A Jobless Future?

by on December 15, 2006 · 4 comments

Ezra Klein worries about the perils of robotics to the labor market:

Soon enough, according to Bill Gates, we’ll all have personal robots. The precise implications of a transition to an economy largely run by hyperpowered, anthropomorphic machines is, obviously, unclear. It’s pretty safe to assume you’ll see a lot of occupational displacement, and at a point, you’ll see more than can be effectively made up. Was Marx right, but we had to wait for robots? Maybe. Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your usefulness!

This gets economics completely backwards. The purpose of an economy is to produce wealth, not jobs. Jobs are the unpleasant tasks we have to perform to get the wealth. If we can get wealth without jobs, that’s an unambiguous improvement. Only decades of demagoguery about “creating jobs” makes it possible for people to get that so backwards.

The more wealth there is in the world, the easier it will be for you to get some of it. Robots would only accelerate the accumulation of wealth, thereby increasing the amount of money a worker is likely to be able to get for a given unit of his labor. True, his wages might shrink relative to the overall economy, but he’ll only get more productive as technology improves, so in absolute terms his wages will only go up.

But what if the robots are better than the people at absolutely everything? Here, we have to bring in the concept of comparative advantage. Even if robots are better in absolute terms at everything, humans will always have a comparative advantage at something. The classic example here is a lawyer and his secretary. The lawyer might be better than the secretary at absolutely everything. Yet the secretary is still useful, because the lawyer might be 100 times as good as the secretary at practicing law, but only twice as good at making photocopies. Therefore, it still makes sense to hire the secretary to make photocopies so the lawyer can devote his energies to practicing law.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • http://www.maclawstudents.com Erik Schmidt

    This reminds me of the (supposed) origins of the term “sabotage.” Fear of automation and specialization has been around for a long time. There are other things that might be disturbing about having too many robots around; humans ceding too much decisionmaking authority, for example. But having robots do mindless, repetitive tasks seems to militate in favor of pushing human advantages (creative thinking, insight, flexibility, empathy) into the foreground in the workplace. Does anyone really enjoy filling out TPS reports, or pulling fries out of a vat?

  • http://www.maclawstudents.com Erik Schmidt

    This reminds me of the (supposed) origins of the term “sabotage.” Fear of automation and specialization has been around for a long time. There are other things that might be disturbing about having too many robots around; humans ceding too much decisionmaking authority, for example. But having robots do mindless, repetitive tasks seems to militate in favor of pushing human advantages (creative thinking, insight, flexibility, empathy) into the foreground in the workplace. Does anyone really enjoy filling out TPS reports, or pulling fries out of a vat?

  • http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com MikeT

    Call me old fashioned, but I do not consider this an unambiguous good. I think if anything this will further increase the rate of collectivism in America. People need to work to see their wealth. It’s just how we are. The laziness that this would bring about would end up largely creating a society that would rather consume wealth than create it.

  • http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com MikeT

    Call me old fashioned, but I do not consider this an unambiguous good. I think if anything this will further increase the rate of collectivism in America. People need to work to see their wealth. It’s just how we are. The laziness that this would bring about would end up largely creating a society that would rather consume wealth than create it.

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