In this seminar, Laura Tyson will present the paper 'Technological Changes, Policies, Power and Labour'
The presentation and forthcoming paper will identify and analyse the effects of a series of technological changes on labour in the US, starting with the ICT revolution in the 1980s and continuing to AI today. How have these changes affected key labour indicators: the growth of labour productivity and its decoupling from the growth of wages; labour's share of value-added; the polarisation of labour markets and the erosion of middle-skill, middle-income routine jobs in employment; the growth in demand for workers with 'expert' cognitive skills and college/post-graduate education and the upskilling of employment; the creation of new work including platform assisted work and Zoom; and wage and income inequality?
Will the effects of generative AI be different - e.g. the speed and scale of labour market disruption; the balance between labour automation and labour augmentation; the loss of white-collar specialised employment opportunities in fields such as accounting and law?
The presentation and forthcoming paper will address the dangers of 'premature automation' - economic and social institutions are not prepared for the rapid large-scale loss of good jobs to GenAI. Will AI-driven automation reduce human employment and de-skill human workers causing soaring wage and income inequality, societal divisions and political fragmentation?
The paper characterises what the US has chosen to do or not do to address these issues. Power explains these choices: weak, eroding unions; lack of competition among companies; the growing role of corporate/dark money in US elections; and the growing power of Silicon Valley. The policies that are needed to share the productivity and prosperity benefits of technological changes will also be examined. Can policy be used to change the course of technological change towards 'pro-worker' technologies and to address climate change? Dani Rodrik's pre-production, production, post-production matrix will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of various policies to develop good jobs as technology changes.
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