One of the claims that never fails to irk me is that such-and-such a job is inherently labor intensive. In this instance I suppose what brought it to mind was this post. Implicit in Matthew Yglesias’s observation, cited and apparently agreed with by Megan McArdle, is that government cannot provide the services it supplies more efficiently than it does, presumably because it is inherently labor intensive. I hear it said of government, the law, and medicine, to name a few.
Once upon a time the same thing was said about telephone companies, banks, making thimbles, and even farming. But then analog and ultimately digital switches replaced a switchboard run by dozens or even hundreds of operators, tellers were replaced in their thousands by ATMs, thimbles began being stamped out with dies rather than being hand-crafted, and a dizzying array of farm machinery began doing the work that had been done by thousands of field hands.
In my view the main difference between government workers, lawyers, and physicians just to name a few, is that they’ve been successful at preventing what they do from being done with less labor than telephone operators, bank tellers, thimble-makers, and farmers were. If telephone operators had been as successful at protecting their jobs as physicians have we’d still be asking Gertie to connect us to the bank. Long distance phone calls would be an act of legerdemain that risked causing an international incident.
The hand-writing is on the wall for the practice of law now. A database, a good search engine, and a relative handful of users can now do in a few days what it might have taken a hundred associates months. And those users might as well be in Bangalore as in Manhattan.
The same will ultimately prove true for many if not all medical specialties and for government work. Even now X-rays are being scanned and transmitted halfway across the world and read by radiologists and technicians in India, their findings returned in little more time than it would take to walk the X-rays across the hall.
I continue to be appalled at the absurdly low level of functionality in their digital servants that today’s physicians are willing to put up with. Virtually every time I’ve gone into a physician’s office lately I’ve been treated to the spectacle of the physician, frequently paid $200 an hour or more, functioning as a data entry operator for a badly designed computer application. I can personally testify that there were better medical computer applications 35 years ago than there are now. Today’s physicians are more frequently employees than the docs were then and they’re not as able to reject the computerization as they used to be. Having driven the good and effective uses of automation out, they’re now stuck with junk. Expensive junk, too, I’m told.
“The same will ultimately prove true for many if not all medical specialties and for government work. Even now X-rays are being scanned and transmitted halfway across the world and read by radiologists and technicians in India, their findings returned in little more time than it would take to walk the X-rays across the hall.”
That is actually more labor, just labor that is willing to work for less. The three month old I intubated yesterday that was going down the tubes had to be intubated by somebody. Someone who was available 24 hours a day. If we wish to forego 24 access, we can eliminate a lot of docs. We can also have lesser trained people do the same jobs. That wont eliminate the number of people needed, just the costs, maybe. It is not unusual to have to hire two lesser trained staff to do the work of one doc. I have had to do it in my corporation.
I would really love to have an electronic system that works. We have been through three that have failed. Our competitor is in their fourth. Please provide us the name of a system that will work to cover a tertiary, trauma facility. AFAIK, the only ones working well at all are the VA system and some proprietary ones like IM has.
On the government workers, here is a question that has been perplexing me. The absolute number of federal workers has stayed relatively constant for the last 50 years. Yet, I am told, there are zillions of new programs and regulations. I am also told that it is difficult to eliminate government programs, that they never go away. How does that relatively fixed number of workers manage to do so much work? (I am being only a little facetious here.)
Steve
Here’s a table showing the federal workforce minus the uniformed military and the US postal service.
That just gives you quicker information to work with. It does nothing to replace what lawyers actually do with that information, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
Bad news for para-legals and proof-readers, certainly.
The difference was that the obsolete jobs were largely “process” jobs, where the person was doing the same definable task over and over again. That’s not the case with doctors, lawyers, and many government positions – these are all jobs where automation is significantly more difficult to impossible without seriously good artificial intelligence.
State employment has steadily trended down over the last decade or two, with the exception of teaching, at least in my state. I don’t see many private schools advertising high student-to-teacher ratios. There are certainly some work that is more labor intensive than others. Nursing would be another one.
But back to government, I constantly see data on the number of government employees, but no figures as to how many jobs have been outsourced to the private sector, either here are abroad. There is a lot of it, particularly in areas like auditing and technology. I’m not sure that outsourcing necessarily means something is more or less labor intensive, it just goes off the books as salary and reappears in another in another place.
Brett:
You may be right. The problems that new law grads who didn’t graduate from the top dozen or so law schools are having now finding jobs practicing law that enable them to pay off their loans and maintain a middle class lifestyle may just be temporary. Or they may reflect a structural change. I think the reality is that a lot of what lawyers actually do is, in fact, highly repetitive.
steve:
I don’t think it’s going to happen all at once but I do think it’s going to happen. Some specialties will be under stress sooner than others. I’m thinking of pathology, radiology, rheumatology in particular.
I’d certainly support a claim that federal gov’t employees do not work as efficiently as they might, nor do entire agencies squeeze a dollar as tightly as they might. When the agencies do, it’s usually for short-term goals and based on short-term thinking.
One instance of that was the dumping of most clerical and secretarial functions in the 80s and 90s. Now, I do type faster than most clerical workers I know; I also know my alphabet so well that my filing skills are without equal. But as a high-ranking officer, I would have at least like to pretend that other skills that I had, the ones for which they were paying me a decent-enough salary, were worth more than my clerical skills. Nevertheless, if I needed clerical work done, I needed to do it myself.
Most federal agencies and departments do not need to be located in Washington, DC. The Dept. of Agriculture, for example, could easily work out of Des Moines or Omaha, with only an HQ office in DC. Keep the Pentagon, State, and Treasury in DC as they have no geographically-central constituency, but nearly all the others could more cheaply be located elsewhere, both for the agencies and their employees.
More federal jobs can be handled through tele-commuting, but there’s a lot of institutional resistance. And while I don’t think it absolutely necessary for every agency’s computer system to be like everyone else’s, they do have to be able to talk to one another. I’ll be dead before that happens.
I was impressed with the system at my local Walgreen’s clinic. Instead of filling out paperwork which someone had to manually input later I did it at a kiosk myself. The physician’s assistant (no doctor under the same roof to be found) who gave me my prescription asked questions from a script that changed based on my symptoms and answers to previous questions inputted into a tablet pc. Automation of this system didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility, nor did anyone really need to be in the same room with me the two times I went. She only touched me to take my blood pressure which is easily done by machine or semi-skilled individual these days. Mind you I had to go to an Ophthalmologist to tell me to just stop sleeping with my eye open and that I wasn’t actually getting infections…
Curious, I decided to look at the census data and the number of state and local public employees have grown modestly (about 2%) over the last decade on a per capita basis. Spending at the state and local level grew much faster, increasing by 25% (local government) and 33% (state government) over the same period on a per capita basis.
In the U.S., the average is 85 workers per 10,000 residents. Illinois has gone from 70 (2002) to 54 (2008), and is probably dropping more since the recession.
These figures don’t include education, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other states have reduced their employment if education were taken out.
I think the fewer employees are offset by higher wages because the jobs tend no longer to be seen as purely labor intensive, but tend towards more college degrees.
But the big problem in Illinois are the number of retirees on the pensions.
We generally do that already with the stuff that doesn’t have a Cabinet seat. The CDC is in Atlanta, for example.
I’m honestly not sure whether or not it’s a structural change, or just the fact that the labor market for lawyers is totally glutted (something which I’ve heard from virtually every lawyer I’ve spoken to, anecdotally speaking).
It’s worth it to point out that there’s usually been a divergence in lawyer salaries: a minority of lawyers make a ton of money, but the rest usually make between $50,000 to $100,000 a year, with most of them leaning closer to the former than the latter amount.
I’ve actually documented that around here somewhere. For at least the last sixty years incomes in the practice of law have been in what is called a “log-normal distribution”. However, I think that the tail has grown longer and the height of the curve has been going down.
Lawyers abandoned certain areas of practice that they weren’t making enough money on. Residential real estate would be a good example. At one time, that would have been a loss leader at a law firm, but the economic soured, compensation feuds between partners got heated, and there was insufficient evidence that the losses lead to gains.
Around here, something like 20-30 years ago, the realtors hired a lawyer to draft a form residential real estate contract, it was then circulated to the “real estate” bar for suggestions and improvements. The bar was then asked to put their stamp of approval on it, but they declined, I’m told, because they did not want to be overtly supporting the unauthorized practice of law. I’m told other bars across the country did place their imprimatur.
And this is before the internet, lawyers gave up work, I can only presume because they were pricing themselves out of that market.