spence136_David JonesPA Images via Getty Images_car factory robots

Economics

工作数字化转型中的赢家和输家

Feb 25, 2021 Michael Spence

米兰—或许，没有哪个方面的数字革命，比自动化对职业、劳动、就业和收入的影响更受人们关注。这一现象至少有一个很好的理由，但可能不是大多数人会采用的。

使用机器来提高生产力并不是什么新鲜事。就任何充当机器用途的工具而言，人类在这个星球上短暂的历史中，大部分时间都在使用它们提供生产力。但是，自从第一次工业革命以来，蒸汽动力和机械化带来了巨大生产力持续地增长，使这个过程已经进入了超速发展阶段。

但并非所有人都对这种转变表示欢迎。许多人担心，对人类劳动力需求的减少将导致永久性的高失业率。但这不会发生。相反，生产力和收入的提高刺激了需求，从而促进了经济活动的开展。随着时间的推移，劳动力市场在技能方面进行了调整，最终随着收入与休闲之间平衡的转变，工作时间也有所减少。

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Michael Spence

Writing for PS since 2008
167 Commentaries

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics Emeritus and a former dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Senior Adviser to General Atlantic, and Chairman of the firm’s Global Growth Institute. He is Chair of the Advisory Board of the Asia Global Institute and serves on the Academic Committee at Luohan Academy. He is a former chair of the Commission on Growth and Development and the author of The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (Macmillan Publishers, 2012).

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 11 Comments on this article

Prashant Kotak Feb 25, 2021

I believe there are very specific reasons why this time, the step change that is already underway will generate very different trajectories and outcomes to the few past occasions on which a similar scale of technological change has happened. You can count the number of previous industrial revolutions on the fingers of one hand - not a large enough sample to use as a template to extrapolate projections of what the future will hold. As such, it is futile to look to the past for guidance.

To turn to the specifics that are different this time, the two biggies are scale and speed (in addition, several other factors lurking in the background). In the past change was limited on either scale or speed, such that human societies as a whole could eventually adjust even when there were localised hotspots of pain.

This time is different. On scale, everything and everyone is affected simultaneously: automation will eat large numbers of entire professions, both blue and white collar, within a decade. On speed, tech advance is already overthrowing older practices within five to ten year windows (cf the smartphone), and this is accelerating. At an individual level we face multiple revolutions within a single working lifetime. The speed of change has under the hood already outstripped the ability of huge numbers of people to keep up - they just don't know it yet. In the longer term, those who can manage the pace of change can thrive - STEM backgrounds, domain-specific technical knowledge (law, finance, etc), complex management expertise, the top end of the arts and entertainments (musicians, sportspeople, etc). But that is only about a quarter of the people in any advanced economy - much less in developing economies. The question arises: what precisely will the rest do, if they cannot move upstream, up the value chains, by retraining quickly and often into viable cognitive professions?
- Robert Wolff Feb 26, 2021
  
  Re: "The question arises: what precisely will the rest do, if they cannot move upstream, up the value chains, by retraining quickly and often into viable cognitive professions?"
  
  The answer is simple but politically explosive. The author mentions that the solution will be largely political but fails to adequately explain the political and ideological changes it will entail.
  
  More precisely, the solution will have to do with Ownership, i.e. who has the right to benefit from a machine based production economy. Currently the owners of production operations own the right to the increased income by owning the machines as those skills of laborers are replaced by machines; but that assumption and reality will not hold politically, socially or economically far beyond today.
  
  There will only be one solution, and that is the redistribution of wealth demanded for socio-political-economic stability, to keep society copasetic.
  
  It's called Socialism -- either public ownership via socialist revolution or massive taxes on the Owners for redistribution to all citizens -- which preserves the right of all people to share in the benefits of production.
  
  This socialist revolution is gaining speed and will accelerate into the near and distant future, because there are no other viable solutions.
  - Prashant Kotak Feb 28, 2021
    
    RW thankyou for your response.
    
    You are coming at this from a political stance, and that is fair enough. I try to make sense of the consequences of technological change in an apolitical way - even if what I see is politically uncomfortable. I too have a political viewpoint - not necessarily aligned with yours 🙂 - but over the years I notice something odd. I still ostensibly believe in that view, but the underpinnings somehow seem to have crumbled.
    
    And I notice the same internal roil at national levels - external expressions of the same old left-right ding-dongs, without the participants seemingly noticing the landscape in which the fight is taking place is dramatically altered. For example, in the UK, we appear to have undergone an almost complete flip of the constituiancies of political support: well paid professionals are now mostly voting for left leaning parties, whereas working class people who wouldn't have touched the conservatives with a bargepole in the past, are now voting for them in huge numbers. A similar, yet different, dynamic in the US with the rise of Trump on one side and on the other side, the rise of a loud and muscular left leaning academia and of the Quad. A European style left now seems pervasive across the US, which would have been unthinkable just three decades ago.
    
    I can only conclude that the global and national level political turmoil we have started to see (and my own political discomfort) are reflections of the use of technology creating a million individual revolutions in the head, across people all over the world.
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  - P. Kamath Feb 27, 2021
    
    RW: you say,”..... It's called Socialism -..........the benefits of production.” It will be a revolution unless it happens in a gradual evolutionary pace as it happened in the last decades. Right to unionize, fixed number of work hours, no children in factories, paid extra hours, medical benefits. Etc were spin-offs of socialism. Today’s they acceptable!
    If the pace is accelerated there will be chaos and probably violence will ensue!
    - Robert Wolff Feb 27, 2021
      
      Totally Agree!
      
      It will be a "Long [Slow] March".
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