Accordingly, SBTC has made it harder for workers without postsecondary credentials, especially those without bachelor’s (BA) degrees, to join or remain part of the middle class, while those with BAs and higher have thrived. But new technologies have been the largest source of the new inequality. Other forces have mattered as well – like globalization and weakening protections from unions and minimum wage laws. Indeed, most labor economists believe that skill-biased technical change (SBTC) has been the largest cause of growing inequality between college-educated and other workers in the past four decades. The employment rates and earnings of these complementary workers rise as a result of automation. In contrast, those with at least some postsecondary education, especially with bachelor (BA) degrees or higher, tend to complement the new technologies in a variety of ways – as engineers or technicians, or those who market and sell the new products, or those providing the health care that we demand with our higher incomes, or whose creativity in music or writing can now be enjoyed by vastly greater audiences. Since 1980, and perhaps well before, economists believe new technologies have been “skill-biased” – meaning that they substitute for less-educated workers broadly in the labor market, reducing the demand they face for their labor and thus reducing their wages and employment rates. And automation can hurt workers beyond those directly displaced.
And facing the prospect of nothing but low-wage work for the rest of their lives can discourage them from ever taking another job. Those who were unsuccessful at school earlier in their lives, and emerged with at most a high school diploma, are especially poor candidates for more education later. For these workers, the thought of returning to a 2- or 4-year college to learn a new skill, or to start a low-wage entry level job as a trainee, is extremely unappealing – and may not be worth it if they only have a decade or two left to work. Displaced workers who are older or less educated are more likely to leave the labor force rather than retrain for another job. Most in the latter situation become unemployed, and suffer lengthy spells without work – sometimes for years – before accepting new jobs at lower wages or leaving the work force altogether. Some workers are directly displaced from their existing jobs perhaps they can retrain for another job in the same firm or industry, and perhaps not. The adjustment process I describe above does not mean that no one suffers from automation. But there are costs – even for the middle class They can now afford to buy more products than before, which then creates new jobs for workers to fill.
This is true because automation raises worker productivity and reduces the costs and prices of goods and services, which makes consumers richer. New jobs always emerge to replace those that have been lost.
To date, these fears have never proven accurate in any industrial country. In the US, such fears occasionally surface as well, as they did during a brief “automation scare” in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when a wide swath of workers felt some risk of displacement. The fear that automation will eliminate millions of jobs, leaving masses of workers jobless, has periodically emerged in industrialized countries at least since the Luddites first made that claim in Britain in the mid-19 th century.
#Fallout 4 automatrons losing parts professional
workers now threatened by a new and powerful form of automation that could displace tens of millions from their current jobs and dislodge them from the middle class? If so, are college-educated or professional workers at the upper range of the middle class as much threatened as those with fewer such credentials at the lower end? And can policy do much to protect the middle class status of either group? Old fears, new trends
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