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Number of Workers in Jobs That Can Be Automated Falls (ft.com)
Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation. From a report: Statistics from the Office for National Statistics published on Monday showed that in 2011 about 8.1 per cent of workers were in jobs with a "high" risk of automation, but by 2017 that had fallen to 7.4 per cent. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source and original study.] The ONS report highlighted that fewer workers remain in areas that can be easily automated, such as dry cleaning and laundry jobs, which fell by 28 per cent between 2011 and 2017, and retail cashier work, which fell by 25.3 per cent over the same period.
Since the financial crisis the UK has enjoyed rapid growth in employment combined with one of the lowest rates of investment spending of any large rich country. Many economists have suggested that hiring cheap labour instead of investment in new techniques is behind the country's weak rate of productivity growth. Policymakers had hoped that increasing the minimum wage would spur companies to replace low-paid jobs with machines, in turn boosting growth in productivity. [...] But the ONS analysis suggests the increase in employment over the past decade has not come from jobs that could easily be done by machines. Instead, since 2011 the UK lost jobs with a high or medium risk of automation, like shelf fillers, but gained them in areas with a low risk, such as physiotherapy.
Since the financial crisis the UK has enjoyed rapid growth in employment combined with one of the lowest rates of investment spending of any large rich country. Many economists have suggested that hiring cheap labour instead of investment in new techniques is behind the country's weak rate of productivity growth. Policymakers had hoped that increasing the minimum wage would spur companies to replace low-paid jobs with machines, in turn boosting growth in productivity. [...] But the ONS analysis suggests the increase in employment over the past decade has not come from jobs that could easily be done by machines. Instead, since 2011 the UK lost jobs with a high or medium risk of automation, like shelf fillers, but gained them in areas with a low risk, such as physiotherapy.
Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation.
It's been this way since the start of the industrial revolution and even before. Some jobs get automated by new technology and those people have to find or create new jobs. As a species we're quite good at that. Generally the automation enables jobs that didn't exist previously. If you need evidence look at the very device you are using to read these very words. Smartphones are a multi-billion dollar business that didn't even exist 20 years ago. The web didn't even exist 30 years ago yet you'd be hard pressed to argue it hasn't been a net creator of jobs and prosperity. (note I didn't say a uniform creator of prosperity) That's not to say there aren't some bumps and bruises along the way for some people but in the end our society ends up better off pretty much every time.
There is this fear that somehow this time it will be different. That somehow devices have finally gotten clever enough to replace people permanently with nothing left for people to do. Problem with that idea is that it presumes there is a finite amount of economically useful work which is an idea that has never been true in the history of man. It also presumes that we have no control over automation politically, economically, or physically which also isn't true. One of our defining traits is that we are tool makers. Our tools enable us to do more than we could do without them. Instead of just making a product we use machines to help us make it so we can spend more time selling it or improving it or funding it.
This summary is weird. It's like they don't realize there are fewer people employed in automatable jobs because those jobs are now becoming automated.
She's only half-right.
The more we work, the more we produce, so we're effectively trading time for wealth. Without raising the minimum wage, the amount of low-end labor purchaseable by everybody a bit above the lowest-paid worker increases (and this scales at every step, so people a bit above that can buy more of those slightly-more-than-minimum workers's labor). That creates a glut of low-wage jobs.
Most of the money is, in fact, going to those low-wage jobs.
Walmart's CEO gets $4 per employee per year. Home Depot is like $120 among all their executives, and around $20 per employee for their CEO. AIG is ludicrous at $518 including the non-cash perks (usually negligible).
There are few billionaires, and the top doesn't have all of the income. People started massively conglomerating businesses (Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, Kraft), allowing them to take less per employee and still take more in total.
Raise minimum wage and you'll see a redistribution; it won't be from billionaires. Instead of creating 5 $250,000 jobs in the next growth cycle, we'll create 25 $50,000 jobs. There will be less poverty, more productivity, and greater wealth. Job growth will be somewhat slower; unless you jack up minimum wage insanely-fast and to ridiculous amounts (note: it has been 67% of GNI/C for decades up until 1970, and is as high as 58% in some of the best-performing nations today), you won't see an unemployment spike or the related recession.
As for high-poverty areas, those come from structural change initiating a local economic collapse. Such areas stay collapsed. Rural America is an exception: they mainly produce food there, and food becomes worth less and less of our productivity over time; they need the land to produce food, so they can't help but be left behind.
The fix for all of this is a Universal Citizen's Dividend--a form of negative income tax implemented as a social insurance. It doesn't pay an inflation-adjusted cost-of-living stipend; it pays a share.
We need social insurances--universal childcare, universal college, universal healthcare, long-term support services. This means we divert some of our great wealth to pay for these things, which stimulates the poorest areas (who pay the least in taxes) and flows wealth in to help repair them. This is yet insufficient.
Those services become more-productive over time. Healthcare, childcare, college, all become cheaper and more-effective. That means Rural America will continue to decay. The blighted Urban environments will have more success from provisioned-services insurances.
A Universal Dividend taxes a flat percentage on personal income (wage, rents not taxed as profits) and corporate profits, reflecting productive incomes. It distributes this as a flat, twice-monthly payment. The poorest receive a greater total impact, as they pay less into this; and the proportion of their income reflected by that total impact is higher, as they have less income.
While productivity improves and Rural America is bound to the land and the increasing productivity therein, thus receiving ever-less of our great wealth, the Dividend pours a share of our productivity into the hands of rural households. Those provisioned services employ workers who receive a part of this share, along with payment drawn less from the poorest than the wealthiest. This combination helps to hold up even Rural America, the seemingly-doomed corner of our economy.
This is the truth about the economy. Ocasio understands productivity--many don't--but she does miss the larger, more-complex details.
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