The Missing Middle Class: Jobs in the Second Machine Age

Xconomy National —

Technological change is not a tide that lifts all boats in our economy. The truth is that it’s more like a tsunami. It threatens to overturn all the boats and drown their occupants, sparing only the lucky few who have already reached safety in the hills.

That’s the kind of admission you won’t often see here in the pages of Xconomy. The X in our name, after all, stands for exponential, a reference to the stunning pace of technological progress and economic growth over the past 75 years—growth attributable largely to advances in computer hardware and software and the organizational changes companies have made to exploit them.

But the reality is that technology’s great bounty isn’t reaching everyone. This is the flip side of the phenomenon I described in my column last week—the Medici effect. Thanks to the ongoing technology boom, there’s a growing supply of super-rich companies and individuals in Silicon Valley. To their credit, they’re making philanthropic investments on a scale so large that you have to look to places like Renaissance Florence for parallels.

But in between the rich and the poor, the skilled and the unskilled, there’s a big hole opening up, as millions of middle-class workers lose their jobs and can’t get them back. It’s fair to blame computer technology for widening this gap. It’s a phenomenon MIT economist David Autor has called labor market polarization. In his words, this is a pattern of “expanding job opportunities in both high-skill, high-wage occupations and low-skill, low-wage occupations, coupled with contracting opportunities in middle-wage, middle-skill white-collar and blue-collar jobs.”

Because we here at Xconomy cover the business of innovation, we tend to focus mostly on the mechanisms of economic growth, and not so much on the question of who’s benefiting from this growth and who isn’t. But I have looked at the issue of technology-induced unemployment a couple of times before, in a 2011 column and in the run-up to our 2013 robotics forum. And this week, after spending a couple of days at an interdisciplinary conference on technology and employment, it’s on my mind again.

Experts at the Innovation for Jobs Summit, organized by Swedish-born innovation journalism advocate (and Xconomist) David Nordfors and Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, offered a range of solutions for labor market polarization. I’ll describe a few of these in a moment. Some of them are being tested in places like Sweden and Finland, whence many of the conference attendees hailed; none will be simple to implement. But neither are they out of reach, if we can start an honest conversation now about what we value as a society.

First, let’s get clear about the scope of the problem. While the jobless rate in the United States has dropped since the height of the Great Recession in October 2009, the bigger unemployment picture is far from encouraging. Looking at the official rate of 6.7 percent masks the real extent of the crisis, because it leaves out people who have given up searching for work. The total unemployment rate, which counts discouraged workers as well as those who have part-time jobs but would prefer full-time work, is stubbornly high, at 12.7 percent. The youth unemployment rate is even higher, at 16.3 percent for all 16-to-24-year-olds and 28.2 percent for black youth. (These are all Labor Department statistics, and they’re up to date except for the youth unemployment data, which is from mid-2013.)

And while the economy is slowly getting stronger, you’d be hard pressed to find an economist who thinks unemployment will ever return to the 4 percent range, where it stood before the recession. If you want to understand why, go read two recent popular-economics books: Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, and Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Machines. The basic problem, these three authors agree, is that the recession gave employers the excuse they’d been waiting for to eliminate millions of workers who’d become too expensive. They were overpaid, in the sense that they’d been doing jobs that could now be done more cheaply by people in other countries or—just as frequently—by software or machines.

The result has been a thinning out of the middle class, with many moderately skilled, medium-wage jobs disappearing for good. When Steve Jobs told President Obama at a 2011 dinner that “those jobs aren’t coming back,” he was referring to manufacturing jobs that Apple had moved from the U.S. to contractors in Asia, but he could just as well have been talking about jobs lost to improved automation. Apple partner Flextronics boasted that it was creating 1,700 new jobs when it upgraded a factory in Austin, TX, to make Apple’s new Mac Pro. But that was just a fraction of the 8,800 jobs eliminated in Austin when Dell closed a desktop manufacturing plant there during the recession.

The new factories always need fewer workers than the old factories. That’s great for productivity, but it’s a bit of a problem for people adapting to Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s “second machine age,” in which we’re starting to feel the full force of advances in computer technology.

To repeat, these big structural changes in the job market aren’t a product of the downturn—they were merely laid bare by it. The labor force participation rate, the percentage of people who have jobs, peaked in 1999 and has been on a steady decline ever since. (1999 was also the year when the real income of the median American household reached its height of $55,000; it has since fallen by 10 percent.) What’s happening is that organizations are shedding every single one of the mid-wage, routine jobs that can be handed over to machines—think telephone receptionists or toll collectors at bridges. At the same time, they’re creating a lot of new, low-wage jobs, but the folks who lost their medium-wage jobs haven’t yet lowered their expectations far enough to take them. So they’re staying out of the workforce, by the millions. “However unrealistically, most of these individuals are holding out for a better offer than what the American economy is serving up,” as Cowen puts it.

If you are highly educated, or you have skills that can’t easily be translated into software algorithms, then congratulations: you’ve made it to the hill. You’re part of the high-skilled elite; you fared far better than your fellow Americans during the downturn, and now you are once again enjoying an economic windfall. In 1983, the top 20 percent of U.S. families held 81.3 percent of household wealth, according to an Economic Policy Institute briefing paper. By 2009, they held 87.2 percent. In essence, 100 percent of the new wealth created in that 26-year period went to the top fifth of U.S. households. (More than 100 percent, in fact; the top 20 percent of households also captured some of the wealth that had formerly belonged to the bottom 80 percent, as Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out.)

To a large degree, what differentiates winners from losers in this economy is whether they have the right education, training, skills, experience, and talents to benefit from “skill-biased technical change,” the economists’ term for cases where technological progress isn’t benefiting everyone equally. The right skills today are those that … Next Page »