From Scott Sumner, As you can see the employment ratio was about the same in 2007 as in 1990, and hence the aggregate data shows no evidence that either trade or automation reduced employment during the period studied by Autor, Card and Hanson, as well as Acemoglu and Restrepo. The above was in response to a paper showing that local unemployment often results from deployment of robots. The same is seen as a result of automation and trade, which is why he includes the last sentence above. Local markets are affected by these structural changes, but not necessarily aggregate employment.
0 Comments
From Larry Summers, Job destruction caused by technology is not a futuristic concern. It is something we have been living with for two generations. According to VoxEU, the "gig economy" is bigger than we thought, Our research concludes that 20-30% of the working age population have spent time as independent workers. Extrapolating this to the US and 15 core EU countries, that’s as many as 162 million people, with up to 94 million in the 15 core EU countries alone. Government statistics show roughly half that headcount, putting the independent workforce at a mere 11% of the working age population in the US and 14% in the EU-15. The difference primarily comes from the fact that more than half of this non-traditional workforce is engaged in independent work part of the time, and also that, in recent years, the gig economy has indeed grown, but still represents only 15%, or about 24 million, of the independent workers in our study. About 9 million out of that 24 are exclusively using digital platforms for their independent work – a little less than 40% – while more than 60% are combining both digital and non-digital means to perform their work. According to a recent Economic Policy Institute publication, Key findings include: |