Technology In The Workplace

Currently, a major concern in the United States among both politicians and citizens is the lack of a “middle class” which has been a symbol of economic strength in years’ past. People are unsure what the causes of this disappearance is, but there is a lot of economic data recently provided by U.S. Census Bureau to show what types of jobs are being displaced most often. There has been convincing data that shows a massive displacement of middle class labor and many believe that is an effect of an increase of technology in the workplace. In a scholarly article analyzing the reasoning for an increase in certain types of unemployment, written by three Cornell faculty members, John M. Abowd, Michael R. Strain, and Lars Vilhuber, Technology and the

The assumption is made in the author’s decision to assign a skill level to jobs; they create graphs of data on job losses during the period based on compensation and not skill level. Although, in many cases a “higher skill” job would pay more than a “low skill” job based on prerequisites and other factors, this is not always the case. This is an extremely important contextual warrant because it allows the authors to make a claim based on displacement of the jobs in a skill level due to technology, instead of making a claim on the compensation of employees due to technology. Author’s Abowd, Strain, and Vilhuber make this clear in the introduction of their article when they say,” A computer is not going to replace a custodian — computers cannot yet make the rounds in an office after hours, emptying trash cans, … But a computer could replace a bookkeeper” (Abowd, Strain, and Vilhuber 1). This is the main claim that the article is trying to prove, that technology is displacing many mid level jobs such as bookkeeping and pushing them to tasks that could not be completed by technology. This claim is not evident based on the data provided by the Census, because the only way that they could accurately measure job level is by compensation tiers. It is not for the Census Bureau to determine what job requires more skill, but that

Although their claim is based on a combination of warrants and deductive reasoning, which can be seen as weak, they make up for that by correctly using both techniques and drew conclusions based on evident data. The claim that technology is displacing jobs aligns with some of the different research that I have done on the topic. Andrew McAfee, an economics professor at M.I.T, recently gave a TED talk called What Will Future Jobs Look Like?, where he explains how technology will advance to the point where many employees are unneeded. He states,” If you look over the last couple of decades … at the returns to corporate profit we can see that they are at an all-time high … if we look at total wages paid out we see that at an all-time low”(TED, McAfee). This data closely ties to the claim made by Abowd, Strain, and Vilhuber, due to the belief that technology is the explanation to the disappearances of many jobs. Although the two perspectives draw from different data sources, they both point to a similar conclusion, that technology has been displacing many jobs in the economy and has the potential to displace more. Two University of Chicago students, Ethan Lieber and Chad Syverson explain the advantage that the Internet plays in lowering costs and reducing competition in their scholarly