The ability of computers to quickly perform routine tasks has “fostered a polarization of employment,” according to two economics professors writing in the New York Times online, by reducing the number of mid-level paying jobs, while leaving the highest and lowest paid occupations largely untouched.
“Demand for highly educated workers who excel in abstract tasks is robust, but the middle of the labor market, where the routine task-intensive jobs lie, is sagging,” write David Autour and David Dorn. Autour is an economics professor at MIT; Dorn teaches economics at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid, Spain.
Mid-level jobs are at risk, they write, because computers excel at such tasks as “organizing, storing, retrieving and manipulating information, or executing exactly defined physical movements in production processes. These tasks are most pervasive in middle-skill jobs like bookkeeping, clerical work and repetitive production and quality- assurance jobs.”
At the same time, they write, this computerization has increased demand for workers who perform “non-routine tasks that complement the automated activities.” These can be abstract tasks requiring problem-solving skills and creativity or “manual” tasks requiring “situational adaptability, visual and language recognition and in-person interaction,” such as preparing a meal or driving a truck.
This has resulted, they say, in job growth that is “concentrated in both the highest- and lowest-paid occupations, while jobs in the middle have declined.”
A critique of the article can be found here.
