勒德分子的胜利

Finance & economics

财经板块

Employment: Triumph of the Luddites

就业：勒德分子的胜利

Covid-19 was meant to lead to job-killing automation

新冠肺炎注定会导致扼杀就业的自动化

It was meant to be a bloodbath.

这注定是一场大屠杀。

When covid-19 struck in early 2020, economists warned that a wave of job-killing robots would sweep over the labour market, leading to high and structural unemployment.

新冠肺炎在2020年初来袭时，经济学家就曾警告称，一波扼杀就业机会的机器人将席卷劳动力市场，导致高失业率和结构性失业。

One prominent economist, in congressional testimony in the autumn, asserted that employers were “substituting machines for workers”.

一位著名的经济学家在秋季的国会证词中断言，雇主正在“用机器取代工人”。

A paper published by the IMF in early 2021 said that such concerns “seem justified”.

国际货币基金组织2021年初发表的一篇论文表示，这种担忧“似乎是有道理的”。

Surveys of firms suggested they had grand plans to invest in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

对公司的调查显示，他们有投资人工智能和机器学习的宏伟计划。

Wonks had plenty of reason to worry.

书呆子们有充分的理由担心。

Recessions cause many companies’ revenues, but not wages, to fall, making workers less affordable.

经济衰退导致许多公司的收入下降，但工资没有下降，导致公司更加雇不起工人。

Some previous downturns had produced bursts of job-killing automation, depriving people of work and leaving them at least temporarily on the economic scrapheap.

之前的几次经济低迷发生时，曾出现过扼杀就业机会的大量自动化，剥夺了人们的工作，导致他们至少暂时陷入经济困境。

Covid seemed to pose an extra threat to workers.

新冠似乎对工人构成了额外的威胁。

People get sick; robots do not.

因为人会生病，而机器人不会。

Past pandemics, research suggests, have hastened automation.

研究表明，过去的流行病都加速了自动化进程。

More than two years on, however, it is hard to find much evidence of job-killing automation.

然而，两年多过去了，很难找到自动化会扼杀就业的太多证据。

Rather than workers complaining about a shortage of jobs, bosses complain about a shortage of workers.

目前的结果更多是老板抱怨工人短缺，而不是工人抱怨工作岗位短缺。

Across the OECD club of mostly rich countries, there is an unusually large number of unfilled vacancies, even as recession nears.

在经济合作与发展组织这个以富裕国家为主的俱乐部中，即使在经济衰退临近之际，仍有数量异常多的职位空缺。

In many countries the wages of the lowest-paid, the people thought to be most at risk of losing their job to a robot, are rising the fastest.

在许多国家，最低收入人群的工资增长最快，而他们被认为是最有可能被机器人抢走工作的人。

To test the doomsters’ predictions more directly, we dug into occupational data for America, Australia and Britain.

为了更直接地检验“就业机会注定遭到扼杀”的预测是否为真，我们深入研究了美国、澳大利亚和英国的职业数据。

Borrowing a methodology developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, we divided occupations into “routine” and “nonroutine” buckets.

借用圣路易斯联邦储备银行开发的一种方法，我们将职业分为“常规”和“非常规”两类。

Routine jobs involve repetitive movements, which can be more easily learned by a machine or computer, making them in theory more vulnerable to automation.

常规工作涉及重复性动作，机器或计算机可以更容易地学会这些动作，理论上这些工作更容易被自动化。

Over time, and especially during past recessions, routine jobs have declined as a share of the workforce.

随着时间的推移，特别是在过去的经济衰退期间，常规工作在劳动力中所占的比例有所下降。

But during the pandemic the rate of decline actually slowed.

但在疫情期间，下降的速度实际上放缓了。

In the two years before the pandemic automatable jobs in Australia, as a share of the total, fell by 1.8 percentage points.

在疫情暴发前的两年里，澳大利亚可自动化的工作岗位占总数的比例下降了1.8个百分点。

In the two subsequent years they fell by 0.6 percentage points.

在接下来的两年里，这一比例下降了0.6个百分点。

We find similar trends in Britain, though a recent coding change makes analysis trickier.

我们在英国发现了类似的趋势，尽管最近的编码变化使分析变得更加困难。

America today has slightly more routine jobs than you would expect based on pre-pandemic trends.

根据疫情前的趋势，现如今美国的常规工作岗位比预期的要多一些。

Economists are now working on theories which will be less prone to malfunction.

经济学家目前正在研究不太容易出错的理论。

Perhaps the routine roles which remain are particularly difficult to automate.

也许剩下的常规工种特别难实现自动化。

Perhaps in some cases technology actually improves, rather than damages, workers’ prospects.

也许在某些情况下，技术实际上改善了工人的前景，而不是损害了他们的前景。

For now a simple rule will suffice: next time you hear a blood-curdling prediction about robots and jobs, think twice.

就目前而言，一条简单的规则就足够了：下次你听到有关机器人和就业的可怕预测时，请三思。