Technological unemployment

This work investigates the relationship between unemployment and technological progress. We analyze briefly the historical context in which the problem of unemployment begins: the emergence of a new economic system, the capitalism. In our research we consider the contributions of two different economists: John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. They offer two different perspectives to this subject. We also consider the contribution David Ricardo, the first author that realized the conflictive relationship between technical progress and the interest of the workers. We also include an analysis of the problem by using different data collected from Global Wage Report, that is annually offered by the International Labor Organization (ILO). Finally, we also analyze the phenomenon called planned obsolescence. The idea of producing goods with low quality in order to guarantee a future demand (replacing the obsolete goods) has been considered a good option to avoid unemployment. This work ends with some final comments and open questions.

Technological change and its labor impact in four industries : contract construction, railroad transportation, air transportation, petroleum pipeline transportation.

"December 1988".

The Impact of technological change in the meatpacking industry /

March 1966.

Survey of economic theory on technological change & employment.

Mode of access: Internet.

Technological change and employment in Western Europe /

"July 1985."

Getting rid of unemployment.

Mode of access: Internet.

The Twitter float and free labour : the political economy of digital media

Nick Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx was published nearly 15 years ago, but there are continuing echoes of its dire promises today. The trends that Dyer-Witheford outlined—the growth of tech-giants in the communications field at the expense of democratic media practices and the radical shedding of jobs in the traditional mass media context—are confirmed by recent events. In November 2013, Twitter launched itself on the public share register, despite having no visible means of financial support, or even much of a business plan. The Twitter IPO tells us a lot about the economy of cyber-capitalism. Aligned to the trend of ‘technological unemployment’ is the rise of what some commentators call ‘digital serfdom’. This is not just growing unemployment, but also drastic under-employment of talented media professionals and an alarming rise in the number of media outlets that want to pay contributors in ‘exposure’, rather than in corporeal, fungible dollars and cents. This articlediscusses these trends and events in the context of the political economy of digital communication.

Un'analisi dell'impatto dell'informatica sul mercato del lavoro

In questa analisi si cercherà di comprendere cosa caratterizza questa l'ondata di progresso tecnologico che sta cambiando il mercato del lavoro. Il principale aspetto negativo di questo progresso si chiama "Technological Unemployment". Benché gli esperti si trovino in disaccordo su quali siano le cause della persistente alta disoccupazione, Brynjolfsson e McAfee puntano il dito contro l'automazione che ha soppiantato i lavori ripetitivi delle aziende. Tuttavia, è anche vero che il progresso ha sempre portato aumenti di produttività, e soprattutto nuovi tipi di occupazioni che hanno compensato la perdita di posti di lavoro, nel medio-lungo termine. Keynes evidenzia che la disoccupazione dovuta alla scoperta di strumenti economizzatori di manodopera procede con ritmo più rapido di quello con cui riusciamo a trovare nuovi impieghi per la manodopera stessa. Da ciò si crea ansia per il futuro, più o meno motivata. Gli stessi esperti sono spaccati a metà tra chi ha fiducia nei possibili risvolti positivi del progresso e chi invece teme possa comportare scenari catastrofici. Le macchine ci rubano lavoro o ci liberano da esso? Con questa ricerca ci si pone l'obiettivo di analizzare le effettive prospettive dei prossimi decenni. Nel capitolo 2 che è il corpo della tesi prenderemo soprattutto in conto il lavoro accademico di Frey ed Osborne dell'Oxford Martin School, intitolato "The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation?" (2013). Essi sono stati tra i primi a studiare e quantificare cosa comporteranno le nuove tecnologie in termini di impiego. Il loro obiettivo era individuare le occupazioni a rischio, da qui a vent'anni, nel mercato del lavoro degli Stati Uniti e la relazione che intercorre tra la loro probabilità di essere computerizzati e i loro salari e livello d'istruzione medi, il tutto valutato attraverso l'ausilio di una nuova metodologia che si vedrà nel dettaglio. A conclusioni simili alle loro, per certi aspetti, è successivamente giunto anche Autor; tra l'altro viene spesso citato per altre sue opere dagli stessi Frey e Osborne, che usano le sue categorizzazioni per impostare la struttura del loro calcolo dell'automatizzabilità dei lavori utilizzando i recenti miglioramenti nelle scienze ingegneristiche quali ML (Machine Learning ad esempio Data mining, Machine vision, Computational statistics o più in generale AI) e MR (Mobile robotics) come strumenti di valutazione. Oltre alle sue ricerche, si presenteranno brevemente i risultati di un recente sondaggio tenuto dal Pew Research Center in cui importanti figure dell'informatica e dell'economia esprimono il loro giudizio sul futuro panorama del mondo del lavoro, considerando l'imminente ondata di innovazioni tecnologiche. La tesi si conclude con un'elaborazione personale. In questo modo si prenderà coscienza dei problemi concreti che il progresso tecnologico potrebbe procurare, ma anche dei suoi aspetti positivi.

Productivity and job security : attrition--benefits and problems.

Bibliography: p. 111-116.

Changing workforce characteristics of an automated insurance company : a supplementary report to A large life insurance company automates, workforce implications of computer conversion /

June 1964.

Unemployment and technological change,

Mode of access: Internet.

Essays on Labor Market Frictions, Technological Change and Macroeconomic Fluctuations

The dissertation consists of an introductory chapter and three essays that apply search-matching theory to study the interaction of labor market frictions, technological change and macroeconomic fluctuations. The first essay studies the impact of capital-embodied growth on equilibrium unemployment by extending a vintage capital/search model to incorporate vintage human capital. In addition to the capital obsolescence (or creative destruction) effect that tends to raise unemployment, vintage human capital introduces a skill obsolescence effect of faster growth that has the opposite sign. Faster skill obsolescence reduces the value of unemployment, hence wages and leads to more job creation and less job destruction, unambiguously reducing unemployment. The second essay studies the effect of skill biased technological change on skill mismatch and the allocation of workers and firms in the labor market. By allowing workers to invest in education, we extend a matching model with two-sided heterogeneity to incorporate an endogenous distribution of high and low skill workers. We consider various possibilities for the cost of acquiring skills and show that while unemployment increases in most scenarios, the effect on the distribution of vacancy and worker types varies according to the structure of skill costs. When the model is extended to incorporate endogenous labor market participation, we show that the unemployment rate becomes less informative of the state of the labor market as the participation margin absorbs employment effects. The third essay studies the effects of labor taxes on equilibrium labor market outcomes and macroeconomic dynamics in a New Keynesian model with matching frictions. Three policy instruments are considered: a marginal tax and a tax subsidy to produce tax progression schemes, and a replacement ratio to account for variability in outside options. In equilibrium, the marginal tax rate and replacement ratio dampen economic activity whereas tax subsidies boost the economy. The marginal tax rate and replacement ratio amplify shock responses whereas employment subsidies weaken them. The tax instruments affect the degree to which the wage absorbs shocks. We show that increasing tax progression when taxation is initially progressive is harmful for steady state employment and output, and amplifies the sensitivity of macroeconomic variables to shocks. When taxation is initially proportional, increasing progression is beneficial for output and employment and dampens shock responses.