Technology and the Future of Work: Why Do We Care?1 by Eduardo Levy Yeyati and Luca Sartorio

All views expressed in the Latin America Policy Journal are those of the authors or the interviewees only and do not represent the views of Harvard University, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the staff of the Latin America Policy Journal, or any associates of the Journal. All errors are authors’ responsibilities. © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Except as otherwise specified, no article or portion herein is to be reproduced or adapted to other works without the expressed written consent of the editors of the Latin America Policy Journal. Technology and the Future of Work: Why Do We Care?1 by Eduardo Levy Yeyati and Luca Sartorio Abstract This article seeks to make a compendium of the research and empirical evidence available on the impact of technological change on labor aggregates. It has been document- ed that increases in labor productivity in the last decades did not have a negative net effect on employment levels. However, technological development and automation have been associated with changes in the composition of employment and polarization patterns that explain the significant fall in the share of middle-class occupations during recent decades in developed countries. In addition, specific characteristics of the digital economy have also been linked to trends in concentration and market power that could explain part of the decline in labor share over income in recent decades. Finally, the article discusses the economics discipline’s efforts to anticipate these trends and forecast the future automation of jobs and public policy challenges for the labor markets of Latin America in the fourth Industrial Revolution. Is the ongoing technological revolution from developed countries, they illumi- the beginning of the end of the work soci- nate the fundamental patterns of the ety? Is automation, now that globaliza- current changes in labor and income, and tion is reverting, the fundamental reason offer a good starting point to adapt the behind the weakening of the middle class theoretical frameworks and the empirical and the decline of labor shares in advanced methodologies to the idiosyncrasies of economies? Can and should the public do Latin American countries to think about something about it? the fourth industrial revolution from a developing perspective. Interest in the impact of digital devel- opments on both the labor markets and income distribution has increased Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? dramatically in recent years, both in A classic argument to dismiss the scope of academic and policy circles. Initially, this these changes is to highlight the relative concern focused on the possibility of stability in the aggregate levels of employ- a massive automation of employment and ment. Far from the dystopia of widespread various dystopian narratives about the end unemployment and redundant human of (salaried) human work. Through diverse work, there are still no pronounced falls in methodologies, the economic literature employment levels or signs of an imminent has built a robust body of empirical evi- human labor obsolescence. Indeed, a look dence shedding light on regularities that at the US labor market from the mid-20th dismissed some of the initial concerns century to the present reveals even a slight while still highlighting major questions increase in the employment-to-popula- and challenges. Although these findings tion ratio that, despite recent fluctuations have been sourced almost exclusively around the 2008 global crisis, already 38 RESEARCH shows a recovery to levels similar to those that the latter tend to outweigh the for- of the 1980s (the same could be said of the mer, resulting in a modestly positive net Eurozone in the latest years). contribution of labor productivity to aggregate employment demand. While our However, if one thinks of automatic perception often focuses only on direct payment toll booths, the increasingly substitution, which is less abstract and robotized industrial factory, or interactive easily observable, a rigorous evaluation automatic telephone customer service, tends to offer a more complex and less one visualizes a landscape where tech- linear panorama. nology gradually but effectively destroys jobs, reducing the available employment That said, this premise assumes that in the economy. A priori, it would seem technology takes over gradually: what difficult to reconcile these stable trends would happen when and if automation with the most basic intuition about the moves into all sectors at the same time? In nature of technological change and the other words, what would happen with this large amount of inherently human tasks logic if there were no other sectors bene- that have been automated over time. fiting from the externalities of automation, How is this contradiction explained? and we only have the direct effects? Autor and Salomons (2017) offer a pre- liminary answer to this paradox.2 Based Polarization: Winners and Losers on their analysis of 19 developed econ- Perhaps as important as the impact on omies during the last four decades, the the net labor demand, and definitely more authors document that increases in labor urgent, there is the question of how tech- productivity in a particular industry have nology alters the composition of labor a two-fold effect on employment levels. across skill levels (as well as across labor First, a “direct” negative effect: a within- commuting zones, age groups, and gender). industry reduction in employment. Sec- On this front, the central concept has been ond, an “indirect” positive cross-industry the polarization (or the “hollowing-out”) effect, namely, an increase in employ- of the labor market: high- and low-skilled ment in other industries. This external occupations (empirically associated with effect, in turn, can reflect a combination high and low wages some time ago) have of multiple factors: “backward linkages” gained participation in total employment at (higher productivity in an industry raises the expense of middle-skilled ones. its production levels and thus its demand for inputs, stimulating production and Many recent works have robustly doc- employment in upstream industries), umented this phenomenon in advanced “forward linkages” (higher productivity economies, starting mainly from the begin- reduces production price and lowers the ning of the 1980s or 90s.3 They generally costs of downstream productive sectors), proxy the skill content of occupations by and income effects (due to lower prices, their wages in an initial year, and calculate consumers have more disposable income the variation of the share in total employ- for consumption in other industries). ment in the following decades, finding a polarization pattern in advanced econ- Although estimates of these direct and omies that is graphically represented by indirect effects vary significantly across a U-shaped curve, as can be seen in the fol- industries, Autor and Salomons show lowing graph.4 39 RESEARCH Smoothed changes in employment by occupation ranked by wage percentile (United States, 1979–2012) cooking, security, transportation, child and elderly care, among others. Many of them may seem like unsophisticated tasks, but they tend to appeal to intrinsically human virtues that do not follow explicit and easy- to-define rules, such as the empathy of a caregiver or the adaptability of a security guard to changing environments in unpre- dictable contexts. As expressed in Polanyi’s paradox: “We can know more than we can tell.” Our human capabilities are based on Source: Prepared by the authors on the basis of Autor (2015) skills and rules that are often beneath our The link between automation and conscious appreciation, transmitted to us polarization can be explained by what the via culture, tradition, evolution. The diffi- literature refers to as a “task approach” culty of the recent technological advance or, more generally, a “task-biased tech- to generate strong disruptions in both nical change.”5 What occupations are extremes of the occupational distribution more likely to be replaced by innovation? would thus be explained by the inability to According to this hypothesis, technological substitute either type of non-routine tasks. change tends to automate “routine tasks” that follow a set of easily definable pro- Interestingly, this is not the only – nor cedures, which can be specified by means even the most likely – explanation of the of a series of instructions that can be exe- polarization pattern in developed econo- cuted by computerized equipment. These mies. In fact, given that the data used in tasks are usually characteristic of mid- the polarization charts largely precedes dle-skilled jobs, both “manual” blue-collar the recent automation trends based on occupations like craft and manufacturing artificial intelligence, it is only natural workers replaced by industrial equipment, that several alternative, unrelated hypoth- and “cognitive” white-collar office and eses have been tried. Most notably, one administrative occupations increasingly that associates these trends with global- threatened by algorithms and data pro- ization: the offshoring of middle-skilled cessing capacity. jobs, both manufacturing and administrative, to low-income developing countries. On the contrary, technology finds it dif- This explanation is also compatible with ficult to replace two types of non-routine an increasing share of low-skilled ser- tasks. On the one hand, there are abstract vices

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