Os robots estão-nos a tirar empregos? (post n^n sobre o assunto)

Job Loss in Manufacturing: More Robot Blaming (Center for Economic and Policy Research):

It is striking how the media feel such an extraordinary need to blame robots and productivity growth for the recent job loss in manufacturing rather than trade. We got yet another example of this exercise in a NYT Upshot piece by Claire Cain Miller, with the title "evidence that robots are winning the race for American jobs." The piece highlights a new paper by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo which finds that robots have a large negative impact on wages and employment.

While the paper has interesting evidence on the link between the use of robots and employment and wages, some of the claims in the piece do not follow. (...)

Actually, the paper doesn't provide any help whatsoever in solving this mystery. Productivity growth in manufacturing has almost always been more rapid than productivity growth elsewhere. Furthermore, it has been markedly slower even in manufacturing in recent years than in prior decades. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity growth in manufacturing has averaged less than 1.2 percent annually over the last decade and less than 0.5 percent over the last five years. By comparison, productivity growth averaged 2.9 percent a year in the half century from 1950 to 2000. (...)

While the piece focuses on the displacement of less educated workers by robots and equivalent technology, it is likely that the areas where displacement occurs will be determined in large part by the political power of different groups. For example, it is likely that in the not distant future improvements in diagnostic technology will allow a trained professional to make more accurate diagnoses than the best doctor. Robots are likely to be better at surgery than the best surgeon. The extent to which these technologies will be be allowed to displace doctors is likely to depend more on the political power of the American Medical Association than the technology itself.

Finally, the question of whether the spread of robots will lead to a transfer of income from workers to the people who "own" the robots will depend to a large extent on our patent laws. In the last four decades, we have made patents longer and stronger. If we instead made them shorter and weaker, or even better relied on open source research, the price of robots would plummet and workers would be better positioned to capture the gains of productivity growth as they had in prior decades. In this story it is not robots who are taking workers' wages, it is politicians who make strong patent laws.