Hatred of Robots Is Hatred of Workers
Those who oppose outsourcing work to other countries -- or to robots - usually justify their opposition as a desire to protect Americans. But it actually reflects a lack of respect for working Americans, and for people in general - a failure to realize that skilled people, not the jobs they happen to occupy, are among the most valuable resources an economy can have.
Think of an economy as a double-entry balance sheet, with columns for assets and liabilities. Many look at the balance sheet and see jobs on the asset side of the ledger, in effect consigning people to the liability column. That is why so many favor infrastructure spending as a make-work program - "let's create some jobs for people who don't have them.'" In fact, a proper accounting would be the other way around: People are one of our most important assets. Jobs, on the other hand, are simply tasks that need to be performed. Eliminate a job, and you free up people to perform other tasks. Fewer welders and shippers equals more potential computer coders and aerobics instructors. Rather than cling to jobs we no longer require, we should shed them, freeing up people to perform other tasks.
If we try to resist shedding jobs, we can't create them. That is partly because employers won't hire unless they can fire, which is why countries with the strongest restrictions on layoffs have the highest unemployment rates, such as Spain (18.9 percent unemployment in the third quarter) and Italy (11.6 percent in October.)
Moreover, if we refuse to shed existing jobs, we won't have enough people to perform new ones. We won't have enough actual assets (people) to balance our real liabilities (tasks we wish to see performed).
A quick look back in history illustrates this. At the beginning of the 20th century over 40 percent of Americans worked in agriculture. By the end of the century, it was just 2 percent. Imagine if you could travel back to 1900 and explain to people that someday agriculture would provide jobs for only 2 in 100 Americans. What would be the reaction? Probably the same we see today when people learn that technology will make an increasing number of jobs redundant. After initial disbelief, the fact that farm jobs were disappearing would ignite fear and horror: Half of our jobs eliminated? How will we survive? But we haven't just survived, we've thrived - largely because we no longer require half the population to provide our daily bread, freeing them up to build cars and the roads they use, manufacture airplanes and fly them, cure the sick and care for the elderly, develop computers and invent pharmaceutical drugs. If half the population was still working the farms, who would have populated our factories, offices and laboratories? If half of us were still needed to till the fields, where would we find the people we need to make a modern economy function?
We can't look just at the jobs that are being shed, but also at the ones that are being created in their stead. When blue-collar jobs are made redundant in the Rust Belt, that means new-collar jobs have been spawned in the Sun Belt, performed by the people who create the job-displacing technologies. According to the Department of Labor, there are more than a half-million open technology-related jobs in the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, the department forecasts, the U.S. economy will see a 30 percent increase in jobs for software developers and database administrators, 25 percent for computer systems analysts, and more than 20 percent for information security analysts, web developers and computer network architects. These are jobs we couldn't have imagined just a few years ago. How many of us had grandparents who were web masters or information security analysts? But many of us have grandchildren who will be. In a dynamic economy, work doesn't disappear, it just changes form.
Our challenge is not to hang on to jobs we needed in the past; it is to give people the skills they need to perform the jobs we actually require today and in the future. Convincing people that redundant jobs will reappear only dissuades them from acquiring the skills they need to fill the jobs that exist. Clinging to outdated jobs undermines our ability to perform necessary ones. Shedding obsolete jobs frees up more human resources to perform vital ones.
