That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [43]
“Eventually we will all pump our own gas,” adds Curtis Carlson, the CEO of SRI International. “By that, I mean that services that can be automated and modified to allow us to do the task ourselves will go that way—online services, bag our own groceries, phone operators, your assistant, etc. Mainly it is for cost but we often like it more because it gives us more control.” Indeed, remind us again why you need a salesclerk to check you out at the drugstore? You don’t, which is why CVS pharmacies have been automating all their checkouts, so now you do it yourself while one better-trained employee watches over you and the computercheckout machines.
Katz and Autor quote the Yale economist William Nordhaus as estimating that “the real cost of performing a standardized set of computational tasks fell at least 1.7 trillionfold between 1850 and 2006, with the bulk of this decline occurring in the last three decades … The consequence,” they write, “has been a sharp decline in the share of U.S. employment in traditional ‘middle-skill’ jobs. The four ‘middle-skill’ occupations—sales, office workers, production workers, and operatives—accounted for 57 percent of employment in 1979 but only 46 percent in 2009,” and the trend is clearly downward.
The third segment of the job market involves workers doing nonroutine low-skilled jobs that have to be done in person or manually—in an office, a hospital, a shopping center or restaurant, or at a specific construction site, factory, or locale. These jobs do not require a lot of critical thinking or an advanced degree. They include dental assistant, hairstylist, barber, waitress, truck driver, cook, baker, policeman, fireman, construction worker, deliveryman, plumber, electrician, maid, taxi driver, masseuse, salesclerk, nurse, and health-care aide at a nursing home. No robot or computer can replace these jobs, and no one in India or China can take them away, either. They will always exist, but how many such jobs there are and how much they pay will depend on the overall state of the economy and local supply and demand.
Putting all three categories together makes clear why the experts speak of job market “polarization.” Nonroutine high-skilled work becomes, if anything, more lucrative, depending on the overall economy. Nonroutine low-skilled work can pay decently, depending on the local economy and how well that worker performs. But white- and blue-collar routine work shrinks, gets squeezed on pay, or just vanishes. The net result of the “rising demand for highly educated workers performing abstract tasks and for less-educated workers performing ‘manual’ or service tasks is the partial hollowing out or polarization of employment opportunities,” conclude Katz and Autor.
Andy Kessler, a former hedge fund manager and the author of Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs, published a piece in The Wall Street Journal (February 17, 2011) proposing an even simpler and more evocative typology of the new labor market:
Forget blue-collar and white-collar. There are two types of workers in our economy: creators and servers. Creators are the ones driving productivity—writing code, designing chips, creating drugs, running search engines. Servers, on the other hand, service these creators (and other servers) by building homes, providing food, offering legal advice, and working at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers and by changes in how business operates.
This dichotomy between “creators