长远看 抢走美国人工作的不是中国

The first job that Sherry Johnson, 56, lost to automation was at the local newspaper in Marietta, Georgia, where she fed paper into the printing machines and laid out pages. Later, she watched machines learn to do her jobs on a factory floor, and in inventory and filing. 

现年56岁的谢丽•约翰逊(Sherry Johnson)第一次因为自动化而失去工作，是在佐治亚州玛丽埃塔的当地报纸印厂，她负责将纸张送入印刷机和摆放页面。后来，她眼睁睁地看着机器学会了她在车间的工作，以及盘货和报表方面的工作。 

“It actually kind of ticked me off because it’s like, How are we supposed to make a living?” she said. She took a computer class at Goodwill, but it was too little too late. “The 20- and 30-year-olds are more up to date on that stuff than we are because we didn’t have that when we were growing up,” said Johnson, who is now on disability and lives in a housing project in Jefferson City, Tennessee. 

“这确实令我愤怒，我觉得，这样到底让我们怎么谋生？”她说。她参加了好意组织(Goodwill)的电脑课程，但是有点太晚了。“二三十岁的人比我们更能适应，因为我们成长的时候根本没有这种事情，”约翰逊说，她现在靠残疾补助生活，住在田纳西州杰斐逊城一处市政住房里。 

Donald Trump told workers like Johnson that he would bring back their jobs by clamping down on trade, offshoring and immigration. But economists say the bigger threat has been something else: automation. 

唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)告诉约翰逊这样的工人们，通过严格限制贸易、离岸外包与移民，他会为他们带回工作。但经济学家说，更大的威胁来自另一件事：自动化。

 “Over the long haul, clearly automation’s been much more important — it’s not even close,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard who studies labor and technological change. 

“从长期角度来看，显然自动化因素更加重要——其他因素都与它差得很远，”研究劳动力与技术变化的哈佛大学经济学教授劳伦斯•卡茨(Lawrence Katz)说。

No candidate talked much about automation on the campaign trail. Technology is not as convenient a villain as China or Mexico, there is no clear way to stop it, and many of the technology companies are in the United States and benefit the country in many ways. 

在竞选期间，没有一位候选人谈到关于自动化的问题。科学技术不像中国或墨西哥，可以方便地拿来充当罪魁祸首，目前没有明确的方式来阻止它，而且许多科技公司都在美国，并在许多方面令这个国家受益。

Trump told a group of tech company leaders last Wednesday: “We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation. Anything we can do to help this go along, we’re going to be there for you.

特朗普上周三告诉一组科技公司的领导人：“我们希望你们能继续保持令人难以置信的创新。我们愿意做任何事情来帮助这种情况持续下去，我们会支持你们。”

Andrew F. Puzder, Trump’s pick for labor secretary and chief executive of CKE Restaurants, praised robot employees in an interview with Business Insider in March. “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case,” he said. 

特朗普选择的劳工部部长、CKE餐厅公司首席执行官安德鲁•F•普兹代尔(Andrew F. Puzder)在3月接受商业内幕(Business Insider)网站采访时曾称赞机器人员工。“它们总是彬彬有礼，总是会追加销售，从不休假，从不迟到，从不打滑摔倒，也不会有年龄、性别或种族歧视的情况，”他说。

Globalization is clearly responsible for some job loss, particularly trade with China during the 2000s, which led to the rapid loss of 2 million to 2.4 million net jobs, according to research by economists including Daron Acemoglu and David Autor of MIT. 

根据麻省理工大学的达龙•阿赛莫格卢(Daron Acemoglu)和戴维•奥特(David Autor)的研究，全球化显然造成了一些职位流失，特别是与中国在21世纪以来的贸易迅速导致了200万到240万就业净损失。

 People who work in parts of the country most affected by imports generally have greater unemployment and reduced income for the rest of their lives, Autor found in a paper published in January. Still, over time, automation has had a far bigger effect than globalization, and would have eventually eliminated those jobs anyway, he said in an interview. “Some of it is globalization, but a lot of it is we require many fewer workers to do the same amount of work,” he said. “Workers are basically supervisors of machines.” 

奥特在1月份发表的一篇论文发现，在美国，受进口影响最严重的地区通常失业率更高，在余生里的收入会减少。不过，随着时间的推移，自动化已经产生了比全球化更大的影响，并且最终会消除这些工作岗位，他在接受采访时说。“其中一些是因为全球化，但很多工作机会的消失是因为我们要求少得多的工人来完成同样的工作量，”他说。“工人基本上是机器的监督者。” 

When Greg Hayes, the chief executive of United Technologies, agreed to invest $16 million in one of its Carrier factories as part of a Trump deal to keep some jobs in Indiana instead of moving them to Mexico, he said the money would go toward automation. 

联合技术公司(United Technologies)首席执行官格雷格•海耶斯(Greg Hayes) 同意为该公司旗下的一家开利公司(Carrier)工厂投资1600万美元，这是同特朗普交易的一部分，目的是保持印第安纳州的一些工作机会，而不是把这些机会转到墨西哥去。海耶斯说，这笔钱将用于自动化。 

“What that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs,” he said on CNBC. 

“最终这意味着工作机会的减少，”他在接受CNBC采访时说。 

Take the steel industry. It lost 400,000 people, 75 percent of its workforce, between 1962 and 2005. But its shipments did not decline, according to a study published in the American Economic Review last year. The reason was a new technology called the minimill. Its effect remained strong even after controlling for management practices; job losses in the Midwest; international trade; and unionization rates, found the authors of the study, Allan Collard-Wexler of Duke and Jan De Loecker of Princeton.

以钢铁工业为例。在1962年至2005年间，该行业失去了40万人，占其总劳动力的75％。但是，根据杜克大学的艾伦•康拉德-韦克斯勒(Allan Collard-Wexler)和普林斯顿大学的扬•德•洛克(Jan De Loecker)去年在《美国经济评论》(American Economic Review)上发表的一项研究，该行业的出货量并没有下降。原因是一种名为微型钢铁厂(minimill)的新技术。即便考虑了管理实践、中西部的失业、国际贸易和工会化进程等因素，其影响依然强大。 

Another analysis, from Ball State University, attributed roughly 13 percent of manufacturing job losses to trade and the rest to enhanced productivity because of automation. Apparel making was hit hardest by trade, it said, and computer and electronics manufacturing by technological advances. 

来自鲍尔州立大学(Ball State University)的另一项分析认为，在制造业内，大约有13％的失业应归因于贸易，其余则是因为自动化提高了生产力。分析称，服装制造受到贸易的打击最大，计算机和电子制造业则受技术进步影响最大。

Over time, automation has generally gone well: As it has displaced jobs, it has created new ones. But some experts worry that this time could be different. Even as the economy has improved, jobs and wages for a large segment of workers — particularly men without college degrees doing manual labor — have not recovered. 

随着时间的推移，自动化总体来说进展顺利：虽然它取代了一部分工作，但也创造了新的工作。但有些专家担心目前这段时间可能有所不同。即使经济有所改善，对于大部分工人，特别是没有大学学位、做体力劳动的工人来说，工作和工资仍未恢复。

Even in the best case, automation leaves the first generation of workers it displaces in a lurch because they usually lack the skills to do new and more complex tasks, Acemoglu found in a paper published in May

阿赛莫格卢在5月发表的论文中指出，即使在最好的情况下，自动化亦令第一代被替代的工人处于困境，因为他们通常缺乏技能去执行新的、更复杂的任务。 

Labor economists see ways to ease the transition for workers displaced by robots. They include retraining programs, stronger unions, more public-sector jobs, a higher minimum wage, a bigger earned-income tax credit and, for the next generation, more college degrees. Few are policies that Trump has said he will pursue. 

劳动经济学家们发现了一些方法，能帮助被机器人替代的工人更好地完成过渡期，其中包括再培训计划、更强大的工会、增加公共部门工作、更高的最低工资、更大的劳动所得税抵扣，以及为下一代提供更多的大学学位。其中很少有哪一项政策是特朗普所谋求实现的。

 “Just allowing the private market to automate without any support is a recipe for blaming immigrants and trade and other things, even when it’s the long impact of technology,” said Katz, who was the Labor Department’s chief economist under President Bill Clinton. 

“只是允许自动化进入私人市场，却没有任何支持，所以，即便失业原因是科技的长期影响，人们也会责怪移民、贸易和其他事情，”卡茨说，他曾在比尔•克林顿(Bill Clinton)总统任期内担任劳工部首席经济学家。 

It’s not only manual labor: Computers are learning to do some white-collar and service-sector work, too. Existing technology could automate 45 percent of activities people are paid to do, according to a July report by McKinsey. Work that requires creativity, management of people or caregiving is least at risk. 

不仅仅是体力劳动：计算机也在学习做一些白领和服务部门的工作。根据麦肯锡7月份的报告，目前雇佣人力进行的活动，有45%可以被技术自动化。需要创造力的工作、人力管理工作或看护类工作风险最小。 

Johnson in Tennessee said her favorite and best-paying job, $8.65 an hour, was at an animal shelter, caring for puppies. 

田纳西州的约翰逊说她最喜欢的一份工作是在一个动物收容所照顾小狗，这也是她报酬最高的工作，每小时8.65美元。 

It was also the least likely to be done by a machine, she said: “I would hope a computer couldn’t do that, unless they like changing dirty papers and giving them love and attention.” 

这或许是机器最难以胜任的工作了，她说，“我希望电脑干不了这个，除非它们喜欢给小狗换脏纸垫、给予它们爱与呵护。”