Economics

技术进步和收入不均

Jul 6, 2011 Kenneth Rogoff

坎布里奇——

直到如今，无休止的技术竞赛和全球化的发展使得高技能劳动者大受青睐，也导致全球范围内收入和财富的差距之大前所未有。这场技术之争会不会最终演变为新型的阶级斗争：民粹主义的政府掌权，进行收入再分配，并且对于经济生活施以更多的国家控制？

毫无疑问，收入不均是全球范围内社会稳定的最大威胁，不管是在美国，欧洲外围国家还是中国都是如此。然而人们很容易忘记，如果让其发挥，市场力量可能最终起到稳定的作用。简单地说，高技能劳动者的收入越高，雇主们就越想找出能减少使用他们才能的方法（以降低人工成本）。

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Kenneth Rogoff

Writing for PS since 2002
243 Commentaries

Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003. He is co-author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, 2011) and author of The Curse of Cash (Princeton University Press, 2016).

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Stamatis Kavvadias Jul 7, 2014

Amazing. Does this person ever think straight? Does he ...engineer all his opinions?

"[...]market forces, if allowed to play out, might eventually exert a stabilizing role."

??? What is this? Is this guy blind to modern economics? Is he aware of Dr. Stiglitz PhD? "If allowed to play out"??? Whenever there is asymmetry of information --that is always-- markets are imperfect (I suppose, we do not know how imperfect: for all we know, they could lead to the worst possible outcome for the largest proportion of the population!).

"[...] the greater the premium for highly skilled workers, the greater the incentive to find ways to economize on employing their talents."

This sounds like ...letting employers "innovate" on how to prohibit technological innovation, since this is the basic engine of highly skilled employment creation. Alternatively, it could mean, allowing employers to "innovate" on ways in which payment of highly skilled workers will stagnate. That is exactly what happened with the US middle class.

Is there any other way? Does prof. Rogoff agree to allow market forces "to economize on employing skilled workers' talents," but prohibit the previous two choices? Unless, we have to trust the markets to bring about yet another crisis?

Maybe, the point of prof. Rogoff is exactly to let employers try to stagnate highly skilled worker income, and see if such workers will create firms to sell their skills in organized ways. This way, markets will be created (among these new firms) -- the dream of every economist, which will lead to the "best" price for highly skilled labor.

If only we could find ways to automate the work of highly skilled financiers.... Their work is such a long way of producing any benefit for society (in fact the opposite is exaggerated because of the financial crisis), and they are extracting huge rents from the economy with their bonuses. Ah! And neither before nor after the crisis, did I see any result from the "incentive to find ways to economize on employing their talents"!!!

Yes, there can be technological innovation that further pushes the boundary of skill required to have a job, rendering large sectors of knowledge subject to automated procedures and further levels of peoples' skills useless. Automated software production, can and will leave large numbers of plain web and application programmers without a use for their skills and, of course, without a job. This will save some of the need to employ skilled workers. But, such "savings" will always come from the bottom of the scale of skills.

The only case when automation will be able to "save" humanity from most of skilled labor, will be when technological innovation stops and new knowledge becomes mostly the work of computers scanning big data. At that point, knowledge increase will pause, and automation will eventually catch up with all knowledge before that time. There are no signs of a slowdown in knowledge increase. Still, this could come in the form of diminishing returns from new knowledge. There are no broad signs of that either.
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Mukesh Adenwala Jun 23, 2014

I found this argument to be evolutionary in nature. Indeed the life will assert itself and will become increasingly efficient over time. Automatism has higher appeal than systems requiring human interventions, which are bound to be imperfect. Economics is indeed one example where markets are preferred as organizing agents than governments. However, when we talk of human societies we forget that extinction, which is one of the necessary ingredients and outcomes of automated systems is not an option, and ways have to be find to a ensure smoother ride to a future about which we know almost nothing with any degree of certainty.
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Shane Beck Feb 5, 2013

Too many variables in this skilled worker versus machine contest- price of education for skilled worker, cost and lifespan of technology including planned obsolsence, the fact that current globalization is planned this way to favor the elites whose skills cannot be transferred overseas- the politicians, the lawyers the bureaucrats, the security complex etc. Spain and Greece provide a test laboratory in which the variable of high unemployment will be tested against the stability of the state
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