BLOOMBERG: A Robot Tax Is a Bad Idea

Description

Guido Matias Cortes of Manchester University in the U.K., Nir Jaimovich of the University of Southern California and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia have long studied the decline of routine jobs, which involve a narrow set of specific activities performed by following well-defined instructions. They can be both manual -- operating a forklift or repairing home appliances -- and cognitive: secretarial work, bookkeeping, serving clients in a bank branch. In 1979, 40.5 percent of the working age population in the U.S. held such jobs; that share stayed constant for another decade, but then, by 2014, it dropped to 31.2 percent. 

It's mostly people, both men and women, with a high-school education or less who accounted for the decline, Cortes, Jaimovich and Siu point out in a just-published paper; some of them ended up out of work, others took non-routine manual jobs -- became waiters and other service workers or, say security guards. That kind of employment has gone up.