A worth reading article by Paul Krugman in NYT. He writes;
Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.
I’ve noted before that the nature of rising inequality in America changed around 2000. Until then, it was all about worker versus worker; the distribution of income between labor and capital — between wages and profits, if you like — had been stable for decades. Since then, however, labor’s share of the pie has fallen sharply. As it turns out, this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. A new report from the International Labor Organization points out that the same thing has been happening in many other countries, which is what you’d expect to see if global technological trends were turning against workers.
And some of those turns may well be sudden. The McKinsey Global Institute recently released a report on a dozen major new technologies that it considers likely to be “disruptive,” upsetting existing market and social arrangements. Even a quick scan of the report’s list suggests that some of the victims of disruption will be workers who are currently considered highly skilled, and who invested a lot of time and money in acquiring those skills. For example, the report suggests that we’re going to be seeing a lot of “automation of knowledge work,” with software doing things that used to require college graduates. Advanced robotics could further diminish employment in manufacturing, but it could also replace some medical professionals.
Click Link below to read article;
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html?ref=opinion
Posted By F. Sheikh
“Highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves”.
The above quote from Mr. Krugman’s article needs some fine tuning. I think it is not the matter of “highly educated” becoming expendable in future, it is the highly educated in the wrong field who will be endangered species. As the technology is advancing and use of robotics increasing, the job requirement is changing and not getting limited, rather expanding. Nature has a way of evolving. When computers moved over jobs of a lot of people, a lot more jobs were created in manufacturing these computers, programming soft ware and marketing and using of computers. Along side these new requirements, phenomenon of natural disasters and wars keep on creating space for reconstruction.
Just wait for the wars on resources of water in future! New frontiers are constantly appearing, the race in space has just begun, genetic engineering is soon going to change life and life styles …… one has to be smart and adapt to new requirements. This natural selection (in the employment of workers) is not new and an ongoing phenomenon.