Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
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Last annotated on June 1, 2016
me that there’s nothing better than a job well done. ChapterRead more at location 29
Note: Il tema del libro IT e lavoro. Si parte da un'osservazione preoccupante: xchè i livelli occupazionali nn vengono ripristinati anche se la recessione è rientrata? Eppure gli altri indicatori esprimono un'economia in salute. Le ditte comprano macchinari ma nn assumono... Prima spiegazione: ciclicità. La crescita è illusoria e le ditte nn assumono, nn si fidano. Tutto nella norma: l'economia è malata e la disoccupazione impazza (Krugman). La domanda esangue contribuisce alla stanca agonia. Un normale ciclo evonomico affrontato con i mezzi sbagliati... Seconda spiega: stagnazone. Un lento declino si trascina. Non sappiamo più innovare, abbiamo puntato tutto sul welfare. I "frutti bassi" della rivoluzione sono stati già colti. I delta pil riscontrati sono illusori, afferiscono per lo più a settori pubblici artificiosamente espansi. La Recessione nn è un fattore decisivo (Tyler Cowen)... Terza spiega: l'emergere di Cina e India ha equalizzato i redditi della classe media. La grande convergenza crea stagnazione nei paesi più ricchi. L'innovzione pervasiva nn premia chi mantiene i livelli precedenti di innovazione (Michel Spence)... Quarta ipotesi: "fine del lavoro". Non c'è poca innovazione, ce n'è troppa: le macchine sostituiscono l'uomo minacciando il lavoratore della classe media... Tesi del libro: si sposa l'ultima ipotesi: nè Grande Recesdione né Grande Stagnazione ma Grande Ristrutturazione: il sistema produttivo vuole + macchine e - lavoratori... il che può essere fonte di mille problemi... Edit
Chapter 1. Technology’s Influence on Employment and the EconomyRead more at location 29
This is a book about how information technologies are affecting jobs, skills, wages, and the economy.Read more at location 32
Of all the grim statistics and stories accompanying the Great Recession and subsequent recovery, those related to employment were the worst.Read more at location 44
An even bigger problem, however, was that the unemployed couldn't find work even after economic growth resumed.Read more at location 48
How can we expect to prosper two decades from now when millions of young graduates are, in effect, being denied the chance to get started on their careers?”Read more at location 56
The grim unemployment statistics puzzled many because other measures of business health rebounded prettyRead more at location 68
Analysts offer three alternative explanations: cyclicality, stagnation, and the “end of work.”Read more at location 79
The cyclical explanation holds that there’s nothing new or mysterious going on;Read more at location 80
economy is not growing quickly enough to put people back to work.Read more at location 81
Paul Krugman is one of the prime advocates of this explanation. As he writes, “All the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand—full stop.” Former Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag agrees,Read more at location 82
A second explanation for current hard times sees stagnation, not cyclicality, in action. Stagnation in this context means a long-term decline in America’s ability to innovate and increase productivity. Economist Tyler CowenRead more at location 88
The growth of median income slowed down significantly at least 30 years ago,Read more at location 95
Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps agreed with this stagnation: “[America’s] dynamism—its ability and proclivity to innovate—has brought economic inclusion by creating numerous jobs. It has also brought real prosperity—engaging, challenging jobs and careers of self-realization and self-discovery … [but] dynamism has been in decline over the past decade.”Read more at location 99
The stagnation argument doesn’t ignore the Great Recession, but also doesn’t believe that it’s the principle causeRead more at location 103
slowdown in the kinds of powerful new ideas that drive economic progress.Read more at location 104
Cowen maintained that it’s been going on since the 1970s, when U.S. productivity growth slowed and the median income of American families stopped rising as quickly as it had in the past. Cowen, Phelps, and other “stagnationists” hold that only higher rates of innovation and technical progress will lift the economyRead more at location 105
A variant on this explanation is not that America has stagnated, but that other nations such as India and China have begun to catch up. In a global economy, America businesses and workers can’t earn a premium if they don’t have greater productivityRead more at location 108
The result has been a great equalization in factor prices like wages,Read more at location 111
The third explanation for America’s current job creation problems flips the stagnation argument on its head, seeing not too little recent technological progress, but instead too much. We’ll call this the “end of work” argument, after Jeremy Rifkin’s 1995 book of the same title.Read more at location 114
The end-of-work argument has been made by, among many others, economist John Maynard Keynes, management theorist Peter Drucker, and Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief, who stated in 1983 that “the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”Read more at location 121
But cyclical weak demand is not the whole story. The stagnationists are right that longer and deeper trends are also at work.Read more at location 147
American economic health stopped growing robustly some time ago, but we disagree with them about why this has happened. They think it’s because the pace of technological innovation has slowed down. We think it’s because the pace has sped upRead more at location 149
Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine.Read more at location 151
We don’t believe in the coming obsolescence of all human workers. In fact, some human skills are more valuable than ever,Read more at location 156
When people talk about jobs in America today, they talk about cyclicality, outsourcing and off-shoring, taxes and regulation,Read more at location 162
It may seem paradoxical that faster progress can hurt wages and jobsRead more at location 165
Great Restructuring.
