Tag: liberal

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labour and Power in the Age of Automation – Book Review

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labour and Power in the Age of Automation – Book Review

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labour and Power in the Age of Automation . Carl Benedikt Frey. Princeton University Press. 2019.

It seems that barely a month can pass without new forecasts of technology-induced job losses hitting the front pages. The Office for National Statistics are at it , Deloitte , PricewaterhouseCoopers , the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); the World Bank even dedicated their most recent World Development Report to the future of work. Fittingly, it was Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne who turbo-charged the automation debate back in 2013 when their paper estimated that […]

Quality of growth matters: Higher growth will happen when its composition and spread improves, not merely the topline

Quality of growth matters: Higher growth will happen when its composition and spread improves, not merely the topline

Last month, global investment strategist Ruchir Sharma set the dovecotes aflutter when he declared that for countries like India, “5% (GDP growth) is the new 7%, the appropriate aspirational standard.”

He based his growth pessimism on the emergence of four Ds – deglobalisation, depopulation (a shrinking global labour force), declining productivity, and a debt overhang as big as the one in 2008. Almost on cue, India’s GDP number for the first quarter of 2019-20 (April-June) fell with a thud to 5%.

Few Indian economists will agree with Sharma’s formulation, for if India has to accept 5% as the new aspirational benchmark, […]

The digital economy is capitalism’s sparkling creation or its undertaker: Former PM Keating

The digital economy is capitalism's sparkling creation or its undertaker: Former PM Keating

Image: Chris Duckett/ZDNet Australian former Prime Minister Paul Keating has likened the world the kids of today are stepping into to a shallow carp pond, saying it’s going to require imagination to determine how they’re going to make themselves useful.

Opening his SAP Ariba keynote in Sydney on Tuesday, Keating said the biggest challenge for Australia over the next few years would be human capital.

While he said the emergence of technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation might take jobs as collateral, "it may well do other things" for the economy, and he has faith in the Australian […]

Robots dominating job market is not inevitable: Oxford economist Carl Frey

Robots dominating job market is not inevitable: Oxford economist Carl Frey

The economic historian believes technology is neither the solution to everything nor a dystopian nightmare

A research published six years ago by two Oxford academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, seemed to reinforce this ominous prediction about the global economy: Robots are going to take over our jobs. For, it warned that “about 47% of total US employment is at risk” due to computerisation. Carl, this year, expanded the ideas of the research in a book, which is portentously titled, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation .

Contrary to what it seems, […]

The Fastest Growing Jobs in America Don’t Require a College Degree

The Fastest Growing Jobs in America Don’t Require a College Degree

There’s a great future in panels. Photo: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post/Getty Images A college diploma is the new high-school degree. In a 21st-century economy, a higher education is the only reliable ticket to the middle class. We can’t solve inequality without solving the crisis of college affordability.

For decades now, liberals have taken these truths to be self-evident . After Ronald Reagan tore up the New Deal order, centrist Democrats found education a convenient panacea for middle-class decline: If differential access to quality schools and advanced skills were the leading drivers of America’s exploding inequality, then the problem could […]

Celebrating labor

Celebrating labor

Labor Day was established as a national holiday 125 years ago, championed by labor unions. Despite unions’ recent decline, we should still celebrate work. The market for labor is an important element of the liberal society, and peoples’ willingness to work for a living makes our economy function.

The decline of unions in America has been remarkable. Over 30% of workers were unionized in the 1950s, versus 10% in 2018. The private sector unionization rate is only 6.4% – about one out of 16 workers. A number of factors explain this change, like the decline in manufacturing employment; America still […]

Progressives’ initiatives hurt private-sector workers | Opinion

Progressives’ initiatives hurt private-sector workers | Opinion

Skip to main content A Labor Day visit to the American Labor Museum in Haledon Jim Beckerman, Staff Writer, @jimbeckerman1

Labor Day, this year, finds the American worker in a pretty good place. Jobs are plentiful, unemployment is down and business is competing for talent. Aside from politically inspired recession fears, the U.S. economy is strong and will get stronger when international trade deals are completed and approved by Congress.

None of this suggests, however, that there are not serious concerns about the future of work in America and that labor, business and government need to prepare for them now. The […]

The robots are coming for your job, too

The robots are coming for your job, too

The robots. They’re coming for your jobs. All of you. (CNN) — The robots. They’re coming for your jobs . All of you.

Long the prediction of futurists and philosophers, the lived reality of technology replacing human work has been a constant feature since the cotton gin, the assembly line and, more recently, the computer.

What is very much up for debate in the imaginations of economists and Hollywood producers is whether the future will look like "The Terminator," with self-aware Schwarzenegger bots on the hunt, or "The Jetsons," with obedient robo-maids leaving us humans very little work and plenty of […]

The robots are coming for your job, too

The robots are coming for your job, too

Long the prediction of futurists and philosophers, the lived reality of technology replacing human work has been a constant feature since the cotton gin, the assembly line and, more recently, the computer.

What is very much up for debate in the imaginations of economists and Hollywood producers is whether the future will look like "The Terminator," with self-aware Schwarzenegger bots on the hunt, or "The Jetsons," with obedient robo-maids leaving us humans very little work and plenty of time for leisure and family. The most chilling future in film may be that in Disney’s "Wall-E," where people are all too […]

History Predicts the Consequences of Today’s Digital Revolution

History Predicts the Consequences of Today’s Digital Revolution

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation In The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation , Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping history of automation from the Industrial Revolution to the current digital age. The Oxford University economist argues that while labor-replacing technologies generate progress in the long run, these advances often have devastating consequences for much of the working population during their lifetimes.

Economists, he proposes, tend to analyze technological history by the fruits it bears us now, rather than the pain it caused in the past. This penchant […]