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October 20, 2019 03:04 am

Is Andrew Yang Wrong About Robots Taking Our Jobs?

U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang "is full of it," argues Slate's senior business and economics correspondent, challenging Yang's contention (in a debate Tuesday) that American jobs were being lost to automation:Following the debate, a "fact check" by the AP claimed that Yang was right and Warren wrong. "Economists mostly blame [manufacturing] job losses on automation and robots, not trade deals," it stated. But this was incorrect. No such consensus exists, and if anything, the evidence heavily suggests that trade has been the bigger culprit in recent decades. All of which points to a broader issue: Yang's schtick about techno doom may be well-intentioned, but it is largely premised on BS, and is adding to the widespread confusion about the impact of automation on the economy. Yang is not pulling his ideas out of thin air. Economists have been debating whether automation or trade is more responsible for the long-term decline of U.S. factory work for a while, and it's possible to find experts on both sides of the issue. After remaining steady for years, the total number of U.S. manufacturing jobs suddenly plummeted in the early 2000s -- from more than 17 million in 2000 to under 14 million in 2007... [But] America hasn't just lost manufacturing workers; as Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research notes, the number of factories also declined by around 22 percent between 2000 and 2014, which isn't what you'd expect if assembly workers were just being replaced by machines. In a 2017 paper, meanwhile, economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University concluded that the growth of industrial robots in the U.S. since 1990 could only explain between between 360,000 and 670,000 job losses. By comparison, the proof placing blame on trade and China is much stronger. Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board and Peter Schott of Yale have found evidence that the U.S.'s decision to grant the People's Republic permanent normal trade relations in 2000 led to declines in American jobs... New technology will change the economy and the way people work. It already is. But those shifts will be more complex than Yang admits and probably won't look like the wave of mass unemployment that he and his like-minded supporters tend to envision... It's not just unrealistic. It's lazy. When you buy the sci-fi notion that technology is simply a disembodied force making humanity obsolete and that there's little that can be done about it, you stop thinking about ideas that will actually prevent workers from being screwed over by the forces of globalization or new tech. By prophesying imaginary problems, you ignore the real ones.

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