There’s an American report called JOLTS. It’s a deeper look at the labour markets over there. Not just how many are unemployed, but how many have been fired, how many hired and how many quit and how many hired. So, it’s a look at the flow through employment - the unemployment number being those who are fired or quit but don’t get hired, the stock of unemployment.
ONS tracks the same numbers over here but not in quite such a regular or even noted fashion.
Over 55s most likely to lose their jobs to robots, study finds
Up to 10 million UK workers could be replaced by artificial intelligence within 15 years
There are those who work beyond retirement age, we agree, but we’d expect the number of over 55s who will lose their jobs within the next 15 years to be asymptotically approaching 100%. But that’s just headline writing. The underlying:
Staff aged over 55 are more likely than any other group of workers to lose their jobs to robots, the first study of its kind has found.
The research by University College London (UCL) economists found nine in 10 workers aged over 55 were made redundant as robot technology replaced humans for “routine” tasks.
By contrast, 70pc of younger workers kept their jobs after retraining and switching to higher skilled more “abstract” jobs either within their own firm or another business, according to the study of 16,000 firms employing millions of staff.
It follows industry estimates that as many as 10 million UK workers are at risk of being replaced by robots within 15 years as the automation of routine tasks gathers pace.
We don’t see anything all that unusual there. The incentive to retrain - whether from the worker or the employer - when there’re 30 years of working life left to amortise that retraining cost will be higher than when there’re merely those few years to retirement anyway.
But back to JOLTS and the ONS figures. What we really want to know is whether this is all some terror, the headlight on the train approaching through the tunnel, or merely some glimmer of daylight. Those flow numbers of employment telling us that around and about 10% of all jobs get destroyed each year, around and about 10% of all jobs are newly created each year. A rough number, yes, but it’s not 1% and it’s not 100% - we’re in the right order of magnitude there at least.
The jobs created are very rarely exactly the same as those destroyed - there’s near always at least some technological shift or movement across sectors involved.
We expect, in this coming 15 years, to see 150% of the jobs in the country destroyed and recreated with that jump to the left or the step to the right. The claim here about 10 million is some 30% or so of all jobs over that 15 years. We’re also told what the compensatory mechanism is - folk get retrained when it’s worthwhile their being so.
We might well mutter that we’d prefer technological change to move a little more slowly so that there’s no one left unemployed - for those technological reasons - in the run up to the Golden Years. We might also insist that we want it to work faster. Technological change is not just akin or related to rising productivity it is rising productivity.
Our point here though is different. There’s nothing very unusual about this. We’ve been doing it these past 250 years as that capitalism and free market mix brought about constant and consistent technological advance. Given that there’s nothing very different going on now than has been happening this past couple of centuries we tend to think it’s not something greatly worth worrying about.
The absence of it, now that would be that light at the end of the tunnel and it wouldn’t be the daylight.