NYT Syndicate
Maybe the automation of jobs will eventually create new, better jobs. Maybe it will put us all out of work. But as we argue about this, work is changing.
Today's jobs ” white collar, blue collar or no collar ” require more education and interpersonal skills than those in the past. And many of the people whose jobs have already been automated can't find new ones. Technology leads to economic growth, but the benefits aren't being parcelled out equally. Policymakers have the challenge of helping workers share the gains.
Whether there's political will for big changes remains to be seen, but here are some policies that economists and policy experts think could help now.
More Education, and Different Kinds
A broad area of agreement: People need to learn new skills to work in the new economy."The best response is to increase the skills of the labour force," said Gregory Mankiw, an economist at Harvard.
The most valuable thing could be to increase college enrolment and graduation rates. A growing number of jobs require a degree; the unemployment rate among people 25 to 34 with college degrees is just 2 percent, versus 8 percent for those who stopped their education after high school.
People who lose their job midcareer don't necessarily have the skills to do another one. But government retraining programmes are confusing and often ineffective, and many companies aren't willing to invest in training workers only to have them poached by a rival."It's bipartisan judgment that it doesn't work," said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University."People are not that malleable."
More successful, he said, is training that workers seek themselves. One idea from Third Way, a policy think tank, is free online prep courses for people who have been out of school too long to remember high school basics.
Perhaps most effective is reaching students as early as elementary school. Educators should focus on teaching technical skills, like coding and statistics, and skills that still give humans an edge over machines, like creativity and collaboration, experts say. And since no one knows which jobs will be automated later, it may be most important to learn flexibility and how to learn new things.
Create New and Better Jobs
The problem, at least for now, is not that there isn't enough work ” there is, but it is very different from the kind of work technology is displacing. Manufacturing and warehousing jobs are shrinking, while jobs that provide services (health care, child care, elder care, education, food) are growing."We are far from the end of work, but face a big challenge redeploying people toward addressing our society's very real needs," Brynjolfsson said.
One idea is for the government to subsidise private employment or even volunteer jobs."If the private market isn't creating the jobs people need, then the public sector should engage in direct job creation," said Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He said the technique"has a better track record than people think." A recent study by the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality examined 40 programmes over 40 years, and found they were successful at things like improving workers' skills and reducing their dependence on public benefits.
People who lose their jobs often don't have the money to pick up and move to where jobs and training are, so he suggests the government help people move. But it's not just about money ” many people don't want to upend their lives.
Change the Way Work Is Done
Most people have skills to earn money, so why not make it easier to do so without an employer? Freelance and contract workers could get portable benefits. They wouldn't have to be tied to a job to get health insurance, for example. Similar and more feasible ideas include easing regulations for companies to hire contract workers (which is happening more, though not necessarily to the benefit of workers), and building co-working spaces so that people get the camaraderie of an office.
Governments could also make it easier to start small businesses. Third Way proposes borrowing an idea from Silicon Valley and creating venture capital funds, seeded by the federal government, for states to invest in local entrepreneurs.
Machines may take so many jobs that there aren't enough left for humans. That would suggest policies like cutting hours instead of employees. Why not shorten the workweek to three or four days, or institute job sharing, which has been successful in Germany?
Give Workers More of the Profits
The earnings from automation have been shared unequally, with business owners getting a much larger share than workers.
"Technology creates phenomenal wealth but concentrates it beyond any acceptable level, and so we will have to agree on some sort of redistribution," said Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a tech startup incubator. But there's no agreement on how to solve the problem.
Liberals want to raise the minimum wage, while many conservatives want to keep it low so that human labour is less expensive than robot labour. Third Way proposes a minimum wage that varies with the cost of living .
"How to make the forces of technology and globalisation work for people and not against them is the biggest public policy challenge in America," said Jim Kessler, senior vice president for policy at Third Way."The rise of populism, both on the left and the right, is because middle-income voters feel that their elected leaders don't have the answer to this question."