The Week: Are Robots Coming For Your Jobs?

The Week:

” First, some historical perspective: For as long as America’s had something like a modern capitalist economy, automation and technology have been disrupting and remaking the jobs market. In the Aspen paper, authors Conor McKay, Ethan Pollack, and Alastair Fitzpayne note that agriculture went from a third of all jobs to 1 percent of them over the last century. Manufacturing accounted for a third of all non-farm jobs in 1910 and fell to 9 percent by 2015. Meanwhile jobs in information, business services, and health care jumped from 3 percent to 29 percent over the same period and retail went from 13 percent to 23 percent. As Mark Paul notes in one of the Roosevelt papers, Time magazine was worried about the “automation jobless” as far back as 1961. It has been ever thus. …

Then we reversed course: We massively slashed federal and state budgets for higher education and instead financed college attendance with a giant debt bubble that has savaged students’ finances for life. Unions collapsed, businesses cut on-the-job and employer-sponsored training way back, and federal grants to support worker training also shrunk. Instead of continuing to expand the safety net, we gutted traditional welfare and started adding work requirements. …”