In country after country, slowing industrial expansion has been accompanied by falling rates of economic growth. Meanwhile, no other sector has replaced industry as a major economic growth engine. Chinese firms have been investing heavily in robotics in the past few years, to preserve jobs as domestic wages rise and competition from even lower-cost countries intensifies. In Germany and Japan, automation helps firms preserve jobs in manufacturing in the face of intense international competition. On the contrary, Germany, Japan and South Korea have some of the highest levels of robots per manufacturing worker but also boast higher manufacturing employment shares. In this context, countries with high levels of robotization are not necessarily the ones that have lost the most industrial jobs. That led in turn to heightened competition, making fast-paced industrial expansion – and fast-paced economic growth – much more difficult to achieve. The best explanation for this worsening economic stagnation is that, since the 1970s, more and more countries adopted export-led growth strategies, built up manufacturing sectors and began to compete in global markets. Countries with high levels of robotization are not necessarily the ones that have lost the most industrial jobs In the context of economic stagnation, even small increases in productivity are enough to destroy more manufacturing jobs than are created. That is the real problem: a pervasive and increasingly global economic stagnation – affecting industry especially – that is marked by low rates of investment, low rates of economic growth and hence low rates of job creation. Labor-saving technical change appears to be happening at a faster pace than before only when viewed from across the tracks – that is, from the standpoint of our ever more slow-growing economies. It’s like the feeling you get when looking out of the window of a train car as it slows down at a station: passing cars on the other side of the tracks appear to speed up. Our collective sense that the pace of labor-saving technological change is accelerating is an illusion. On the contrary, industrial efficiency has been improving at a sluggish pace for decades, leading the Nobel-prize-winning economist Robert Solow to quip, in 1987: “We see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.” While machines now make everything from shoes and shirts to cars and computers, there has been no significant uptick in the pace of labor-saving productivity growth in industry in recent decades. Yet it is hasty to ascribe these trends to accelerating automation.
This is the case in wealthy and poor countries. It is true that, for the manufacturing industry, a jobs apocalypse has already taken place.Īnd this process is occurring across the world: according to the UN, the share of all workers employed in manufacturing is falling globally, even as industrial production per person continues to rise. Poor job quality and stagnant wages are major problems in America and across much of the world, but it is wrong to blame these problems on an accelerating pace of automation, which is hardly in evidence.Īutomation Cassandras often point to the manufacturing sector as the precedent for what will happen to the rest of the economy.
#Guardian automaton free#
He plans to hand out free money to every American citizen in the form of a monthly “dividend” of $1,000. Candidate Andrew Yang blames automation for a long-simmering crisis of underemployment. Will automation-induced job loss tear society apart? The question has even influenced the US presidential race.
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