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"Over the long run, I have confidence we can do it," Stiglitz says. But, he warns, "I can see us being in this kind of doldrums for half a decade, for a decade, or for longer." --THE ECONOMY CONTINUES TO PRODUCE JOBS, JUST NOT ENOUGH GOOD ONES Some economists worry that the sluggish, lopsided labor market of the past five years is what we'll be stuck with in the future. Smarter machines and niftier software will continue to replace more and more midpay jobs, making businesses more productive and swelling their profits. The most highly skilled workers -- those who can use machines to be more productive but can't be replaced by them
-- will continue to prosper. Many low-pay jobs are likely to remain sheltered from the technological offensive: Robots are too clumsy to tidy up hotel rooms or clear dirty dishes at busy restaurants. "Computers can do calculus better than any human being," says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business. But "restaurant bus boy is a very safe job for a long time to come." Under this scenario, technology could continue to push economic growth -- but only a few would enjoy the benefits. More people would be competing for midpay jobs, so pay would shrivel. Many midskill workers would be left unemployed or shunted into low-skill, low-pay jobs. The income gap between the rich and ordinary citizens, already at record levels in many developed countries, would continue to widen. Most economists say that unequal societies don't prosper; it takes a large and confident middle class to produce the consumer spending that drives healthy economic growth. "In the long run, you could actually see growth stopping," says economist Maarten Goos at Belgium's University of Leuven. "If everyone is employed in low-wage service jobs, then, that's it." --TECHNOLOGY LEADS TO MASS UNEMPLOYMENT In a speech last year, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers declared that the biggest economic issue of the future would not be the federal debt or competition from China but "the dramatic transformations that technology is bringing about." Summers imagined a machine called the "Doer" that could make anything or provide any service. Productivity would soar. Wonderful goods and services would emerge. Enormous wealth would go "to those who could design better Doers, to those who could think of better things for Doers to do." But everyone else would be worthless in the labor market. Summers said the world is moving in that direction and has completed only 15 percent of the journey, but already we are "observing its consequences." Consequences, indeed. ATMs dislodged bank tellers. Microsoft Outlook manages what secretaries used to do. Expedia is replacing travel agents. E-ZPass is doing away with toll-booth operators. And robots continue to supplant factory workers. But surely some jobs are safe. Truck drivers, perhaps? A machine can't negotiate a left-hand turn against oncoming traffic without a human behind the wheel, can it? Or so economists Frank Levy of MIT and Richard Murnane of Harvard University reasoned in their book "The New Division of Labor," way back in 2004. That was then. Six years later, Google developed a car that could drive itself, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, circling Lake Tahoe and cruising down Hollywood Boulevard. The gee-whiz driverless car could soon claim victims in the job market. "Twice a week, a truck comes near my house, and two guys get out and pick up the garbage," says Vardi, the Rice computer scientist. "This will disappear. There will still be a truck coming, but it will be driven autonomously, and the garbage will be picked up autonomously, and those jobs will be gone." In the United States alone, 92,000 people are employed as sanitation workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Add all other driving occupations, from long-haul truckers to taxi cab drivers, and the total exceeds 4 million. All those jobs may be in danger. And that's the future: Other occupations already are disappearing. Add up the jobs that technology can take across dozens of occupations and the result, Vardi and others warn, is unemployment on a scale we haven't begun to imagine. "The vast majority of people do routine work. The human economy has always demanded routine work," says software entrepreneur Martin Ford. He worries that machines will take all those routine jobs, leaving few opportunities for ordinary workers. In his book "The Lights in the Tunnel," Ford foresees a computer-dominated economy with 75 percent unemployment before the end of this century; the vast majority of workers, he predicts, won't be able to develop the skills necessary to outrun job-killing computers and robots. "People talk about the future, creating new industries and new businesses," Ford says. "But there's every indication that these are not going to be in labor-intensive industries. ... Right from the get-go, they're going to be digital." Consider the great business successes of the Internet age: Apple employs 80,000 people worldwide; Google, 54,000; Facebook, 4,300. Combined, those three superstar companies employ less than a quarter of the 600,000 people General Motors had in the 1970s. And today, GM employs just 202,000 people, while making more cars than ever. As far back as 1958, American union leader Walter Reuther recalled going through a Ford Motor plant that was already automated. A company manager goaded him: "Aren't you worried about how you are going to collect union dues from all these machines?" "The thought that occurred to me," Reuther replied, "was how are you going to sell cars to these machines?"
[Associated
Press;
An AP interactive that accompanies the Great Reset series explores job growth in recent economic recoveries and includes an in-depth video analysis: http://bigstory.ap.org/interactive/interactive-great-reset/
Bernard Condon reported from New York. You can reach the writers on Twitter at http://twitter.com/BernardFCondon and http://twitter.com/PaulWisemanAP.
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