Dovetailing off of yesterday’s blog entry (“Teaching more people to code isn’t a good jobs strategy”), I’d like to examine an assumption implicit in the first passage I quoted:
‘[Although] I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these [software] platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing.’
It’s a little unclear what “employment crisis” the author is talking about since the U.S. unemployment rate is a very healthy 4.4%, but it probably refers to three things scattered throughout the article:
- Skills obsolescence among older workers. As people age, the skills they learned in college and early in their careers get less useful because technologies and processes change, but the people fail to adapt. Accordingly, their value as employees declines, along with their pay and job security. This phenomenon is nothing new: in Prehistoric times, the same “career arc” existed, with people becoming progressively less useful as hunters and parents upon reaching middle age. Older workers faced the same problems in more recent historical eras when work entailed farming and then factory labor. That being the case, does it make sense to describe today’s skills obsolescence as a “crisis”? “Just the way things are” is more fitting.
- Stagnation of real median wages in the U.S. Adjusted for inflation, the median American household wage has barely increased since the 1970s. First, this isn’t in the strictest sense of the word an “employment crisis” since it relates to wages and not the availability of employment. “Pay crisis” might be a better term. Second, much of the stagnation in median pay evaporates once you consider that the average American household has steadily shrunk since the 1970s: Single-parent households have become more common, and in such families, there is only one breadwinner. Knowing whether someone is talking about median wages per worker or median wages per household is crucial. Third, this only counts as a crisis if you ignore the fact that many things have gotten cheaper and/or better since the 1970s (cars, personal electronics, many forms of entertainment, housing except in some cities), so the same salary can support a higher standard of living now. Most of that owes to technological improvement.
Note the data stop in 2012, when the U.S. economy was still recovering from the Great Recession - Automation of human jobs. Towards the end of the article, it becomes clear this is what the author is really thinking about. He cites research done by academics Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee as proof that machines have been hollowing out the middle class and reducing incomes and the number of jobs. I didn’t look at the source material, but the article says they made those comments in 2013, which means their analysis was probably based on economic data that stopped in 2012, in the miserable hangover of the Great Recession when people we openly questioning whether the economy would ever get back on its feet. I remember it well, and specifically, I remember futurists citing Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s research as proof that the job automation inflection point had been reached during the Great Recession, explaining why the unemployment rate was staying stubbornly high and would never go down again. Well they were wrong, as today’s healthy unemployment numbers and rising real wages demonstrate. So if the article’s author thinks that job automation is causing “our employment crisis,” then he has failed to present proof the latter exists at all.
For the record, I do believe that machines will someday put the vast majority of humans–perhaps 100% of us–out of gainful work. When they finally do that, we will have an “employment crisis.” However, I have yet to see proof that machines have started destroying jobs faster than new ones are created, so speaking of an automation-driven “employment crisis” should be done in the future tense (which the author doesn’t). Right now, “our employment crisis,” like so many other “crises” reported in the media, simply doesn’t exist.
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