doubled.
Between 1964 and 2007, on the eve of the Great Recession, the earnings of the median working-age male rose by about one-third.
Median earnings among female workers more than doubled after 1969.
Median household income rose by about 75 percent.
The typical age at retirement declined
Leisure time increased among both working age men and women.
The computing speed of the fastest computer rose by a factor of one billion. With a “b”. But we cannot shake technophobia. The sense remains that the next one-billion-fold increase in technological progress will be different.
Take blogger Kevin Drum’s influential essay from May of this year. Drum sees worrisome long-term declines in income, employment, and the share of national income going to workers.
But in the long run automation has made the entire workforce more productive. Everyone still had jobs—just different ones.
But we still can’t imagine what work will look like in a few decades. In particular, people seem to resist the idea that if technology reduces demand for labor by a quarter, that might translate into everyone working 25 percent less rather than unemployment rising by one-fourth.
Technophobia is pernicious not only because it needlessly distresses those it afflicts but because it distracts people from real economic problems that would be tractable if we could focus more narrowly on them. For an example of a productive look at technological change and its implications for workers, don’t miss the new Third Way report, “Dancing with Robots,” by economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane.
Levy and Murnane recommend a transformation of American education to equip more Americans with information-management skills.