Dean Baker has
a piece in Counterpunch where he dismisses the concern over the very real issue of technology and employment.
Economists are not very good at economics. We know this because we had a huge housing bubble that collapsed, which almost none of them saw.
Actually one does not need to be an economist to see the issue of technology on human employment. This side trip to bash on economists only really shows what Dean is really about. We'll get to that later.
In particular they can be a great source of entertainment. That’s how we should view the story that robots will take all of our jobs and leave most of the population unemployed.
So those of us concerned with a future in which humans do not “work” and therefore do not have a means of getting income which is needed for, well, everything is “entertainment”? Ok.
Remember the story about how the aging of the baby boomers will bankrupt us because we will have too few workers to support the surge of retired baby boomers?
In that story, all of us aging baby boomers will be left waiting around for someone to change our bedpans. But now we are supposed to be worried that we won’t have any work for people to do because the robots will be there to do it faster and cheaper.
Either of these stories could in principle be true, but they cannot both be true. If robots are capable of doing most of the tasks that humans now do, then we don’t have to worry about declining ratios of workers to retirees. We will have plenty of robots to do the work for us.
Well actually these things can both be true. The actual argument about “supporting baby boomers” is about taxes and other social services. Those services cost money and the money that comes from Medicare, medicaid and social security comes out of the paychecks of those who are not retired. You need to have this income to support the retireees who are living longer and may outlive their savings and investments.
The robot argument is about what those not retired people do for a living. Yes the bedpans (and diapers) will be changed, but if a robot does it and not a person, and a robot does not have to be paid and therefore does not pay into social security or pay any taxes whatsoever (does your car pay taxes?) then the system colapses not only do you have less people working but you also have killed your tax base.
So yes, both things can be true.
Alternatively, if we are facing labor shortages because there are too few workers to support a growing population of retirees, then clearly robots will not have taken everyone’s job. At worst we have to worry about one of these problems, but not both.
Dean is merely fixated on his retiree scenario to see the larger picture. The labour shortage, the human labour shortage is the issue. Retirees are a current class of people, the issue with robots (and automation) is that humans will not have a job to retire from. That's the long term argument. It will likely begin with retiring of older workers but it will spread out.
Let’s assume robots are the problem. This would actually not be a new story. The robots might be new, but this is the story of productivity growth that we have dealt with for centuries. Ordinarily we think productivity growth makes us richer, since we can produce more goods or services in every hour of work. This can lead to rising pay and living standards or alternatively more leisure time.
However, the robot story is somewhat different or so its proponents would claim. Robots are supposed to lead to such rapid increases in productivity that there will be no way for all the displaced workers to be reemployed. The problem in this case is not productivity; rather the problem is that all the benefits are going to the owners of the robots.
Well, no. Yes, technology increased productivity but never to the extent of being able to replace all human involvement. Yes, there were disruptions but not the wholesale elimination that is on the horizon. Look at the auto industry. The auto industry produces many many many more cars than it did in the 50s. Yet the labor pool involved continues to shrink. Don't let those reports of new factories fool you. They don't employ anywhere near what they would have in the 1960's. The issue of re-employment goes like this: Where? Once manual labour is dealt the death blow by robots, that's millions of people who simply will not have work to do
at all
Dean wants to make this a discussion on who owns the robot, as if people are going to be purchasing robots and sending them to work in their place. No, it's not who owns the robots. It's who owns the business. It has not been the case where people own the business for a long time (outside of farming). In smaller ecomomies, everybody has a hustle. Entrepreneurship is how employment happens. But in a post industrial society the masses are hustle-less. They depend on large companies for employment.
The final frontier of productivity is the elimination of wages. It simply becomes a matter of how long does it take to produce a good rather than how long and how much (for the worker). The robot becomes a fixed cost to obtain and a relatively known cost to maintain. It breaks, it is replaced with another robot with the exact skills needed. Once one has gone automated, it is only a matter of how long and how long's restrictions are the limits of physics.
There also is no evidence that robots and other technological change is responsible for the upward distribution of income in the last three decades.
That may or may not be the case, but it is not relevant whether it is. Once you're no longer paying for human labour those “savings” will go to the business owner because, as we know from slavery, if you own the means of production AND you don't have to pay it a wage, healthcare, etc. you come out ahead. Besides, where does this guy thinks the unpaid labour costs go to? Charity?
But there is a more fundamental problem with this robot-driven inequality story. The owners of the robots won’t directly get rich from owning the machines: robots will presumably be relatively cheap to make. After all, we can have robots make them. If the owners of robots get really rich it will be because the government has given them patent monopolies so that they can collect lots of money from anyone who wants to buy or build a robot.
While it may be the case that a patent war could occur between manufacturers, the fact that those who build, sell and maintain the robots will be making out quite well is simply a matter of economics that the government has little control over (and probably shouldn't). But lets say that patents are not enforced so anyone who can, could make a robot. It still does not address the issue of robots displacing people as units of labor. Just like very few people own any business whatsoever, very few people will own the means of making robots for industrial use. Therefore we're back to humans being displaced.
