The Future of Work: Don't Blame the Robots

The latest entry in a special project in which business and labor leaders, social scientists, technology visionaries, activists, and journalists weigh in on the most consequential changes in the workplace.    

Dean Baker

PACIFIC STANDARD - JUNE 4, 2015

There has been a bizarre debate in national policy circles in recent years, with many raising the prospect that the development of robots and other technologies will lead to mass unemployment and lower living standards. The debate is bizarre for two reasons. First, productivity growth has actually been quite slow in recent years; this is the opposite of the “robots replacing workers’’ story. Second, faster productivity growth should mean higher wages and better living standards in a well-working economy.

Taking these points in turn, productivity growth has slowed sharply in the last decade. From 2005 to 2014 productivity growth has averaged just 1.4 percent annually. This is down from 2.9 percent from 1995 to 2005. In the last two years productivity growth has been even slower, averaging less than one percent. By comparison, in the post-World War II Golden Age from 1947 to 1973, productivity growth averaged almost three percent.

Productivity growth is a direct measure of the rate at which technology is increasing output per worker hour. If robots and other technologies are making workers obsolete, we should be seeing sharp increases in the rate of productivity growth, since they are allowing us to produce goods and services with few or no workers. Instead, slower productivity growth means technology is displacing workers less quickly than in 1995–2005.

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