Sandwichman quoted: >From a comment on a US News and World Report blog from Joseph > DeLassus of MO, July 14, 2009: > > "Not much is said these days about technological unemployment."
What _is_ this kind of unemployment? No-one can have an intelligent conversation without defining terms. Of course, as with any concept, the definition is a matter of convention. So I did a short search: from answers.com: technological unemployment is: >Unemployment resulting from the application of new technology, either by >eliminating jobs or by changing the nature of work so that those who had >performed the work no longer have applicable skills to do so.< from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1153/is_5_125/ai_91808044/:>The displacement of workers by advancing technology< (Technological unemployment. - Inventing ourselves out of jobs? America's debate over technological unemployment, 1929-1981 - book review _Monthly Labor Review_, May, 2002 by Horst Brand) from the Wiktionary: It's >Unemployment caused by the replacement of workers by machines or artificial intelligence technology.< from the Wikipedia: >Much technological unemployment (e.g. due to the replacement of workers by machines) might be counted as structural unemployment. Alternatively, technological unemployment might refer to the way in which steady increases in labor productivity mean that fewer workers are needed to produce the same level of output every year.< There seems to be a consensus that there are two types of this kind of unemployment. The first refers to the technology-driven rise in the productivity of an average hour of labor-power hired (inflation-corrected salable output per hour of average labor-power) compared to the demand for the product. By definition, if the quantity of real salable output demanded rises more slowly than labor productivity (as defined here), then the number of hours of labor-power hired will fall absolutely. If the demand grows faster than that, but not fast enough, the quantity of hours of labor-power hired would fall relative to the (labor force)*(the per-worker number of hours currently hired). This can show up either as (1) a fall in the number of people hired or (2) a fall in the hours of labor-power per person hired or (3) a combination of both. The second type of technological unemployment involves the obsoleting of existing skills by changes in technology, as when traditional movie cartoonists lost jobs due to computer-generated animation. (This is the kind of unemployment first noticed on a large scale during the British "industrial revolution.") This can show up as (1) overt unemployment or (2) underemployment (the traditional cartoonists being employed at jobs below their abilities, such as working at McDonalds) or (3) a combination of both. In this case, there's no obvious way that we could cut people's hours in order reduce the number of workers fired in a capitalist system -- unless the traditional cartoonists suffer from reduced wages enough that Disney _et al_ are willing to hire the traditional ones instead of the ones doing computer-generated animation. Even then, with 3-D movies being the "hot item" in Tinseltown, the traditional cartoonists seem to be up against the wall. What's needed is some sort of training program or helping the traditional cartoonists find jobs up to their abilities in other fields. Tom also wrote that: >I remain in awe of the ability of "progressive economists" to talk about >unemployment and not mention the elephant in the room [i.e., technological >unemployment?] < I guess I'm one of those nefarious "progressive" economists. There: I talked about the pachyderm in pen-l. In fact, I wrote a lot of the Wikipedia entry on types of unemployment. Or maybe I misidentified the nature of the proboscidean creature infesting our quarters. is that enough? -- Jim Devine / "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
