Mass Technological Unemployment Has Already Happened

The renewed vibrancy of progress in the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics has revived interest in the possibility of rapid, near-term automation eliminating vast numbers of jobs in the coming years. I will not here concern myself with the plausibility of the prediction. Rather what interests me here is the fact that this has already happened.

The claim is less shocking or original than it might appear. In fact, I first came across such a claim just as I was beginning to take a serious interest in matters of economics, Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work (1994). The "end" of work he predicted did not prove so imminent as he thought, but his argument regarding mass technological unemployment as already having happened stuck with me.

Basically, the Industrial Revolution in fairly short order exploded productivity, and displaced labor at a very rapid rate. However, all this has been concealed by three factors.

1. The first, most direct, but least noticed is that people are working less. The school-leaving age is later, higher education is bigger than ever, and people expect to retire. In between people work shorter weeks than they used to (the 12, even 10 hour day a thing of the past). There has also been an increasingly minimal definition of what it means to be employed, whether one thinks in terms of the expansion of part-time, temporary and other irregular employment, or the propensity of governments to fudge the figures in an attempt to show that things are better than they really are. (In Britain, one hour worked in the last week counts as employment.) This conceals a great deal of unemployment, and even more underemployment.

2. A massive amount of labor has been soaked up in marginal or even wasteful uses. Bluntly characterized as "bullshit jobs" by David Graeber, this includes such activities as advertising and marketing, the hypertrophy of the finance-insurance-real estate complex (to twenty percent of U.S. GDP), and the blooming of a health care bureaucracy (explicitly defended on the grounds that while it is wasteful, it is a major employer). There is even make-work of this kind in manufacturing, thanks to built-in obsolescence and product differentiation. And many genuinely productive jobs contain an increasing bullshit component, so that more people end up working them than might otherwise be the case. All this has multiplier effects--as an "unnecessary" financial firm will still need office space necessitating construction, utilities and janitorial services.

(Of course, that one can discuss work in this way is enough to make a market fundamentalist seethe. In their view if someone is willing to pay for something, that is sufficient proof of its value according to neoclassical thinkers' use of marginal utility. But these same people also say unemployment doesn't really exist and you can't run out of resources, so we know what their theories are worth, don't we?)

3. Massive state action, which takes two forms. One is the dramatic expansion of the state, paid for with high and progressive taxation, deficit spending or both, with the money going to such things as enlarged military-industrial complexes, and welfare programs. All of these generate further employment quite directly, while by way of transfer payments, welfare systems put purchasing power in the hands of people who would not otherwise have it, yet again contributing to consumption and employment. The other, related form is the expansion of credit in an age of fiat money, especially explosive after the end of the gold standard. Governments, businesses, households borrow money and spend it, again keeping the economy going.

David Graeber, in his recent take on the issue, suggests that if just some of this were taken into account we might find the real unemployment rate is a mind-boggling fifty, even sixty percent.

We might respond in unconstructive ways--with more statistical manipulation, with more bullshit jobs, with dubious credit expansions. (Alas, I think we're already pushing the limit there.) We might respond in constructive ways--for example, with shorter work days and weeks and years, with works schemes addressing real problems (we sure could do with a rebuild of our infrastructures, in the U.S., anyway), a strengthened system for supporting human beings (for instance, a Universal Basic Income scheme). But whatever we do, the fact remains that mass technological unemployment is something with which we already live today.

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