Causation in Period 9 Quiz

Technical changes on the job tend to change basic skill requirements incrementally. Sometimes these changes accumulate to the point of creating new occupations. In manufacturing, craft occupations such as machinist and tool and die maker are evolving quickly into technician and technologist jobs. The same has happened with the skilled job of assembler, repair person, and materials handler. In services, the secretary is evolving into the information manager and the bank teller is evolving into the financial services portfolio consultant for individual customers.

The Economic Policy Institute [in 2001] recently reviewed dozens of studies of what constitutes a “living wage” and came up with an average figure of $30,000 a year for a family of one adult and two children, which amounts to a wage of $14 an hour. This is not the very minimum such a family could live on; the budget includes health insurance, a telephone, and child care at a licensed center, for example, which are well beyond the reach of millions. But it does not include restaurant meals, . . . Internet access, wine and liquor, . . . or even very much meat. The shocking thing is that the majority of American workers, about 60 percent, earn less than $14 an hour. . . .

. . . Most civilized nations compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized child care, subsidized housing, and effective public transportation. But the United States, for all its wealth, leaves its citizens to fend for themselves. . . .

It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition—austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they? . . . What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift. The “home” that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be “worked through,” with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next.

Over the last decade, patent applications [for new inventions] have nearly tripled. And because the Patent Office doesn’t have the resources to deal with all of them, right now there are about 700,000 applications that haven’t even been opened yet. . . .

. . . Somewhere in that stack of applications could be the next technological breakthrough, the next miracle drug, the next idea that will launch the next Fortune 500 company. . . .

We have to do everything we can to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit, wherever we find it. We should be helping American companies compete and sell their products all over the world. We should be making it easier and faster to turn new ideas into new jobs and new businesses. And we should knock down any barriers that stand in the way. Because if we’re going to create jobs now and in the future, we're going to have to out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth.

We’ve got a lot of competition out there. And if we make it too hard for people with good ideas to attract investment and get them to market, then countries like China are going to beat us at it and beat us to it.

If we assume the most extreme estimates of automation . . . and make the exceedingly optimistic assumption that all of these individuals are redeployed into the workforce at average productivity, it would imply as much as a 3.5 percent per annum boost to GDP growth over 20 years. More moderate estimates . . . suggest GDP gains from automation of approximately 1 percent to 1.5 percent. . . .

. . . Other technologies known to be in development—including advances in nanotechnology and bioengineering—could precipitate an entirely new wave of even greater productivity gains and potentially deeper disruption. . . . They may also create new opportunities for displaced labor, particularly as the pace of adoption of new technologies today is much faster than it has been historically.

Productivity growth in most of the world’s rich countries has been dismal since around 2004. . . . In a time of Facebook, smartphones, self-driving cars, and computers that can beat a person at just about any board game, how can the key economic measure of technological progress be so pathetic? . . .

. . . It’s likely that many new technologies are used to simply replace workers and not to create new tasks and occupations. What’s more, the technologies that could have the most impact are not widely used. Driverless vehicles, for instance, are still not on most roads. Robots are rather dumb and remain rare outside manufacturing. And AI [artificial intelligence] is mysterious for most companies.