(p. A17) Technology disrupting the workforce is not a new phenomenon and it has never proved a lasting impediment for those eager to work. The invention of, say, the internal-combustion engine put buggy-whip makers and carriage assemblers out of business, but it created many more jobs in the manufacture, advertising, sales and maintenance of automobiles. Other technologies, from the cotton gin to the airplane, expanded job opportunities and created goods and services that made the hard work worthwhile.
What is unique about today’s digital revolution is the suspicion, fanned by progressives, that for the first time technology threatens to make obsolete not only some jobs–as assembly-line robotics has, for instance–but human labor itself.
. . .
That poor schooling, and not some intrinsic human limitation, is the real barrier to full employment seems to be borne out by what economists call the “skills gap.” More than nine million Americans are currently looking for work, but 5.4 million job openings continue to sit unfilled, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most of the largest increases have been in health care or professional and business services.
In a recent study by the large U.S. online job site, CareerBuilder, more than half the employers surveyed had positions for which they could not find qualified candidates: 71% had trouble finding information-technology specialists, 70% engineers, 66% managers, 56% health-care and other specialists, and 52% financial operations personnel. Nearly half of small and medium-size employers say they can find few or no “qualified applicants” for recent vacancies, according to the latest survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses.
With the Labor Department conceding that help-wanted postings have “remained at a historically high level,” this is the time not to rail against technology but to use it to make education more effective: gearing coursework to the learning styles of individual students, identifying and remedying disabilities early on, and providing online access to the best classes in the world.
For the full commentary, see:
LEWIS M. ANDREWS. “Robots Don’t Mean the End of Human Labor; The left frets about the impact of technology, but new jobs will be created. The real problem is bad schools.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Aug. 24, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on Aug. 23, 2015.)