As the presidential candidates spout on about jobs and the economy, I sometimes wish I could put my late grandfather on the stage during the debates. Not just because he had a low tolerance for blather, although he did, and I think the politicians would find his comments, let's say, bracing. The real reason is that his experience has more relevance to the jobs debate than most of what the politicians are talking about.
My grandfather had a job that doesn't even exist anymore. In fact, most people may never have heard of it (except via Eugene O'Neill). He was an "iceman," delivering big blocks of ice to homes and businesses in the era before refrigeration. Back then, if you wanted to keep things cold, you kept your food in an insulated icebox (essentially a big cooler). Ice men like my grandfather were daily visitors, just like the milkman or the paper carrier.
Eventually technology came out with something better, but my grandfather knew that wasn't necessarily going to be better for him. As my father used to tell it, the family was once invited to dinner during the 1930s; a dinner that ended with ice cream out of a refrigerator. An electric refrigerator.
My grandfather didn't say anything, but there was no way in hell he was going to eat that demon dessert, no matter how hard my grandmother kicked him under the table. Finally, when the hostess' back was turned, she switched dishes, putting her empty one in front of grandfather and eating the second one herself.
That kind of defiance wasn't going to hold back the refrigerator, any more than John Henry could hold off the steam hammer. By the 1950s, 80 percent of American households had refrigerators, and my grandfather was out of the ice business and back to his farm.
My grandfather was an example of the "creative destruction" of jobs that economists (and lately presidential candidates) embrace. Technology both creates and destroys jobs, usually at the same time, and ideally because a superior product came along. Refrigerators were better than iceboxes. Eventually even my grandfather admitted it. If you look at the overall economy, the loss of ice routes was more than made up by new jobs making refrigerators.
The key word in creative destruction, however, is "creative." Now we're living in another time not unlike the 1930s, with a jobs crisis that's partly a massive failure of financial markets and partly a huge technological shift in the nature of work. There's no question the Great Recession slammed the global economy. But one reason why the jobs market has been so slow to recover is that technology is enabling us to do more work with fewer people -- or with people anywhere around the world.
Ah, but your grandfather was a blue-collar worker, you may say. Those kinds of jobs are begging to be automated. If he'd gone to college, that would have been a different story.
And that's very true: if my grandfather had gone to college he probably wouldn't have been an ice man, or a farmer. But an education isn't the guaranteed haven from technological change it used to be. The working assumption that most people have -- that technology favors the smart, the creative, and the well-educated -- may not hold up any more.
Figure it this way: it's about the difference between repetitive tasks and those that require analysis. If you're working on an assembly line, picking vegetables or handling deposits and withdrawals over a bank counter, a machine might do your job better. If you're in charge of making sure those jobs get done, or marketing them, then a computer may help you, but it can't do the job for you.
Unfortunately, the definition of "repetitive" is going to keep shifting. "E-discovery" software, which can sort through email and documents looking for suspicious patterns, is already taking on a job traditionally done by paralegals and junior associates in law forms. IBM's "Watson" computer, which can respond to questions well enough to play "Jeopardy," is really designed to take over tasks from nurses and doctors, like taking medical histories. But you'll still need a human being to write a brief, argue in court, or conduct your surgery.
The jobs crisis is the first priority for most Americans, and rightly so. If you don't have a decent job in America, your entire life can unravel. Yet in the early stages of a crucial presidential campaign, we're spending far too much time asking the wrong questions: can we "hold onto" the jobs we have? Should we cut taxes? Does a college education pay off?
What we really need to do -- and what our political candidates better start doing -- is talk about what kind of jobs technology is likely to create, and what kind it destroys, and how our national policy can get ahead of that curve. The economy will work these issues out in the long run, but it'll be a lot less ugly if we actually start planning for the changes we know are coming. Anything else is like refusing to eat the ice cream from the refrigerator: a stand that doesn't change a thing.
Follow Scott Bittle on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sbittle
See: http://revolutionofreason.com and http://www.youtube.com/RobertLBlackburn
The days of "full employment" are coming to an end. With the right social institutions and attitudes, we can see a future where people do not have to work long hours to have modestly comfortable lives, where the promise of "more leisure time" can be a positive one, instead of the fear of "unemployment". Social security, for example, moves in the right direction, but not far enough. For the promise of automation and the reduced need for human labor to be a benefit instead of a curse, we need to ALL become capitalists, not just the wealthy few. Understand that "shared wealth" is NOT socialism - it is universal capitalism, where every person at least has the opportunity to own sufficient "wealth-producing property" (stocks, bonds, etc.) that they need not be a wage-slave.
Workers are more productive than ever so it makes sense that we could work less so what happened? What happened is greed. Employers instead of paying employees the same wages for fewer but more productive hours saw it as a way to make more money. Lay off employees and make the remaining employees work that much harder.
I'd love to work 30 hours/week but I couldn't afford my home and expenses on 75% of my pay. Being 50 I also have to consider health insurance. Part time employees often don't qualify for benefits.
I will probably move to working part time in 15 years when I turn 65. When I qualify for Medicare I'll be able to do consulting instead of being tied to my employer for benefits.
It will actually be a lot more ugly because ‘planning’ will end up being “preventing” or “delaying” since people like the author’s grandfather will oppose every change that isn’t to their obvious and immediate advantage. It has been argued that the reason that the Industrial Revolution took place in the West rather than China (where many of the key enabling inventions were made) was that China was centrally planned under an emperor while the West was a chaotic mess of competing and often warring states. The Chinese rulers did want the disruption of new technologies impoverishing existing areas. In Europe, no one could prevent the new water mills in England from bankrupting the existing wind mills in the Netherlands.
These statistics clearly indicate that it is not at all the case that China currently is coming up with all the innovations.
The Economist Magazine’s Intelligence Unit’s “Innovation index” shows a ranking of the world’s most innovative countries and is available at: http://graphics.eiu.com/PDF/Cisco_Innovation_Methodology.pdf
The methodology that they use to arrive at their rankings are a lot more complex; but their figures also rank China well down on the list of innovative countries.
It is unlikely to come up as a policy issue any time soon because most people of all ideologies generally like the advances in technology we have seen in the last 10-15 years, and it isn't nearly as easy to pin blame on as the decisions of the opposing party.
"Conversely, today's robots are ill-suited for the more fluid environment of the assembly line -- where trims and options change frequently, and "dual-arm control" is a prerequisite.
"The constraints [on the assembly line] are much different," Nieves asserts. "For one thing, the work is, by and large, bilateral -- it's two-handed operations. It was built around our human capability, and we are two-handed creatures."
It's not just the lack of humanlike dexterity that makes robots a poor fit for the automotive assembly line. To make inroads into assembly, robots need much more highly developed senses of vision, touch and force.
"Robots on the body line are largely blind. They just have brute force and a memory," Nieves explains. "Robots on the unstructured side have to be much more cognizant of what's happening.""
automation requires high volume reptitve tasks, not particularly well suited for flexible and rapidly changing shorter run environment of todays production
plus these technologies create higher skill jobs maintaining, programming, operating, tooling and setting up complex equipment. there isn't a robot yet that can repair itself. And even the most advanced robots can not perform all the things a human can do - such as two handed operations or "finesse" jobs at least not for any kind of cost justifiable point
The fact is that productivity has imporved that is true, but that the average worker has not shared in the benefits of their increased productivity such as the higher wages that used to be connected to increased productivity - globalization and supply sider economics has decoupled wage growth from productivity growth - if more people were benefitting you would see increased demand and less job "loss" from technology
but lets assume for a minute that technology has displaced jobs - should we be exacerbating this trend by outsourcing jobs that are not made obsolete by the march of time? Are automobiels, appliances, electronics, computers, medical devices and all the things we use everyday obsolete? no they are not
the US can and should do more to retain these industries onshore
incarceration business, i.e. privately run prisons need 90% occupancy to provide
this service for less than state run services.
As an increasing number of people become homeless, through the increasing number
of foreclosures and through unemployment, it becomes increasingly beneficial to
local authorities to make laws that would incarcerate these people. Such
homeless camps are an embarassment! And need to be kept out of sight!
Also, these same local authorities would receive generous contributions for
there political campaigns and favorite "charities", for their efforts, from
these private companies.
Since, apparently, such quid pro quo is no longer illegal. These prisoners
would be compensated at $0.22/hour (comparable to what chinese workers
make) and could then be leased to various corporate interests by the these
private prison companies at a slightly higher rate. Giving these private
incarceration companies additional profit. The corporations would no longer
have to outsource to other countries, since low cost labor would be available
right here in the continental United States creating further corporate savings
in fuel costs. Because of recent legislation, all those troublesome "#occupy"
people could also be classified as terrorists, and become a part of this
"economic miracle" through suspension of habeas corpus.
One can almost see the invisible hand of the free market at work.
At last, Wall Street would acheive the control and security it so desperately
wants.
I have been flying solo as a legal services professional since 2009. I could probably afford to hire an employee, but then I would have to file quarterly reports, pay for worker's compensation insurance, pay SDI and unemployment insurance. Not to mention, there are the myriad of rules and regulations surrounding hours and conditions of work. The time, cost and aggravation of compliance when it is not absolutely necessary to hire someone makes a new hire problematic unless absolutely necessary.
Frankly, since I travel to courthouses throughout the state, it is easier to just put a computer, printer and scanner in my car and transmit my documents straight to my clients as soon as I complete and assignment or work into the night when I get home.
I keep my costs down, and my clients haven't seen an increase in their fees since 2008. I can't say that would stay the same if I hired an assistant.
That's not at all the author's thesis. He says the problem no one wants to address is our technology is making having the same number of employees not worthwhile.
Let's say you had no compliance issues and hiring someone was as simple as writing them a check. Would you still hire that person to do those things if technology did it reliably for less cost, including your own time as a cost?
http://www.flixya.com/blog/3201910/Beautiful-Butterflys
Courtesy of Quicken, Peachtree and other accounting software that job now either can be done by the owner in his spare time or by almost anyone in the office with a minimal amount of training. Invoices can be sent out by E-mail with one touch of a function key.
This one innovation cut the number of office workers needed in the accounts payable/receivable, inventory and accounting departments of every business in the US by about 25%. An even better example is the US post office which is now going the way of the dinosaur courtesy of the internet. Will life really be better when we can no longer get mail on Saturday?
Rather than creative destruction, I think it is time we started practicing a little creative inefficiency.