25 Facts About Technological unemployment

Technological unemployment is the loss of jobs caused by technological change.

View that technology is unlikely to lead to long-term Technological unemployment has been repeatedly challenged by a minority of economists.

Especially in Europe, there were further warnings in the closing two decades of the twentieth century, as commentators noted an enduring rise in Technological unemployment suffered by many industrialised nations since the 1970s.

Levels of persistent Technological unemployment can be quantified empirically, but the causes are subject to debate.

Concept of structural Technological unemployment, a lasting level of joblessness that does not disappear even at the high point of the business cycle, became popular in the 1960s.

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For pessimists, technological unemployment is one of the factors driving the wider phenomena of structural unemployment.

Since the 1980s, even optimistic economists have increasingly accepted that structural unemployment has indeed risen in advanced economies, but they have tended to attribute this on globalisation and offshoring rather than technological change.

Technological unemployment's findings suggest that technological growth and the resulting job-creation in high-tech industries might have a more significant spillover effect than anticipated.

Many economists pessimistic about technological unemployment accept that compensation effects did largely operate as the optimists claimed through most of the 19th and 20th century.

Technological unemployment conceded that after some disruption, the advance of mechanization during the Industrial Revolution increased the demand for labour as well as increasing pay due to effects that flow from increased productivity.

Term "Luddite fallacy" is sometimes used to express the view that those concerned about long-term technological unemployment are committing a fallacy, as they fail to account for compensation effects.

Pericles responded to perceived technological unemployment by launching public works programmes to provide paid work to the jobless.

Mass Technological unemployment began to reappear in Europe, especially in Western, Central and Southern Europe in the 15th century, partly as a result of population growth, and partly due to changes in the availability of land for subsistence farming caused by early enclosures.

Joseph Schumpeter notes that as the 18th century progressed, thinkers would raise the alarm about technological unemployment with increasing frequency, with von Justi being a prominent example.

In both cases the debates were not conclusively settled, but faded away as Technological unemployment was reduced by an outbreak of war – World War II for the debate of the 1930s, and the Vietnam War for the 1960s episodes.

General consensus that innovation does not cause long-term Technological unemployment held strong for the first decade of the 21st century although it continued to be challenged by a number of academic works, and by popular works such as Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation and Martin Ford's The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future.

Concern about technological unemployment grew in 2013 due in part to a number of studies predicting substantially increased technological unemployment in forthcoming decades and empirical evidence that, in certain sectors, employment is falling worldwide despite rising output, thus discounting globalization and offshoring as the only causes of increasing unemployment.

At the 2014 Davos meeting, Thomas Friedman reported that the link between technology and Technological unemployment seemed to have been the dominant theme of that year's discussions.

In late 2015, further warnings of potential worsening for technological unemployment came from Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's chief economist, and from Ignazio Visco, the governor of the Bank of Italy.

Since about 2017, a new wave of concern over technological unemployment had become prominent, this time over the effects of artificial intelligence .

Gandhian economics called for a delay in the uptake of labour saving machines until Technological unemployment was alleviated, however this advice was largely rejected by Nehru who was to become prime minister once India achieved its independence.

The policy of slowing the introduction of innovation so as to avoid technological unemployment was implemented in the 20th century within China under Mao's administration.

People advocating some form of basic income as a solution to technological unemployment include Martin Ford, Erik Brynjolfsson, Robert Reich, Andrew Yang, Elon Musk, Zoltan Istvan, and Guy Standing.

Threat of technological unemployment has occasionally been used by free market economists as a justification for supply side reforms, to make it easier for employers to hire and fire workers.

Technological unemployment advised vigorous cooperative efforts to address the "myriad devices" – such as tax havens, bank secrecy, money laundering, and regulatory arbitrage – which enable the holders of great wealth to avoid paying taxes, and to make it more difficult to accumulate great fortunes without requiring "great social contributions" in return.

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