Cheap Labor and the Great Stagnation

July 27th, 2011  |  Published in Political Economy, Work  |  8 Comments

The National Employment Law Project has a [new report out](http://www.nelp.org/goodjobsdeficit) Called "The Good Jobs Deficit", in which they note that the terrible job market is even worse than people realize. Not only are few jobs being created, but those that are being created are predominantly low-wage jobs, worse than the ones they are replacing. Thus the wages of American workers are stagnant or even falling in some cases.

This isn't really surprising, as we've known about the problem of [low-wage job growth](http://www.urbanresearch.org/projects/low-wage-work-metropolitan-america) for a while. But the report made me think about something else: Tyler Cowen's recent book, [*The Great Stagnation*](http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS). In that book, Cowen took note of the stagnation of incomes for the broad majority, but he interpreted it as a symptom of a deeper problem:

> Median income is the single best measure of how much we are producing new ideas that benefit most of the American population. Yet the picture is depressing . . . You can see the rate of growth of per capita median income slows down around 1973, which I take as the end of the era of low-hanging fruit. As an approximation, if median income had continued to grow at its earlier postwar rate, the median family income today would be over $90,000.

Cowen goes on to say that "The American left has pointed out and indeed stressed measures of stagnant median income, but it usually blames politics, insufficient redistribution, or poor educational opportunities rather than considering the idea of a technological plateau." So for Cowen, the causal story is that technological stagnation leads to stagnating income. He treats the innovation slowdown as basically exogenous, the result of a lack of "low hanging fruit", easily discovered and exploited technologies that can increase our standard of living. So at the end of the book, Cowen's recommendation is essentially that we should try to make science a higher-prestige occupation, and then just wait around and accept stagnation until somebody finds some more low-hanging fruit.

But I think Cowen gives insufficient attention to the reverse causal story: one cause of technological stagnation is that labor is too cheap. As Daron Acemoglu [explains](http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/14809.html) in this paper, you can use the tools of mainstream economics to construct a model in which the development of labor-saving technology is more rapid when there is scarcity of labor. Economic historians [have suggested](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habakkuk_thesis) that one of the reasons that technological progress in the 19th century was faster in the United States than in Britain was that labor was scarce in the U.S.

The reasoning here is pretty straightforward. A rational manager will only adopt labor-saving technology if it is cheaper than the labor it replaces. And when labor is scarce, wages rise as employers compete against each other for workers, making it more attractive to save on labor by using machines instead. For instance, suppose a [self checkout](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_checkout) machine for a grocery store ends up costing $10 per hour over its lifetime, when you account for purchase and maintenance costs. If your cashiers make $8 per hour, there's no reason to use the machines. But if they make $12, you have an incentive to replace cashiers with machines, and manufacturers have more incentive to come up with this kind of labor saving technology.

This isn't great for the cashiers who lose their jobs, obviously. But in the larger scheme of things, working at a supermarket checkout isn't the kind of fulfilling and valuable work we really want to preserve, and this kind of technological change is necessary if we want to improve our overall standard of living and move in the direction of a [post-scarcity society](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/). That's one of the reasons I argued that preserving and creating jobs [shouldn't be the left's main preoccupation](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/). Instead, we need to ease the pain of unemployment for those who are displaced.

But in addition, we need to raise wages. So how do we make labor more expensive? One way is to raise the minimum wage and increase rates of unionization, which are both good ideas. And rising wages [in China](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977049.htm) will hopefully start to improve the situation on a global scale. But in the United States, the most important thing is to get back to full employment--i.e., create labor scarcity throughout the labor market. Just keep in mind that we don't necessarily need to do it by [creating a ton of jobs](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/).

Responses

  1. Assorted links — Marginal Revolution says:

    July 28th, 2011 at 12:13 pm (#)

    […] 4. Cheap labor and TGS. […]

  2. Noah Yetter says:

    July 28th, 2011 at 12:26 pm (#)

    Creating artificial scarcity of labor just results in unemployment. I can’t take an ex-cashier and make them a software engineer. Destroying low-wage jobs does no more to create viable alternative high-wage jobs than mandated 35-hour workweeks do to reduce unemployment.

  3. Steve Sailer says:

    July 28th, 2011 at 3:51 pm (#)

    It’s long been documented that California’s farms lag behind similar farms in Australia in adopting new labor-saving technology because of California growers’ easy access to huge numbers of low-skill, low-wage illegal immigrants.

  4. Richard says:

    July 28th, 2011 at 9:56 pm (#)

    Good idea when policies are actually in place to ease the suffering of the unemployed.

  5. Outstripping Work « Gucci Little Piggy says:

    July 29th, 2011 at 8:02 am (#)

    […] Peter Frase provides an elitist roadmap for the future of work.  Frase wrote, using the grocery store checkout […]

  6. Inequality, Economic Stagnation and Product Innovation | Rortybomb says:

    October 31st, 2011 at 3:00 pm (#)

    […] Frase made a similar point in an excellent post about how cheap labor can lead to stagnation in innovation.  But for Yglesias’ point, we […]

  7. v says:

    October 31st, 2011 at 6:42 pm (#)

    Outsourcing at the high end job level (software, engineering, medicine etc.,) (which is nothing but labor arbitrage) will decimate the US. For every one of these jobs outsourced, 5 jobs in the US in the middle and lower level is decimated.

    The supply curve is so drastically shifted and there is absolutely no chance for this to change unless a huge pool of workers in developed economies completely abandon these professions (which they can’t do easily since they require very long education time). Also for people who have taken microeconomics, both China and India are VERY LARGE countries and there are exceptions in microeconomics text to these cases which involve VERY LARGE countries. When a country is small (say vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore etc.,) and outsourcing happens there, not much gets affected.

    The sad part is that CEO’s, consulting firms and investment banks get paid multimillion dollars to do this easy stuff and go around claiming that
    a. they have invented next best thing to sliced bread and have optimized something (consultants)
    b. they are doing god’s work (investment bankers)
    c. they have created shareholder value (CEOs)

    Truly pathetic. The only value added by the above bozos is that they have found someone who can do the job for lesser pay.

  8. Three Last Points, for the Left and Right, on Romney’s Comment About the Poor and Middle-Income | Rortybomb says:

    February 5th, 2012 at 6:12 pm (#)

    […] arguments being floated that a strong middle-class is essential for product innovation as well as labor-saving technological progress.  This will be an important avenue of research for years to […]

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