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The Luddites Are Almost Always Wrong: Why Tech Doesn't Kill Jobs
Mystakaphoros writes "Mike Masnick of Techdirt argues that we can all put down our wooden shoes and take a chill pill: technology 'rarely destroys jobs.' For example, telephone operators have largely gone by the wayside, but a (brave) new world of telemarketing and call center support jobs have opened up because of advances in technology, not to mention the Internet. Masnick points out writing from Professor James Bessen that makes the same point: 'In other cases, technology creates offsetting job growth in different occupations or industry segments. For example, word processors and voice mail systems reduced the numbers of typists and switchboard operators, but these technologies also increased the number of more highly skilled secretaries and receptionists, offsetting the job losses. Similarly, Amazon may have eliminated jobs at Borders and other national book chains that relied on bestsellers, but the number of independent booksellers has been growing and with it, more jobs for sales clerks who can provide selections and advice that Amazon cannot easily match.' That said, I think it's worth asking: if machines are going to replace all our fast food workers, are we going to start paying our gourmet chefs minimum wage just because we can?"
The article is absolutely correct. But it also fails to take into account that the new jobs are lower paying while inflation decreases the value of the new wages.
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Obviously, this guy doesn't know anything about the restaurant industry, at least in the USA. Most "chefs" are already making minimum wage or very close to it. In the USA, only the servers and managers make money in a restaurant due to the messed up tip system. However, when it comes to "gourmet chefs" they make even less. At the highest levels, a.k.a. 3 star restaurants, most of the kitchen staff are unpaid interns. They all dream of opening up their own place some day.
Though technology may not "destroy" jobs, it certainly shifts them. For example, car factories are increasingly populated with robots. Although that creates economic prosperity that may show up somewhere else, it certainly displaces the unskilled, who previously could at least hold factory jobs.
In my area, we now have garbage trucks that pick up (standardized) trash cans. Presumably, this leads to fewer "garbage men" - who used to be the archetypal unskilled laborers. But the few garbage men that remain now must be skilled as truck drivers.
So, assuming that a certain portion of the population will always be unskilled, and assuming the portion of unskilled jobs is shrinking, the unemployable underclass will continue to grow.
That depends on one question: Can we replace them with illegal aliens?
Because the political establishment, along with business interests, have decided that a permanent underclass of illegal alien workers is just fine with them. This in turn has depressed the wages on labor-intensive jobs while making welfare a more attractive option than work for many.
The unwillingness to enforce border controls has probably cost more Americans jobs in the last 20 years than any technological advance.
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For example, word processors and voice mail systems reduced the numbers of typists and switchboard operators, but these technologies also increased the number of more highly skilled secretaries and receptionists, offsetting the job losses.
I haven't had a secretary since smart phones came on the market. The Administrative assistant was canned and we were handed these things.
Similarly, Amazon may have eliminated jobs at Borders and other national book chains that relied on bestsellers, but the number of independent booksellers has been growing and with it, more jobs for sales clerks who can provide selections and advice that Amazon cannot easily match.'
Borders went out of business, Barnes and Noble is hanging on a thread and the ONLY independent bookstore around me is a Christian bookstore. And they a lot MORE than books.
Look it, the data is showing that between automation and globalization, it is doing some real harm to our employment here in the US. And what this article misses is that job replacement isn't always one-to-one. Meaning for one worker who loses a job because of automation, there isn't always another job him to slip into: it usually hundreds get canned and a fraction of those move into the new area.
I am by NO means against automation - to head off the ad-hominems - but what I'm trying to point out is that there are some drastic changes happening NOW in our economy and things are going to get ugly.
Oh, to the weavers. Back in the 19th Century, automation increased worker productivity - it didn't replace them because you needed a human to be the brain of the machine.
Today, humans aren't necessary because the machines are "smart" enough to be autonomous.
When those new looms were put in place, you needed operators, and a few (children) to go inside a running machine to lubricate it - they lost life and limb and we got those "job killing" government regulations as a result.
So maybe a weaver lost their job as a weaver, but an entire crew was hired for the new machine.
Today, it's the opposite. Entire lines are replaced by robots and maintained and programmed by a hand full of people.
And that as a society is where we 're going to have to make some hard adjustments.
Anyway, BOOKS are going to be written on this and there's no way to do justice on the topic in a techdirt article let alone a Slashdot post.
Tech most certianly does kill jobs. It may make even more in the long term, but they are very different jobs. For the 50 year old newly laid off factory worker with kids he has to put through college now, the fact that there are suddenly lots of new jobs in robot design isn't a lot of comfort.
For example, telephone operators have largely gone by the wayside, but a (brave) new world of telemarketing and call center support jobs have opened up because of advances in technology
If I had my druthers -- and we don't, because time and tech marches on -- I'd rather be an AT&T operator in 1973 than a telemarketer in 2013.
That said, I think it's worth asking: if machines are going to replace all our fast food workers, are we going to start paying our gourmet chefs minimum wage just because we can?
Yes. If the "market" can set wages below minimum for gourmet chefs due to an infusion of newly retrained fast food employees so they bottom out at that limit, then it will. That's just what happens. Whether or not that entire scenario occurs -- laid off McDonald's cashiers going to culinary programs and flooding the upscale restaurant and hospitality business letting wages be depressed rather than trying to find other more immediately available jobs -- that's really the question to be asking. (I would answer "no" to that question.)
I am not a crackpot.
The basic parameters of the argument are clear, sure, and have been clear for a few hundred years: automation may replace large numbers of jobs with machines controlled by a smaller number of people, but may also create new jobs, either directly working on the technology involved, or indirectly in other areas. The more difficult questions are in the details. Do the numbers always match up, and what factors influence whether they match up? Does automation lead to more general shifts in the economy, e.g. either concentration of wealth or decentralization of wealth? If it could do either, what factors influence that?
My own view is to be rather skeptical that there is a universal answer. These kinds of articles give off a whiff of a kind of Panglossian view that the technology/economy ecosystem is in a Gaia-like eternal balance, and I don't see a strong reason to believe that's true. Instead I think we need to look at specifics to determine what effects a given technological advance, within a particular existing economic situation, will have.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That people will always be able to do things machine cannot. Sure, maybe machines will not be able to play rock-n-roll or write poetry, but it's not like these things actually pay very well. But what happens computers are as good as people in most of all the things that qualify as jobs nowadays? Are we to expect that suddenly 100 new paying professions will suddenly arise that we have no idea about today, that by some magic only humans (aka meat-sacs) will be able to perform? I doubt it.
It also fails to take into account that the skills required for the jobs that disappear are entirely different than the skills required for the new jobs that replace them. This means you lose everything you've worked for, career-wise. I might have 30 years in as a buggy whip craftsman, but that doesn't mean I have the skill set required to assemble an automobile. It also means that the salary I've been building up disappears. Even if the jobs are equivalent pay ranges, a senior buggy whip architect probably makes a lot more than a junior steering column technician.
If I started at $40,000/yr 30 years ago and make $75,000/yr today and suddenly lose that because my entire industry has been obsoleted -- including my retirement possibly -- and can now only take a new job at $50,000/yr... I'm still screwed.
I'm not arguing we should stop inventing, but its hugely callous to ignore the difficulties inflicted on people when this kind of thing happens.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Why can't tech make having to go to work obsolete?
Why can't we make all the tech stuff, like robots, do all the dumb work for all of us so we can spend the rest of our lives playing, or do the kind of work we really enjoy? Isn't this the frigging thing we should strive to achieve in society? Not create more jobs, but less?
This article is flawed because it relies on historical patterns when we are entering entirely different age. Industrial Age is over and we are transitioning into Information Age. Comparing pre-industrial agricultural society to early industrial age is much better comparison, but then it doesn't support the premise. Few of us that are familiar with the history will tell you that this transition resulted in a lot of societal ills and displaced farmers and merchants did not all find jobs in the factories. Few that did find jobs were ruthlessly exploited and did not at all benefit from this transition.
Comparing telephone operator jobs to telemarketing jobs won't tell you what will happen when automation combined with a growing population will make any kind of job scarce. It is very possible that within generation only top 10% of intellectual ability will be needed, rest will be automated away. Even today we know that productivity already entered exponential growth period. We also know that benefits of this productivity are not reflected in growing wages - nearly all of the extra wealth created by this productivity increase is channeled into corporate dividends and not wages..Pattern is very clear - less workers doing more for about the same pay. This cannot support growing unemployed class by creating service job opportunities, unless you are talking McJobs.
Attempting to portray critics as Luddites is 'poisoning the well' further compounded by willful denial of empirical evidence of the societal trends to the contrary. Yes, author is correct - technology is morally neutral, it is nether good nor bad. What we do with it - and presently as a society we chose to enrich 1% of our population, is what we should focus on.
That's one way of defining the average (mean) standard of living, yes. But that does not necessarily mean that the median standard of living also increases in the same scenario, without stronger assumptions on the distribution.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How many people in Detroit were out of work once robots started spot welding all the car frames and moving parts into position for assembly? How about Robots in manufacturing in general? Lots of people used to do those jobs. Check out How It's Made sometime. You'll see huge assembly lines full of robots where people used to stand. Hardly anyone walking around.
I've personally seen the labor force in Manufacturing facilities decline due to automated machining processes; 1 or 2 guys running 6 CNC machines where it used to take 6 people to do it manually. Polishing metal to a lustrous finish used to be a skill reserved for the 1 or 2 old German guys in the place. Now, you have CNC polishers do it in 5 different axes nonetheless.
Next, lets talk about how global connectivity has put people out of work. CNC again. You only need one programmer to transfer the machining code to some place in china where a dude running the CNC machine uploads it, puts a chunk of steel on the table , and hits the Go button. For $1.75/hour wages.
TFA is complete BS.
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Technical progress has enormously boosted productivity worldwide and is still increasing it at a rate of about 2% per year. Theoretically, we needed to work four days less every year for producing the same goods and earning the same income. However it does not happen this way. Producers use productivity boosts for reducing costs - mostly wages and salaries. This is supposed to improve their profits, but it also has an adverse affect. Layoffs, unemployment, subsequent demand shortfall and economic crises eat a large part of the benefits from increased productivity. The remaining excess profits are invested - however not in production of goods, but in financial assets. Hedge funds, investment banks, and trading firms circulate an immense money volume (up to seven trillion US$ per day) through the financial markets, this way creating a shadow economy that largely surpasses the market of real products and services. It consumes most rewards of technical progress, and gives back occasional market crashes and financial crises.
But it also offers the opportunity to redistribute some of the excess profit back from the rich to the poor. Providing many people with a small but regular trading income will take liquidity out of the financial markets and inject it back into the production cycle. This will boost demand worldwide and soften the world's economical problems.
It's the regular trading income thing that has a lot of people stumped though.
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IMHO, there is no communism without the first industrial revolution. Marx is a consequence of technology.
Interestingly, Marx himself believed something along those lines, that communism would be the product of certain tensions produced by the (then-)modern industrial economy. That's one reason that orthodox Marxists (like Kautsky) were very skeptical of the Russian Revolution. If you believe that communism is the result of tensions within an industrial economy, led by the urban proletariat produced in factories, then a communist revolution without first having industrialization doesn't make sense: the Leninist ideas of a vanguard party that would seize power, crash-industrialize an agrarian economy, etc., and then usher in communism, ends up seeming very ahistorical and strange.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Very simply our standard of living = (production - consumption)/(numbers of citizens) Robots increase production, which is good.
It is good. But the fruits of that production aren't distributed to the entire population, but rather to the owners of those robots to distribute as they see fit.
Man, I could see the above sentence turning redder and redder even as I was typing it. Just gonna call myself out on that one. :)
The question is, are they good jobs? We have done everything possible to destroy the middle class. You can argue 1% vs. 99% until we are blue in the face, but the fact is, what built America was a strong middle class. The logical conclusion is, if you want to unbuild America, you destroy the middle class. Mission accomplished, America.
I'm a libertarian-leaning independent, so I hate both parties. But, I find the Republicans piss me off the most, because they kept waving American flags as they shipped our good-paying jobs overseas.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I really hate the way the term Luddite is used -- people should read a bit of history (here for a start). The real Luddites were not anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers rebelling against the creation of textile sweatshops. It's a pity their rebellion was put down so violently -- we have a need for more Luddites in today's economy where our iPhones are produced by people who are effectively living in slavery.
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It also fails to take into account that the skills required for the jobs that disappear are entirely different than the skills required for the new jobs that replace them. This means you lose everything you've worked for, career-wise. I might have 30 years in as a buggy whip craftsman, but that doesn't mean I have the skill set required to assemble an automobile. It also means that the salary I've been building up disappears. Even if the jobs are equivalent pay ranges, a senior buggy whip architect probably makes a lot more than a junior steering column technician.
If I started at $40,000/yr 30 years ago and make $75,000/yr today and suddenly lose that because my entire industry has been obsoleted -- including my retirement possibly -- and can now only take a new job at $50,000/yr... I'm still screwed.
I'm not arguing we should stop inventing, but its hugely callous to ignore the difficulties inflicted on people when this kind of thing happens.
"Callous" is really the only possible word I think we can use here. Look, I respect people's understanding of the benefits of capitalism. There are some brilliant capitalists around here. But when the problem is "solved" by market forces, there's another problem left over-- lots and lots of now-unqualified, unemployed people. Just using their children's hunger as a whip to scramble for a new job may again be a market force in action, but it's certainly not kind.
And then you run into the problem of... if we're all broke on our asses, who is going to buy your products?
You might want to avoid an example where someone went from a good paying decent status job to the lowest paying shittiest work our society has.
Texas has added wages across all income levels.
But no, you just keep quoting that 90% figure from the Institute for Numbers I Pulled Out of My Ass...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
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You know this is exactly what happened to the Luddites.
Luddites tended to be middle aged middle class families. Men would work in the fields, Woman would weave at home. It was great â" a decent wage and a decent life/work balance. In a stoke their physical capital (looms at home), human capital (knowing how to maintain and operate a hand powered loom) and a way of life (They would have to leave their husbands and farms and go to the city) were destroyed.
What is the lessoned learned?
Revolutions are good for people at the top. It is good for the next generation. It is not so good for the entrenched middle class which it tends to ravage.
So while I have empathy for the situation I donâ(TM)t think the answer is to slow down progress. Places that have done that tend to prolong the change and be in 2nd place when the revolution is over. I am looking at southern vs. northern Europe right now but there are a lot of other examples..
"Tech vs. Jobs" is the wrong frame, and the wrong debate. Jobs are lost, and (partially) replaced by lower-wage jobs, because of the enormous increases in productivity that increased technology (and improved management practices) brings. This should be making everybody better off--more product for less work should mean generally higher standards of living. The reason it doesn't is because our economic paradigm awards all of the benefits of increased productivity to capital, and none to labor. We need a system in which anyone who wishes can make a living working about 20 hours/week. But unless we rethink our economics we are teetering towards a crash, because the labor sector is collapsing, and capital must soon follow because it relies on a healthy consumer class--the very laborers whose livings have been pulled out from under them. If one looks at labor participation rates (instead of govt. unemployment numbers) the situation becomes quite clear.
Actually, the movement toward computing has tremendously reduced the average medical knowledge in the country. Good secretaries in doctor's offices used to know a huge amount about the doctor's field of medicine because they had to transcribe dictation all the time. Today, they know how to book appointments, but tend to know much less about medicine. (And be less helpful to patients who spend hours in the waiting room).
What has happened as real incomes have become ten times as large over the last 140 years is that we've become more educated. When Americans spent their days farming with a horse, they were doing a job that required a fourth grade education and earned $4K/year.
Later, they earned $20K running a partially automated tractor and used their high school education to plot out crop patterns. Today, Americans average $40K and farmers have a bachelor's degree from Texas A&M. They operate $2 million combines with GPS and laser range finders to be more productive and earn more.
I'm a poor in America. I bought a used 25$ tv about two years. I saved for years to buy a 300$ laptop. I'll have to save for 5 years to finish my BA in math. I haven't spent a single dollar that wasn't for food, housing, or electricity in over a year. I don't have a phone or car or an air conditioner.
The dollars are stretched, and the situation is getting worse.
After all, I am strangely colored.
That sounds like they were opposed to their guild or equivalent being undermined. They wanted the industry to be dominated by skilled workers such as themselves, when skilled workers were no longer needed.
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Imagine instead of people we're talking about horses. Horses have had a variety of jobs throughout history. They bounced around between farm, military, and transportation jobs as different trends and technologies came and went. Horses didn't have to worry, there was always something they'd be useful for.
And then, within a 50 year span, they lost almost all those jobs, because machines surpassed them in their core competency (pulling and carrying stuff).
Similarly, humans will get bumped and jostled around and generally will have something to contribute... until we quite suddenly (from a history perspective) don't. A few more advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, and the majority of humans will have nothing to contribute to the economy. The kinds of jobs that humans will still excel at (eg. creative stuff like writing) are also things that just don't require that many people to do, and which many people will continue having no aptitude for.
This is good news. It'll be awesome to see what humans can do post-scarcity. But the transition will be awkward.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Technology allows jobs to be done with less manual effort. By its very nature, it leads to less jobs; if it didn't, it wouldn't be adopted. Replacing 50 auto workers with 1 robot may create 1 robot repair tech job, but it's not going to produce 50. Otherwise you'd keep the auto workers on the job.