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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
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I'm not finding that terribly persuasive.
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"[O]ne of the biggest causes of unemployment in Britain was the decline of coal and other industries in the face of competition from Germany and the United States. Workers’ skills and geographic location ruled out quickly redeploying them elsewhere in the economy. But that transitional episode eventually passed."
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Right. But how long did that take? What happened to those displaced during the interregnum?
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"The challenge that all new technologies pose is not that they create too few jobs, but rather that too few workers have the skills to fill them."
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The advantage of tech to management is eliminating workers. I don't employ robots so I can pay my workers to do something else. I employ robots to remove the cost of my workers. And every business into which my workers may venture as they are displaced will, as they are able to, do the same.
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"The sectoral employment transition is easier where the educational system teaches a broad range of skills, rather than encouraging specialization from an early age, and where flexible labor markets have good retraining facilities."
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Great, but the market values specialization. It refuses to promote autodidacts or generalists. The algorithm that replaced the HR clerk screens for the exact narrow form of widget maker desired, and nothing more.
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"[Businesses] can use technology to substitute capital for labor and keep wages low, or use technology for the good of their workers with a view to longer-term profits. In the latter case, worker wellbeing benefits more from the new technology, not necessarily only through higher wages but also through better working and living conditions."
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This point is a good point. Nick Hanauer has been making similar point, borrowing from Henry Ford: "If nobody has any money, who'll buy what we're making?" But again, the rest of the business community isn't terribly interested in that view. It is more interested in siphoning money from the bottom to the top until the system collapses, at which point, in crisis, businesses will change their view.
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"A mandatory minimum wage or tax inducement to employers to raise low wages may be necessary. The point of technological innovation, after all, is not to give people reason to resist it."
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Right, except those things increase automation. Make workers X more costly and those who are making the robots and writing the algorithms will work X more aggressively to provide options to employers to exploit the market opportunity. In the interim, no new workers will be hired, as employers will instead seek to get more value from their now more costly workforce to offset the wage increase.
