The End of Unskilled Jobs?

While we saw a slight improvement in the historically high unemployment rate, economist Gregory Clark ponders the long-term consequences of a future in which machines replace more and more unskilled workers. What will the economy and society look like if unskilled workers are no longer needed? See the following summary of Gregory Clark's article to learn more.

Gregory Clark sees a bleak future for the unskilled:

Tax and Spend, or Face The Consequences, by Gregory Clark, Commentary, Washington Post: At some point, the Great Recession will end. ... Whenever it happens, we will see that the downturn was but a minor blip in the long story of the economy. In the next chapter, abundance beckons -- for some. Advances in technology drive economic growth, and there is no sign that they are slackening. The American economy is likely to continue unabated on the upward path that began with the Industrial Revolution.

No, the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.

The battle will be over how to get the economy's winners to pay for an increasingly costly poor. ... In a future with higher taxes, the divide between rich and poor would be the central economic challenge.

For much of the past 200 years, unskilled workers benefited greatly from capitalism. Before the Industrial Revolution, for example, skilled construction workers earned 50 to 100 percent more than unskilled laborers; today, that premium has fallen to 33 percent in the United States. ...

Why have the unskilled fared so well? ...[M]achines ... even today ... cannot replace many of people's manipulative abilities, language skills and social awareness. The hamburger you eat at McDonald's is still put together and delivered to you by human hands; even a fast-food "associate" deploys an astonishing repertoire of spatial and language skills.

But in more recent decades, when average U.S. incomes roughly doubled, there has been little gain in the real earnings of the unskilled. And, more darkly, computer advances suggest these redoubts of human skill will sooner or later fall to machines. We may have already reached the historical peak in the earning power of low-skilled workers, and may look back on the mid-20th century as the great era of the common man.

I recently carried out a complicated phone transaction with United Airlines but never once spoke to a human; my mechanical interlocutor seemed no less capable than the Indian call-center operatives it replaced. Outsourcing to India and China may be only a brief historical interlude before the great outsourcing yet to come -- to machines. And as machines expand their domain, basic wages could easily fall so low that families cannot support themselves without public assistance. ...

So, how do we operate a society in which a large share of the population is socially needy but economically redundant? There is only one answer. You tax the winners ... to provide for the losers. ...

The United States was founded, essentially, on resistance to taxes, and to this day, an aversion to the grasping hand of the state seems fundamental to the American psyche. ... The conflicts to come are foreshadowed in California, where popular anti-tax sentiment has forced substantial reductions in medical care for the state's poorest children.

How can we avoid or minimize such conflicts? The Obama administration seeks to do so in part through a more cost-effective health-care system. ... But ... this will at best buy time before an inevitable crunch.

Others see education as a way out of this dystopia. The root problem is, after all, the widening of the income gap between the skilled and the unskilled. Can expanded education give the poorest the tools to resist the march of the machines? I'm skeptical. Already, much of the supposed improvement in high school and college graduation rates has come by asking less of graduates. ...

In the end, we may be forced to learn to live in a United States where, by stealth, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" becomes the guiding principle of government -- or else confront growing, unattended poverty.

As the world develops in the long, long run, and as countries move from "developing" to "developed," I still see a chance that the growth in the demand for the services that the unskilled provide will outstrip the growth in the supply. That doesn't mean that the wealth gap won't continue to increase, and that there won't be any problems associated with the growing gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, but I'm not so sure that wages will fall such that absolute living standards will decline as predicted above. But nobody knows for sure what will happen, so what do you foresee?

This post has been republished from Mark Thoma's blog, Economist's View.