Wednesday, October 20, 2010

MIT Economist on the Polarization of the Workforce

Here how one company promotes its product line.


Link to October 13 GOOD article, "Automation Insurance: Robots Are Replacing Middle Class Jobs".


Excerpt: In his report, Autor says that a leading explanation for the disappearance of the middle class is “ongoing automation and off-shoring of middle-skilled ‘routine’ tasks that were formerly performed primarily by workers with moderate education (a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree).” Routine tasks, he explains, are ones that “can be carried out successfully by either a computer executing a program or, alternatively, by a comparatively less-educated worker in a developing country.”

The culprit, in other words, is technology. The hard truth—and you don’t see it addressed in news reports—is that the middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete
.

For some odd reason, Metropolis springs to mind.

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