The early parts of this seem to fall apart when you switch from first-order qualitative reasoning to thinking about derivatives. Our basic observation is that the rate at which new technologies are automating away jobs now exceeds the rate at which new jobs are being created. Yes, this indicates a deficiency in the engine of reemployment, but putting all the focus on one side of the inequality seems disingenuous; every factor which changes the values on either side matters, cumulatively. Yeah, reemployment isn’t working; but we’re also pushing harder on it than we used to. We haven’t run out of useful things for people to do—but we have to look harder to find those things. We haven’t just automated away jobs—we’ve significantly increased the rate at which jobs are automated away, with a large influx of new programmers plus improvements to programming infrastructure to make them each individually more productive.
Unemployment seems like a solvable problem in the short term, but in the medium to long term I expect it to keep coming back, and to be more difficult to fix each time.
A testable consequence of your assertion is that labor market turnover should not have been higher in previous decades than now. Do you believe this would appear in the data? Would you bet on it?
I predict that labor market turnover is higher now than it was in past decades, for as many decades as we have reliable data.
Goes and checks.
BLS data on total separations as a percentage of total employment. It only goes back to Dec 2000, but that is enough to surprise me: the separation side of the turnover fell from 4.0 to 3.2. So my hypothesis, that the rate of automation has increased by enough to significantly impact the labor market, is falsified.
Edit: Actually, after a bit more research I’m not so sure—in particular, I found this which claims that there are 2.7M temporary workers (+50% over the last four years). Converting temporary-worker count into turnover rate is tricky, but this is a symptom you’d expect if turnover has increased, and I don’t think it’s included in the BLS data.
+1 for empiricism. Although on due reflection I think the number we want is not so much turnover in people, but the number of job positions that are eliminated without someone being rehired for them. There might be economists tracking this. Turnover probably correlates with this to some degree, but not perfectly.
The early parts of this seem to fall apart when you switch from first-order qualitative reasoning to thinking about derivatives. Our basic observation is that the rate at which new technologies are automating away jobs now exceeds the rate at which new jobs are being created. Yes, this indicates a deficiency in the engine of reemployment, but putting all the focus on one side of the inequality seems disingenuous; every factor which changes the values on either side matters, cumulatively. Yeah, reemployment isn’t working; but we’re also pushing harder on it than we used to. We haven’t run out of useful things for people to do—but we have to look harder to find those things. We haven’t just automated away jobs—we’ve significantly increased the rate at which jobs are automated away, with a large influx of new programmers plus improvements to programming infrastructure to make them each individually more productive.
Unemployment seems like a solvable problem in the short term, but in the medium to long term I expect it to keep coming back, and to be more difficult to fix each time.
A testable consequence of your assertion is that labor market turnover should not have been higher in previous decades than now. Do you believe this would appear in the data? Would you bet on it?
I predict that labor market turnover is higher now than it was in past decades, for as many decades as we have reliable data.
Goes and checks.
BLS data on total separations as a percentage of total employment. It only goes back to Dec 2000, but that is enough to surprise me: the separation side of the turnover fell from 4.0 to 3.2. So my hypothesis, that the rate of automation has increased by enough to significantly impact the labor market, is falsified.
Edit: Actually, after a bit more research I’m not so sure—in particular, I found this which claims that there are 2.7M temporary workers (+50% over the last four years). Converting temporary-worker count into turnover rate is tricky, but this is a symptom you’d expect if turnover has increased, and I don’t think it’s included in the BLS data.
+1 for empiricism. Although on due reflection I think the number we want is not so much turnover in people, but the number of job positions that are eliminated without someone being rehired for them. There might be economists tracking this. Turnover probably correlates with this to some degree, but not perfectly.