Tag: academic

Views on Automation’s U.S. Workforce Impact Highlight Demographic Divide

Views on Automation’s U.S. Workforce Impact Highlight Demographic Divide

Younger Americans, those who are less educated and those with smaller incomes are more concerned than older, more affluent and more educated adults about how automation will affect their jobs, according to a new poll.

The Morning Consult survey , conducted May 18-21 among a national sample of 2,204 U.S. adults, found that 59 percent of respondents believe automation and associated technologies — artificial intelligence, driverless cars and robots — will decrease their U.S. job opportunities, while 20 percent said automation will increase the number of available jobs. Wealthier Americans were less likely to be pessimistic about job retention as […]

10 jobs that won’t exist 20 years from now

10 jobs that won't exist 20 years from now

Mail carriers might become a thing of the past. Paul De Los Reyes/Flickr The truth is, no industry is 100% safeguarded against the influence of technology.

Some workers, such as dispatchers, are more at risk of seeing their jobs become computerized than others.

Occupations that tend to be more routine and repetitive will likely cease to exist in 20 years. Out with the old, in with the robots! These days, new technological advances happen all the time — and while some industries have flourished in the changing landscape, others have fallen prey to automation .Here’s the […]

What does the ‘future of work’ mean for schools? Big claims leave educators with more questions than answers

What does the ‘future of work’ mean for schools? Big claims leave educators with more questions than answers

“It’s time to update our schools so they work better for today’s students,” Stacey Childress, the head of New Schools Venture Fund, said earlier this month at the organization’s annual summit — a who’s who of charter school leaders, their funders, their advocates, and others promoting school choice or education technology.

“With the twin forces of automation and globalization just absolutely changing the very nature of opportunity and work, this is more important than ever.”

It’s a message that’s hard to miss.U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently told the Wall Street Journal that schools need to change because by the […]

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber Review

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber Review

Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, was a mover and shaker in the Occupy Wall Street movement and is well known for his approachable critiques of neoliberal free market ideology. His new book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon & Schuster; $27), sprang from a shorter essay he published in 2013 in a feminist-activist magazine called Strike , which quickly struck a nerve. (One that kept thrumming: on a Monday morning in 2015, an anonymous group plastered the London Underground with quotations from the writings.)

“Huge swathes of people spend their days performing jobs they secretly believe […]

China really is to blame for millions of lost U.S. manufacturing jobs, new study finds

China really is to blame for millions of lost U.S. manufacturing jobs, new study finds

Robots are not to blame for the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Millions of Americans who lost manufacturing jobs during the 2000s have long ”known” China was to blame, not robots. Evidently many academics who’ve studied the issue are finally drawing the same conclusion.

For years economists have viewed the increased role of automation in the computer age as the culprit for some 6 million lost jobs from 1999 to 2010 — one-third of all U.S. manufacturing employment. Firms adopted new technologies to boost production, the thinking goes, and put workers out of the job in the process. […]

The Conventional Wisdom on Trade is Wrong Again

The Conventional Wisdom on Trade is Wrong Again

For years, the purveyors of respectable opinion assured us that there was no need to worry about the economic dislocations caused by free trade, because such dislocations would be comparatively minor and temporary. In fact, as Gwynn Guilford notes in an important new article at Quartz , even academic economists are beginning to conclude that imports from China cost up to 2.4 million American manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011 and that "offsetting employment gains in other industries never materialized."

Now that they are faced with clear evidence of substantial and long-lasting job losses in the manufacturing sector, the same […]

Job losses from automation or trade pacts? Will we learn from this?

A simple request: please don’t turn this into something it is not by making this about supporting our fake pResident.

The Epic Mistake about Manufacturing that’s Cost Americans Millions of Jobs

America’s manufacturing sector is in far worse shape than the media, politicians, and even most academics realize. Manufacturers’ embrace of automation was supposedly a good thing. Sure, some factory workers lost their jobs. But increased productivity boosted living standards, and as manufacturing work vanished, new jobs in construction and other services took its place. This was more of a shift than a loss, explained Bradford DeLong, economics […]

The epic mistake about manufacturing that’s cost Americans millions of jobs

The epic mistake about manufacturing that’s cost Americans millions of jobs

Looking back, there were two kinds of people who lived in America in 2016: people who believed Donald Trump, and people who believed data.

Trump claimed on the campaign trail that globalization had destroyed US manufacturing —and in the process, the American economy—by letting China and other countries steal American factory jobs. From the turnout at Trump’s rallies and the “Make America Great Again” stickers slapped on bumpers across America, it was clear the message was resonating.

The data camp didn’t get it. Yes, the US had hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs, losing close to 5 million of them since 2000. Trade may […]

The Guardian view on a job guarantee: a policy whose time has come

The Guardian view on a job guarantee: a policy whose time has come

Victor Hugo once remarked: “You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.” Today, in the United States, a job guarantee seems just such an idea. Progressives of all shades – from Cory Booker to Bernie Sanders – have embraced policies that to varying degrees say the state should seek to do away with involuntary unemployment. This is a welcome return to a politics of work, which has been missing for too long from advanced economies. It is also heartening that polls suggest the job guarantee is popular , with half of voters […]

Why you should hate your job

Why you should hate your job

How the reality of employment is one of perpetual disappointment and the case against the work ethic Do you like your job? Maybe you do, but I think you should reevaluate. At the very least, I think you should be uncomfortable with the fact that you live in a system that compels you to have a job, particularly if that job is neither necessary for your own well-being nor the well-being of others. Thanks to advances in robotics and AI, we may be close to building a society in which work, as we currently know it, is no longer […]