Are robots and aging demographics self-cancelling problems?

Dean Baker says yes:

This is one where a baseball bat might be necessary. If you are concerned that a falling ratio of workers to retirees is going to make us poor then you are not concerned that excessive productivity growth will leave tens of millions without jobs. Let’s try that again. If you are concerned that a falling ratio of workers to retirees is going to make us poor then you are not concerned that excessive productivity growth will leave tens of millions without jobs.

It is possible for too much productivity growth to be a problem, if the gains are not broadly shared. It is also possible for too little productivity growth to be a problem as a growing population of retirees imposes increasing demands on the economy. But, it is not possible for both to simultaneously be problems.

That is missing the point, as there is too much talk of “productivity growth” per se and not enough of either distribution or political economy.  If robots concentrate wealth in the hands of IP owners, wages for many workers might fall or remain stagnant.  That is a problem.

Similarly, if robots concentrate wealth in the hands of IP owners, it may be hard to drum up the tax revenue to support a higher dependency ratio.  The wealthy may produce a blocking political coalition or capital simply may be harder to tax for mobility, accountancy, and Laffer curve-like reasons.  There is then a problem with the dependency ratio.

We then have both problems, no contradiction.

Note that we can get out of at least one half of this mess if the robots are especially good at taking care of old people.  That seems unlikely to me, at least in earlier stages of robot development, but of course it is not impossible.  In reality, many old people would fare somewhat better if our economy were somewhat more like that of Mexico, namely with cheaper land and cheaper servants.  You could imagine robots lowering wages by say ten percent, yet still labor wouldn’t be cheap enough for most old people to afford much more in the way of servants.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed