Matt Ridley calms baseless fears about the effects of innovation on jobs. Here’s his conclusion:
Here too history teaches a reassuring lesson. Automation has already shifted vast amounts of income from labour to capital, and how has society responded? By sharing the labour more equally. Consider, for example, the fact that Britain has very low unemployment right now. Yet because of shorter working hours, longer holidays, longer periods in education and longer retirement, the proportion of life that the average Briton will actually spend at work, as opposed to sleeping, consuming, learning, on holiday or in retirement, has shrunk dramatically, from about 25 per cent a century ago to about 10 per cent today. That is evidence of fairly sharing the benefits of automation. If the percentage falls to 7 per cent or 5 per cent thanks to further symbiosis between computers and people, then everybody can gain.
Kevin Williamson ponders a President Oprah.
My former GMU Econ student Ninos Malek asks: “What’s wrong with making money?”
treating the boom in Mexican car production as the result of insufficient protection for American car producers, to be “remedied” by protectionism, reflects a major misunderstanding that will harm rather than benefit Americans.
Deirdre McCloskey investigates the causes of youth unemployment. A slice:
The minimum wage, too, is high in South Africa. The Congress of South African Trade Unions insists on it. COSATU had an honorable role in the struggle against apartheid, and is viewed with indulgence by politicians. The result is that low-wage workers cannot compete with trade unionists. The poor sit in huts in the countryside of Kwa-Zulu Natal, pacified by a small income subsidy to someone in the family. Low-skilled people, such as young people, don’t have a chance.
