SAMUELSON: Old jobs lost, new ones created

High-tech challenge: schooling enough skilled workers

12:39 AM, Jul. 19, 2013  |  Comments
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Just what explains today's continuing high unemployment remains a central economic question of our time. I have largely exonerated the computer revolution, which - according to some economists - eliminates more jobs than it creates.

This (the argument goes) makes it hard to reduce the joblessness that resulted from the Great Recession. To the contrary, I wrote, past technological upheavals have tended to be net job creators through two mechanisms: lower prices, which expand demand for goods and services; and higher wages and profits, which increase purchasing power across the economy. There's little evidence that computer technologies depart from this history.



It was feared that this was the new norm. Robert Heilbroner, a well-known economist who wrote a widely read book on economic history ("The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers") warned: "As machines continue to invade society ... it is human labor itself - at least, as we now think of 'labor' - that is gradually rendered redundant."

So concerned was President Lyndon B. Johnson that in 1964 he appointed a National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress. To be fair, not everyone fretted about technology. Americans still lived in the shadow of World War II when new technologies were credited with helping win the war. For many, there was a lingering optimism that automation would solve many social problems. Herman Kahn, a prominent futurist, predicted a four-day work week and 13-week annual vacations.



Indeed, this theme animates the second essay, "Dancing With Robots," published by Third Way, a liberal think tank, and written by economists Frank Levy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Richard Murnane of Harvard.


But Levy and Murnane contend that new computer jobs dwarf losses. They count 3.5 million workers directly involved "in creating computer infrastructure" - software developers, systems analysts and data experts.


Computers excel, they argue, at automating tasks that can be distilled to data inputs and rigid rules - say, placing an Amazon order or making bank deposits. As a result, job creation in the future will "center on three kinds of work: solving unstructured problems (example: performing delicate surgery), working with new information (example: analyzing marketing data), and carrying out non-routine manual tasks (example: moving furniture)."

Schools aren't any worse than in earlier decades, argue Levy and Murnane, but the skills required for the first two types of jobs - the well-paying jobs - have become more complex. Future living standards depend heavily, they say, on whether schools can produce those higher skills in larger quantities.

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