Should-Read: Paul Krugman: Maid In America

Should-Read: Paul Krugman: Maid In America: “[In 1996] I argued… that menial work dealing with the physical world…

…gardeners, maids, nurses–would survive even as quite a few jobs that used to require college disappeared…. Big data has led to more progress in something that looks like artificial intelligence than I expected…. The point about the relative displacement of cognitive versus manual jobs seems to stand…. The disruptiveness of such technological change is something we should take seriously…. The initial effect of the Industrial Revolution was a substantial de-skilling of goods production. The Luddites were, for the most part, not proletarians but skilled craftsmen, weavers who constituted s sort of labor aristocracy but found their skills devalued by the power loom. In the long run industrialization did lead to higher wages for everyone, but the long run took several generations to happen—in that long run we really were all dead…. It remains peculiar how we’re simultaneously worrying that robots will take all our jobs and bemoaning the stalling out of productivity growth. What is the story, really?