financevorti.blogg.se

What decides if a job is going to happen and how the people in that job are looked at is a set of social constructions around that job. So, you can't look at that and tell me that the only thing that decides whether a job is going to happen is if we need it. Again, in our society right now a lot of the people who are given the highest incomes and given the most public esteem are doing jobs that in the grand scheme of human history are ridiculous: corporate lawyers, management consultants, high-frequency traders on Wall Street. This idea that we're going to have a useless class of people because robots are going to take the jobs, it seems a lot likelier to me that we're just going to imbue new jobs with both social capital and money. So, this idea that the only jobs that have dignity and that have worth are ones that are actually needed. Management consultants make a lot more money and are given a lot more social capital, I'm not saying fairly, I'm just saying it is true, than farmers or public school teachers. There are more yoga instructors today than there are coal miners in America.

So, you go forward in time, I mean I'm a journalist who writes stuff online, it's not an objectively all-that-needed a job. So, go back a couple hundred years and we're most all working in agriculture, we are doing things that are very directly about human survival. The other reason I'm skeptical is that human beings are very good at assigning value to jobs that maybe do not have that much intrinsic value in them. It is not true currently and it is not visible in any of the data currently, which is a problem. So one, the robots are taking all of our jobs - maybe it will be true someday. If we were being able to do a better job automating things, making the same number of people produce much more we would be getting richer faster and we would be able to share those gains faster. In many cases part of the problem in our economy is not that we have too many robots but that we don't have enough robots. If automation were putting all these people out of work because we're producing so much more without any people needed at all we would be seeing those productivity numbers shooting up. For one thing we don't see it in the data, we actually have quite good productivity data, we know if we're making more things with fewer or the same number of people and while it is true that productivity is going up, it is going up more slowly than it has in the past. EZRA KLEIN: I'm going to be honest, I'm a doubter of the automation apocalypse theories.