I am inclined to agree with Thomas in the
interchange below.
I don't have any figures. However, I think this is what
happens in the introduction of a new technology such as railways and the
internal combustion engine: The technology is genuinely labor-saving, and so
everyone wants to have it or has to have it to stay abreast of business
competitors. There is thus a large amount of work created to fill the demand for
the new technology. Moreover, with a very broad technology it takes a while to
discover all the uses; i.e., to create demands that were not there before.
Ultimately the technology is mature. Virtually every potential user has acquired
it. When you are only replacing old wornout units rather than selling to new
markets, the workforce producing this technology has to be scaled back. It
is then that we discover that relative to the population level the once-new
technology has destroyed more jobs than it has created.
I think too that computer technology is like none other that
went before because of the very generality and breadth of its application. It is
displacing people at throughout the employment spectrum. A lot of middle
managers fell to its onslaught some time ago because it so increased
productivity in data gathering and organization and interpretation. Bank tellers
are vanishing, and supermarket cashiers will soon join them--how many hundreds
of thousands, or millions, of people are employed in these jobs just in North
America? What jobs will be created for these people in the brave new world of
increased employment through technology that traditional economists believe in?
Name one new job brought in by computer technology that a displaced welder or
cashier could transfer to. If you can name such a job, then estimate its numbers
relative to the vanished jobs.
And computers are not the end of the new technologies. In a
recent talk Rifkin said he believes that the 21st century will be the era of
biotechnology. In his book he does hint without giving any details that the
number of workers in food production may be slashed still further, and food
production will move to a factory setting. To fill in some possible details
(some may think I've read too much science fiction) I have no difficulty in
envisioning factories as highly automated as oil refineries (i.e., very few
employees relative to an immense output) in which genetically engineered yeasts
are grown and processed to produce passable imitations of virtually any food you
can imagine--steak, corn on the cob, potatoes.
Of course there would remain work worth doing such as nursing
and educating children. The question is who is willing to fund it? As was
pointed out in a paper on the CCPA website, under our present distorted system
of accounting, the production and sale of a golf ball is counted as an addition
to the GNP (recorded on the plus side of the ledger) while the education of a
child is counted as a rather large reduction in the GNP (recorded on the minus
side of the ledger). Until this is changed, there will be not be many worthwhile
jobs for people to find.
Victor Milne
Ed
Wrote:
Thomas
Lunde:
Your thesis of growth
from original idea to larger employment is well buttressed by
several historical examples. However, the computer has the
potential in speed and computing power to seriously eliminate things
that we humans do.
Weick:
I don't think so. Though I don't have
numbers on this, I would be willing to bet that the microchip has
created far more work than it has displaced. A whole complex
multinational industry has been created around it. Granted,
however, that most of the people who were displaced would not have
picked up the newly created jobs.
While it is true that the rate of unemployment in the
industrial world is now higher than it was before the computer, I
would suggest that this is not because of the computer. It is
probably due to factors such as slowed growth after the destruction
of world war II was repaired and the decline in some of the more
traditional sectors of the economy, such as mining, agriculture and
fishing. Other probable factors are rigidities in the wage
structure in the case of Europe, the end of the Cold War, migrations
from poor parts of the world where unemployment is usually not
measured to wealthy parts whre it is measured,
etc.
Thomas:
And so your exponential
growth idea can just as easily be applied to an invention that
negates our usefulness in the production of things and
eliminates the need for our participation in the creation of
things.
Weick:
I wasn't refering to
"exponential growth". What I was talking about was
surges of growth following a major innovation - the idea first
formulated by Schumpeter. While blowing away some industries,
it creates whole new ones. Even the new industries grow old
and are in turn displaced by something new. The growth process
is not exponential. It's jerky and uneven. Fast at
times, slow at others, and at times even negative. While the
general trend for the past two hundred years has been upward, it
could hardly be characterized as being exponentially
upward.
<snip>
