In his latest Washington Post column Robert Samuelson turns to a topic that I’ve addressed any number of times here—the overblown fears of “robots coming for your jobs”:
Jobs have been eliminated; there can be little doubt of that. But jobs have also been created. The lesson from history is that inventions and innovations have typically been more than offset by employment gains. Automobiles displaced horses, and job gains were not only in manufacturing but also in gasoline stations, auto repair shops and highway construction.
Jet planes are another good example. Although they decimated most long-distance train travel, airlines now move vastly more people than trains ever did. A similar shift may be happening now. Over the past decade, 4 of 10 new jobs were created in “digitally intensive industries,†the OECD says.
On the other hand, there’s a tendency to exaggerate the significance of novel developments. Annual robot sales, though impressive, are equal to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the 571 million jobs in OECD countries at the end of 2018. As yet, they haven’t destroyed many jobs.
Indeed, it’s possible — though the OECD study barely mentions it — that the supply and demand for workers, after many years of favoring business, is slowly shifting the advantage to workers.
The preponderance of the evidence is that automation creates new jobs and new types of jobs. Yes, there are fewer master weavers than there were 300 years ago but more woven goods are being produced at higher quality than ever before with more people employed under better conditions with higher wages for producing them. Yes, there are fewer smiths than there were 150 years but more goods made of iron and steel are being produced at higher quality than ever before with more people employed under better conditions with higher wages for producing them. And so on.
What we really have to fear is not a robot job apocalypse but the modern day equivalent of master weavers and blacksmiths having the power and motivation to protect their own jobs from automation, keeping those jobs artisanal and expensive.
i.e. crony capitalism. Who mourns the buggy whip manufacturers! Oh, the horror!
The greatest enemy of free markets is a free marketeer who turns corrupt, employing the government to suppress competition and innovation so he can sit back and relax as the money flows in untrammeled by pesky competitors. Think Ma Bell, public utilities. It takes a government to enforce a monopoly.