January 8, 2018
WHAT COMES OF FAILING TO ASK THE THRESHOLD QUESTION:
Racing the Machine (ROBERT SKIDELSKY, 12/22/17, Project Syndicate)
Economists have always believed that previous waves of job destruction led to an equilibrium between supply and demand in the labor market at a higher level of both employment and earnings. But if robots can actually replace, not just displace, humans, it is hard to see an equilibrium point until the human race itself becomes redundant. [...][T]here is the assumption running through the report that automation is not just desirable, but irreversible. Once we have learned to do something more efficiently (at lower cost), there is no possibility of going back to doing it less efficiently. The only question left is how humans can best adapt to the demands of a higher standard of efficiency.Philosophically, this is confused, because it conflates doing something more efficiently with doing it better. It mixes up a technical argument with a moral one. Of the world promised us by the apostles of technology, it is both possible and necessary to ask: Is it good?Is a world in which we are condemned to race with machines to produce ever-larger quantities of consumption goods a world worth having? And if we cannot hope to control this world, what is the value of being human? These questions may be outside McKinsey remit, but they should not be off limits to public discussion.
It is Mr. Skidelsky's assumption that seems off the mark here; that the fundamental purpose of an economy is to create jobs. He carries this mistake so far as to suggest that we might want to reduce efficiency to maximize employment, which was quite literally the original demand of the Luddites.
It seems more accurate to say that the point of an economy is to create wealth.
And while that could be cast as a technical discussion, consider this: if you ask people whether they prefer more work and less wealth or more wealth and less work, which do we think they'd choose?
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 8, 2018 9:51 AM