Tag: inequality

Automation is remaking Mississippi jobs: Are workers ready?

Automation is remaking Mississippi jobs: Are workers ready?

A high school student repairs a car in an automotive shop class. Jobs in automotive body repair are relatively safe from automation, and they don’t require a college degree. Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Mississippi Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes with trends and top stories about education in Mississippi. Subscribe today!

Rising use of automated technologies has eliminated thousands of jobs in Mississippi, and many more are at risk, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution. The report looked at the percentage of tasks — that is, what people actually […]

The Evolution of Work in Urban Labor Markets

The Evolution of Work in Urban Labor Markets

The Google logo adorns the outside of their New York City office, June 3, 2019. Over the past four decades, wage inequality in the U.S. has grown remarkably, with the earnings of the most educated increasing and the earnings of the least educated falling in real terms. But that’s not the whole story. The polarization of employment by educational attainment has been accompanied by—and is likely the result of—a less widely recognized polarization of jobs across regions.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor gave an interesting keynote address on this topic at the annual conference of MIT’s Initiative on […]

The Indignity of Universal Basic Income

The Indignity of Universal Basic Income

There is an increasing push to implement some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI), especially among tech elites who believe that advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will bring about mass technologically-driven unemployment. Andrew Yang, the founder of Venture for America, is running for president on the belief that a UBI will resolve many of the woes of the losers of economic transition in recent decades. There is something to be said for the idea of UBI as a more efficient replacement for today’s bureaucratic welfare systems. And if it were somehow feasible, it would certainly attest to the […]

The Indignity of Universal Basic Income

The Indignity of Universal Basic Income

There is an increasing push to implement some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI), especially among tech elites who believe that advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will bring about mass technologically-driven unemployment. Andrew Yang, the founder of Venture for America, is running for president on the belief that a UBI will resolve many of the woes of the losers of economic transition in recent decades. There is something to be said for the idea of UBI as a more efficient replacement for today’s bureaucratic welfare systems. And if it were somehow feasible, it would certainly attest to the […]

Explaining the labor share: automation vs labor market institutions

Guimarães, Luis and Gil, Pedro (2019): Explaining the labor share: automation vs labor market institutions.

This is the latest version of this item. Abstract

In this paper, we build a theoretical model to study the effects of automation and labor market institutions on the labor share. In our model, firms choose between two technologies: an automated technology and a manual technology. In this context, the labor share reflects both the average wage level (versus output) and the distribution of firms between the two technologies. Our model offers three main insights. First, automation-augmenting shocks reduce the labor share but […]

Automation to push 40-160 m women for occupational transition by 2030: Study

Automation to push 40-160 m women for occupational transition by 2030: Study

The estimate presented in the Women Deliver Conference 2019 today at Vancouver, Canada; is based on the study of six mature economies (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and four emerging economies (China, India, Mexico, and South Africa), which together account for around half of the world’s population and about 60 percent of global GDP.

Image Credit: @WomenDeliver The age of automation, and on the near horizon, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offer new job opportunities and avenues for economic advancement, but women face new challenges overlaid on long-established ones. Between 40 million and […]

Automation to disproportionately affect women in healthcare

Automation to disproportionately affect women in healthcare

An emergency department in 2030 is poised to look much different as automation takes hold, and those changes are likely to disproportionately affect women in healthcare, according to a new report.

Automation will displace as many as 1 in 4 female workers across all sectors, or 160 million women, but that will be offset by an increase in demand and productivity, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute. That does not account for "frontier" jobs that one could not even imagine today, said Kweilin Ellingrud, a senior partner at McKinsey and co-author of the report.

"It is scary […]

Populism is thriving as losers to the robot revolution demand radical change: Carl Benedikt Frey

Populism is thriving as losers to the robot revolution demand radical change: Carl Benedikt Frey

The mainstream political parties have largely neglected these losers, mostly lowskilled working class. The populists are tapping into their anger, says Frey.

The urban-rural divide that we see today, also in India, is likely to be exacerbated because new jobs mostly emerge in cities with skilled populations, says Frey. The rise of right-wing leaders has been a recurring theme of recent times. Is it linked to the emerging economic situation, especially the growing inequality and the hollowing out of middle-class jobs amid a wave of tech-led disruptions? Carl Benedikt Frey, co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and […]

Automation vs jobs – 5 questions everyone should look at and ask!

Automation vs jobs – 5 questions everyone should look at and ask!

Everywhere is the fear of large-scale automation leading to mass unemployment and insecurity. We are at the cusp of major technological change, drastically changing the nature of jobs, leaving masses of people unemployed and worsening economic inequality.

According to a 2013 study by Oxford University researchers, 47 percent of U.S. employees are at risk of automation, while a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute report claims that one-third of U.S. workers will be displaced by imminent automation from their current jobs. Other reports offer tamer prospects, with a recent OCDE report (2018) finding that only 9% of U.S. jobs are “highly automatable.” […]

Automation isn’t about giving in to the robots

Automation isn’t about giving in to the robots

Future workplaces still need those high skill jobs credentials to make it happen Image Credit: Hugo A. Sanchez/©Gulf News We’ve all heard the warnings of an impending dystopian future.

According to Deloitte, an estimated 35 per cent of UK jobs are at high risk of automation in the next 10 to 20 years, while in the past 15 years technology already contributed to the loss of over 800,000 jobs. Market research firm Forrester predicts 6 per cent of US jobs will be lost to robots and automation by 2021, with the main losses being felt in transportation, logistics, customer services, […]