Tag: inequality

Peter Harris proposes later retirement age and a right to go back to school

Peter Harris proposes later retirement age and a right to go back to school

Policy wonks have gathered in frosty Melbourne to take the nation’s economic temperature. Things could be worse, but there are plenty of risks on the horizon. Do we need to convince Australians to work for longer, and make it easier to go back to study?

It’s often said we’re living through an age of uncertainty, but what’s the biggest point of uncertainty for the Australian economy?

Our polarised and often ineffectual politics? A heavily indebted China? Ageing? The budget? Trump? Brexit?Well that’s uncertain too, Productivity Commission chair Peter Harris told the first day of the Melbourne Institute’s Economic and Social Outlook […]

If Silicon Valley is the knowledge work capital of the world, why does it have so many lousy jobs?

If Silicon Valley is the knowledge work capital of the world, why does it have so many lousy jobs?

Over the years, Silicon Valley’s tech elite – Andy Grove of Intel, Eric Schmidt of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook – have paid close attention to the writings of Peter Drucker.

And why not? Besides being celebrated by BusinessWeek as “ the man who invented management ,” Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” more than half a century ago, anticipating the prosperity and ascendance of those who would make a living with the stuff between their ears, and not with their calloused hands.

“Today the assembly line is obsolescent,” Drucker observed with remarkable foresight in “ Landmarks of Tomorrow ,” his […]

Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?

Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?

LONDON – As the Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow noted in 1987 , computers are “everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Since then, the so-called productivity paradox has become ever more striking. Automation has eliminated many jobs. Robots and artificial intelligence now seem to promise (or threaten) yet more radical change. Yet productivity growth has slowed across the advanced economies; in Britain, labor is no more productive today than it was in 2007.

Some economists see low business investment, poor skills, outdated infrastructure, or excessive regulation holding back potential growth. Others note wide disparities in productivity between leaders and laggards […]

Come friendly robots and take our dullest jobs

Come friendly robots and take our dullest jobs

We are currently going through one of those periodic phases of “automation anxiety” when we become convinced that the robots are coming for our jobs. These fears are routinely pooh-poohed by historians and economists. The historians point out that machines have been taking away jobs since the days of Elizabeth I – who refused to grant William Lee a patent on his stocking frame on the grounds that it would take work away from those who knitted by hand. And while the economists concede that machines do indeed destroy some jobs, they point out that the increased productivity that […]

News Analysis: Robots to possibly bring severe repercussions to U.S. society

News Analysis: Robots to possibly bring severe repercussions to U.S. society

Visitors look at a robot at Gateway’ 17 held in Detroit, the United States, June 21, 2017. (Xinhua/Wang Ping) WASHINGTON, July 10 (Xinhua) — While industrial robots are predicted to replace millions of U.S. workers and suppress wage growth in the next decade, reforms in education and social safety net largely lag behind, said a renowned U.S. economist.

"There’s a real mismatch between our institutions and the technologies coming on board," Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Axios Media, an American news website, in an interview published on Sunday night.

Industrial robots have taken over routine […]

Magazine excerpt: The fourth industrial revolution

Magazine excerpt: The fourth industrial revolution

Will any of today’s jobs still exist in 20 years? Will automation rewrite all our futures? The so-called fourth industrial revolution has profound implications for the world of work – and therefore the role of learning and development. We’re already used to robots undertaking repetitive manufacturing tasks, and smart applications determining our credit ratings, autopiloting planes and delivering functionality to our mobile devices. The next waves of development will see the combination of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, big data, and cloud services.

The combined effect of these technologies creates the opportunity for machines to interact with humans by providing services […]

News Analysis: Robots to possibly bring severe repercussions to U.S. society

WASHINGTON, July 10 (Xinhua) — While industrial robots are predicted to replace millions of U.S. workers and suppress wage growth in the next decade, reforms in education and social safety net largely lag behind, said a renowned U.S. economist.

"There’s a real mismatch between our institutions and the technologies coming on board," Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Axios Media, an American news website, in an interview published on Sunday night.

Industrial robots have taken over routine work from human hands in the past several decades. A paper published in March by Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, […]

OPINION: Kendall Stanley — Machines, machines and more machines

Get ready for robocalypse.

The word doesn’t really trip easily off your tongue, but you’re probably going to be hearing plenty of it in the coming years and it’s getting the attention of bankers from around the world.

While the bankers at a recent conference weren’t looking at a dystopian future, they were worried that the economic upheaval of artificial intelligence may be more substantial than they’ve been thinking — way more substantial.“In the past, technical advances caused temporary disruptions but ultimately improved living standards, creating new categories of employment along the way,” noted the article on the bankers in The […]

The digital divide: why the skills gap must be addressed to tackle inequality

Automation anxiety: the role technology is playing in rising inequality has become a hot topic

In 1821, the eminent political economist David Ricardo remarked: “The substitution of machinery for human labour is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers… [it] may render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition of the labourer.” Little over a century later, John Maynard Keynes identified a similar predicament: “Technological unemployment… [is an issue born of] our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses of labour.”

Fast-forward another century and […]

How can Britain solve its productivity ‘puzzle’?

How can Britain solve its productivity 'puzzle'?

When analysts and business commentators talk about economic productivity the understandable reaction of most people is to switch off.

As obscure, abstruse economic concepts go, productivity is right up there. No one really – not even economists – really understands why it goes up and down, but all are convinced it’s very important indeed.

But maybe we should all be taking more interest in the concept. Leaving aside debates about inequality and relative poverty, the real determinant of the prosperity of a population over time is probably its productivityThe UK’s comparatively poor productivity rate, which according to the latest figures has […]