Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…Okay, well, if you cover it up really well. No. I think the nuance here is that I am also very committed to expertise, obviously, given where I am. One challenge, which I mentioned in passing, and perhaps I should have done more in the book on this, is how do you utilize and respect expertise without creating the wrong kind of technocracy that is insular and too self-confident and, frankly, looking down upon the rest? Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve created in the United States and Europe, and that’s what working-class liberalism has to avoid. Now, here’s a sentence in your book that I very much disagreed with. I almost thought you left out a word. Let me read it to you, and I’ll tell you why I disagree. You wrote, “Automation is central to my account because it severs the link between mass production and shared prosperity. ” Now, I view automation as creating the link between mass production and shared prosperity. There’s a lot of evidence that automation doesn’t lower the labor share. I know well your papers with Restrepo. That’s about the composition of labor income, right? Not about the total labor share. There’s a new paper out by Barany, Patel, and Siegel looking at France up through 2019. Automation doesn’t harm the labor share at all, so why be so negative on automation? I just think it’s great. There are two parts to this. The first is how to put automation in our pantheon of different types of technological changes. By the way, by just having this conversation, we have gone way beyond what most economists do, which is to give up the pretense that there is just one kind of technology, that technology has a uniform effect. We’re explicitly talking about automation because there are other kinds of technological changes as well. I think that’s very important. I think blackboxing of technology is one of the least productive things that we’ve done as economists. By the way, I’m guilty of this for the first 15 years of my career too. Second is what is the conceptual and then empirical effects of automation? Let me start with the second. I don’t know this new paper that you mentioned.…

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