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Does Tech-Industry Job Growth Actually Lower Wages For Some Workers? (citylab.com) 78

"A new study finds clear evidence that low-skilled workers fail to benefit from high-tech growth and development," writes a senior editor at The Atlantic (and co-founder of CityLab).

The UK-based study was co-authored by two researchers, one from the London School of Economics and the other from the Resolution Foundation in London. CityLab summarizes its results: High-tech growth leads to better jobs and higher wages for more skilled workers. But it leads to lower wages for less-skilled workers. These effects are compounded by housing costs, with less-skilled workers being even worse off when housing costs are taken into account. Indeed, the researchers see "a negative and statistically significant effect from high-tech on wages for workers in the bottom third of educational attainment."

This effect is even larger when local housing costs are included, which stands in sharp contrast to the situation for higher-skill workers: Their effective wages rise when controlling for housing costs. The reason for this unevenness boils down to the fact that high-skilled tech workers are mobile and paid at rates that factor in higher housing costs, whereas less-skilled workers are more or less trapped; people competing for low-wage jobs mostly lack the resources to move to other places.

The article concludes that spurring growth in tech-industry jobs "offers no panacea for low-wage jobs: If anything, it makes a bad and highly unequal situation even worse."
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Does Tech-Industry Job Growth Actually Lower Wages For Some Workers?

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  • by lucasnate1 ( 4682951 ) on Saturday August 10, 2019 @10:45AM (#59073774) Homepage

    Whenever there's progress, some people are inevitably left out. But don't worry, later on we just call them stupid Luddites and say it was their fault and they totally deserved it.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Whenever there's progress, some people are inevitably left out.

      It is not inevitable. The problem described in TFA is caused by NIMBY restrictions on housing construction.

      Where such restrictions don't exist, no one is being left out.

    • It is weird that the jobs most places look for are the easiest jobs to do because they just require you to navigate some cloud API like Azure. Coding experience optional.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • GDP isn't everything (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Saturday August 10, 2019 @10:58AM (#59073832)

    Which is why "but these policies increase GDP" isn't the only thing that matters when deciding on policies.

    Brexit is a good example. To an external observer, remain arguments seem to amount to "but GDP!" plus some name-calling. Same thing for pro-immigration/open borders arguments in the US.

    If you actually care about your countrymen, then there are additional considerations that argue for a middle ground approach. If you don't care about your countrymen (or if you're just dumb), then keep it up with "but GDP!' plus name-calling. Your countrymen are seeing you more and more clearly.

    • More like remain arguments boil down to:
      There is no way the EU is going to give us a better deal then we have now once we are outside the EU.
      And the whole idea of brexit was sold on the slogan of "we'll have our cake and eat it too".
      The other argument is that leaving the EU single market will require border checks between Ireland and UK, but the good friday agreements makes that illegal. And no brexiteer has given an adequate solution other than hand waving it away as being solved by "technological solutio
      • by Kohath ( 38547 )

        A discussion of pros and cons sure is better than name calling.

        I don't know if they will punish us if we don't do what they want is a persuasive argument for a continued engagement though. But I am just an outside observer.

        • Who is talking about punishment?
          Not giving the UK access to the internal market is not punishment.
          The UK wants access to it without abiding by any of the rules that the other members have to follow.
          That just isn't going to happen. It's not about punishment.
          Turn it around for a second, why should the EU do business with a country that clearly has no interest in good faith negotiations and following common rules and standards?
          When you stop paying your gym membership you don't get to keep going to the gym for
          • by Kohath ( 38547 )

            Turn it around for a second, why should the EU do business with a country that clearly has no interest in good faith negotiations and following common rules and standards?

            Why should others care what rules and standards the EU wants? The European economy isn't doing well. Picking fights is unwise when you're weak.

        • by Whibla ( 210729 )

          A discussion of pros and cons sure is better than name calling.

          I don't know if they will punish us if we don't do what they want is a persuasive argument for a continued engagement though. But I am just an outside observer.

          It's not so much an issue of punishment as it is self-harm.

          Let's put some numbers on those pros and cons:

          Pros: Current tariff situation (both imports & exports): Dairy (0%), Meat (0%), Sugars (0%), Cereals (0%), Fruit & Veg (0%), Vehicles (0%), Fish (0%).

          Cons: Approximate tariffs if we leave under the increasingly likely 'No Deal' scenario (definitely exports, we set import tariffs, with a granularity of 'global'): Dairy (40%), Meat (38%), Sugars (32%), Cereals (24%), Fruit & Veg (10%), Vehicles

          • by Kohath ( 38547 )

            I guess the UK will just have to buy that stuff from the US then. Or someone else with lower tariffs. Or produce it domestically. Markets are dynamic.

            • by Whibla ( 210729 )

              And your reply typifies the problem with the debate:

              The tariffs I mention are those set by the WTO. If two countries or economic areas do not have a trade agreement then they default to WTO rates. Of course one country can unilaterally decide to waive or lower some of those tariffs but if they do, they must do so for all countries, everywhere in the world. That's why I said the granularity is global.

              After the UK leaves the EU it will no longer be part of the trade agreements made by them. Since being part

        • I don't know if they will punish us if we don't do what they want is a persuasive argument for a continued engagement though.

          It is, because an intelligent person will frame is as "we will get more of what we want if we give them what they want". It doesn't actually matter whether the other party is getting anything or not, it matters what your outcome is going to be. And as it turns out, not giving the EU what it wants will result in a worse outcome for the UK than doing so. Anything else is a lesser concern.

          Equally importantly, the people who voted for Brexit are not going to get the things they were promised if they actually ge

      • by Whibla ( 210729 )

        A passable summation, but when you say "but the good friday agreements makes that illegal" you are incorrect, at least by my reading of it.

        The entirety of that argument stems from a rather extreme interpretation of Section 8 (Security), Paragraph 1 which states: "The participants note that the development of a peaceful environment on the basis of this agreement can and should mean a normalisation of security arrangements and practices." I suspect that to many people it would be a 'stretch' to interpret this

        • Yeah, ok. The illegal part is a bit of an exaggeration maybe.
          Maybe the text doesn't legally mean that there can't be border infrastructure, but it certainly seems like the people in Ireland and Northern Ireland have mostly interpreted it that way.
          • by Whibla ( 210729 )

            ... it certainly seems like the people in Ireland and Northern Ireland have mostly interpreted it that way.

            Most people have a tendency to believe what they read on their facebook feed or in the press, or hear on the tv. One of the reasons the Leave campaign was so successful was that it tapped into people's emotions, and after they were 'triggered' they simply stopped listening or believing anything that contradicted their now strongly held beliefs.

            Likewise, after the referendum, a small proportion of demagogues have fixed certain 'truths' in people's minds and neither evidence nor logic can dissuade any but th

    • Also, explain to me how in a 49 to 51 vote the compromise is to go with the very most extreme version of brexit?
      Seems like it is the leavers who are ignoring their countrymen.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Britain has some of the lowest wages among the big European nations. Way lower than Ireland for tech jobs.

      One reason for that is that Ireland is enjoying a massive tech boom as companies come to Ireland and employ a mix of local and imported talent. They can built the teams they need, get the people they need.

      We have already seen a lot of tech and research jobs leave the UK due to brexit. They follow the investment and research funding. They go where the teams are. Eindhoven is booming too because companies

    • to make sure that the GDP growth makes it around to everybody? I've said this before, but I wouldn't mind the H1-Bs so much if I got something for them being here besides lower wages and fewer job opportunities. Universal Healthcare would be a good start. And Tuition free college. A large scale federal jobs program like the "Green" New Deal would be nice too.

      As it stands I get nothing out of immigration unless I own a business that employs them.
      • by Kohath ( 38547 )

        Universal Healthcare would be a good start. And Tuition free college.

        How about if people who earn their paychecks got more opportunities and fewer bills? You seem to want freebies for non-workers at workers' expense:

        We certainly shouldn't have free college as long as someone like Elizabeth Warren gets paid $400,000 per year for teaching one class. Community college is already cheap and the people who go there don't need to contend with a horde of unmotivated students attending for free. If you want college costs to go down, provide an incentive for employers to hire gradu

        • You're correct, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has a cost. Including inaction.

          Take healthcare. The most conservative (e.g. right wing) estimates say a single payer "Medicare for All" system paid for with payroll taxes would save $2 trillion every 10 years vs our current system. Or take climate change, where the cost of droughts, refugees and war are in the trillions. A $15 national min wage would raise prices .03% and cost 1.3 million jobs (800k teenagers, 700k part timers) but would
      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        That's nice but what is missing of course is how does having the H1-Bs get us to any of those things. Answer - it doesn't. The globalist class wants GDP growth because they know the wealth gap exists any the vast majority of any real benefit from grow flows to them. You and I in the middle class might get a cheaper widget and enjoy a little more buying if and its a big if we don't lose our jobs. Next up considering you children they have to enter the workforce with little experience, that is an unavoidab

      • As it stands I get nothing out of immigration unless I own a business that employs them.

        That's provably untrue, and we're already seeing the proof at supermarkets. Produce prices were already going up before the latest spat of heavy weather, which is going to severely impact next year's yields, at least in part because there is a shortage of farm labor due to all this ICE activity. Our current system demands that food rots on supermarket shelves, not in fields.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Brexit is a good example. To an external observer, remain arguments seem to amount to "but GDP!" plus some name-calling.

      Maybe if you're real, real dumb.

      The remain argument is "but jobs", because it's going to affect people's actual jobs negatively, whatever it does to GDP. (Which, by the way, will also be affected negatively.)

      • by Kohath ( 38547 )

        The remain argument is "but jobs"

        Jobs for local people? Remember the topic is how tech employment brings in a lot of outsiders who bid up the price of everything and life becomes worse for non-tech local people who were there before.

        Aggregate "jobs" is not much different than aggregate GDP. There are additional considerations that argue for a middle ground approach. The objective would be to benefit (closer to) the entire society instead of tiny fractions of society located in a couple of cities. The parts matter too, not just the tota

        • Jobs for local people?

          Yes, real jobs for people who really live within the UK will be lost, because lots of businesses aren't competitive without the current state of trade.

          • by Kohath ( 38547 )

            Yes, real jobs for people who really live within the UK will be lost, because lots of businesses aren't competitive without the current state of trade.

            People who moved to the UK for a job and now "really live in the U.K." aren't what I meant by locals.

            • People who moved to the UK for a job and now "really live in the U.K." aren't what I meant by locals.

              There's been plenty of media on the subject of people who actually voted for Brexit who will be screwed by it. I remember somewhat clearly that one was a florist. Sad thing is, lots of the people who will be harmed by Brexit still say they would vote for it again, same as lots of the people harmed by Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy would vote for him again. They somehow believe they're supporting some deeper principle. Brainwashed tools.

  • by stikves ( 127823 ) on Saturday August 10, 2019 @11:20AM (#59073900) Homepage

    Technological improvements do tend to make things cheaper. This includes not only stuff like phones or cameras, but also food, energy, and building construction costs.

    So in theory (but not practice), the quality of living of all people, including the poor should actually go up. (And it does go up in many cases. Say what you want, however Walmart for example brings cheap food on the table).

    However one thing that keeps everyone down is the fixed land (plus the ever increasing regulations here in Cali. Rooftop solar is not mandated for example). We can build houses more quickly and for a lower price. However we cannot even when we need and want. So, people started living in vans, sharing a house with other families, or outright on the streets.

    The only thing that keeps us down seems to be NIMBY-ism. Please do not blame tech for failure on this regard.

    • by lucasnate1 ( 4682951 ) on Saturday August 10, 2019 @11:35AM (#59073930) Homepage

      Technological improvements do tend to make things cheaper. This includes not only stuff like phones or cameras, but also food, energy, and building construction costs.

      Funny, at least where I live, food has only become more expensive. I think it is wrong to lump all technological improvement together. If someone develops a new language for mobile apps, it doesn't make my food cheaper in any way whatsoever.

      • If I can invent a technology that replaces vast numbers of low skilled workers with machines, that will create a vast flood of desperate, unemployed people who can go into the fields and pick food for you, and that will let us grow more, higher quality food for a cheaper price.

        Which is a good thing, if you're not a low skilled worker. Which I'm not. I would presume most readers of slashdot aren't either.

        So, yeah... pretty exciting stuff. I don't want people to starve, but I'm not interested in having the

        • by lucasnate1 ( 4682951 ) on Saturday August 10, 2019 @12:54PM (#59074076) Homepage

          It's funny how many expressions people invent to dehumanize other people. It can "neg*o" or "ki*e" or "useless eaters", and sometimes it can just be "low skilled worker".

          • It's funny how quickly an industrious, hard working, benevolent, generous and charitable man loses his compassion when the beggars unite and turn their hands to robbery.

            • "... when the dispossessed unite and turn their hands to expropriation."

              FTFY

              • Yep, that's the language of thieves. When you hear those types of weasel words, you know who you're dealing with.

                • Hey, that guy built a robot that makes cars! Lets band together and go steal his shit! If enough of us go all at the same time, that make's it morally justifiable and totally legal!

                • Those are the words if the downtrodden rebelling against their dispossession.

                  The best way to avoid such revolt is to avoid situations where the few are embarrassingly rich; while the many languish without property, security, or realistic hope of advancement.

                  A society in which prosperity is widely shared is a society in which the prosperous may live without fear of their fellow man.

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          OTOH, if the "useless eaters" shrug, your grocery store shelves will be bare. Perhaps they're not actually all that useless.

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Funny, at least where I live, food has only become more expensive. I think it is wrong to lump all technological improvement together. If someone develops a new language for mobile apps, it doesn't make my food cheaper in any way whatsoever.

        Personally if I do the math I think first world food production is kinda crazy. I'll just take potatoes as an example:

        Purchase: 9.16 NOK/kg [kolonial.no]
        Paid to farmer: around 5 NOK/kg (PDF) [landbruksdirektoratet.no]
        Average salary: 45600 NOK/month [dinside.no]

        So to pay one man for a year 45600*12 = 547200 NOK he must produce >100,000 kg potatoes. And that doesn't include any costs to produce potatoes, you still need tractors, fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation and whatnot so in practice you need even bigger volumes. Nobody's picked up automation like the f

        • by Whibla ( 210729 )

          Personally if I do the math I think first world food production is kinda crazy. I'll just take potatoes as an example:

          So to pay one man for a year 45600*12 = 547200 NOK he must produce >100,000 kg potatoes. And that doesn't include any costs to produce potatoes, you still need tractors, fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation and whatnot so in practice you need even bigger volumes.

          Given that a knowledgeable and competent farmer can harvest between 16 & 28 tons of potatoes per acre - let's take a low average and call it 20 tons / acre - this means that, before expenses, you would need to cultivate a mere 5 acres to make your yearly target revenue. A single person, with machinery obviously, can easily farm 100 acres, although they'd probably require an assistant to drive the second vehicle during harvest, which should more than cover those aforementioned expenses.

          The economics are

          • by Kjella ( 173770 )

            The economics are not so obviously 'borked' as you seem to think.

            Obviously they're doing it, so it works. But I also know the farm my mother grew up on just after WW2 and heard the stories from back when they were using horses and vagrants doing day labor. Heck, even as late as the 80s my family grew a few potatoes for their own use the old fashioned way, I've dug up potatoes with a hoe. When you think about growing >100t of potatoes the old way it seems rather insane. Like, you understand why a couple centuries ago 90% was employed in agriculture and somehow we now d

    • One thing that always gets ignored is that people assume that the housing or other goods/services that people pay for are a fixed quality, which is far from the case. Compare housing from 60 years ago with what gets built today and you find that it's larger (by around 1,000 square feet [aei.org]) , nicer, and safer across the board. The cost remains fixed, or even increases as a percentage of spending, but we're getting more for that money.

      The same is true for just about everything. If you take the cost of the ori
      • Who cares? I would buy a Model T to get be from point A to point B, I buy a modern car to do the same. The expectations of people have gone up with time and they should get something that meets with their expectations for the price.
    • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      Because nothing pays the city's bills like density, neighborhoods that allow it should be rewarded by getting their potholes fixed, and neighborhoods that prohibit it should get their streets turned back into gravel, which is cheaper to maintain.

      It would also help to follow Minnesota's lead in streamlining the permitting process. A permit process should never take a year [strongtowns.org].

    • Technology gets cheaper, but the company using the technology has to be forced by market conditions to share that savings with customers. For example, the prices of groceries haven't gone down even though automatic tellers have and grocery stores are using more and more of them to replace human cashiers. The grocery store is taking the savings from those cashiers all the way to the bank.
  • by X!0mbarg ( 470366 ) on Saturday August 10, 2019 @11:37AM (#59073942)

    This is simple: If there are more workers than jobs, then the wages offered will be lower.
    After all, if "you" are not willing to work for those wages, there will be someone else desperate to put ramen on the (tv) table and start making payments on their student loans, waiting just outside the interview door.

    I have seen this way too many times to count.

    Local colleges and universities crank out a new batch, and the recruiters are there to pick them off, preying upon their desperation and empty promises of high wages "after your probationary period is up," only to drop them for the next batch of graduates, also starting at minimum wage for jobs that have been touted as 6-figure positions (according to the college recruiters).

    It doesn't matter what industry, either.
    Around here, we have a lot of Nursing graduates.
    There is an industry wide cry for qualified nurses, but none of them are willing to pay what nurses are supposed to be worth. This causes a Lot of them to look elsewhere for jobs, and move out of the area.

    And the employers continue to cry over the lack of nurses!

    Anyone remember the Great Push for M.C.S.E. in the tech industry?
    The vast majority of them got jobs in Call Centres for minimum wage!

    And the cycle continues...

    • by prefec2 ( 875483 )

      People with student loans are not considered low in education. Also the student loan issue of the US might not be present in the same way in the UK, where the study was conducted. Furthermore, more workers does not result in lower wages in general. The issue is much more complex. If there would be only workers and employers and the employers have a constant need for labor then all workers compete with each other in this market and all employers compete with each other for workers.

      This simple model fails in

  • So, really, nothing to do with wages, per se, but more about how the cost of living goes up in high-tech areas. Low-wage earners don't make less money, they just can't afford to do as much with it.
  • It's important to have the study done and published, but the results shouldn't be surprising to anyone.

    That said, I expect that there are many defects in the study. There usually are. I would be quite surprised, however, if a new study that fixed those defects produced a different result.

  • by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Saturday August 10, 2019 @12:21PM (#59074008)

    Tech succeeds in industries where there are inefficiencies.
    Salaries are high when there are inefficiencies and need to be covered with human intelligence.
    So yeah once a computer is helping than the skill level needed and salary offered for a job goes down.

    Lets say Taxis - Drivers not only had to be able to drive, they had to be able to navigate the city. Now add Google Maps and any idiot can navigate. Voila Uber . Any idiot can be a taxi driver and hence a lower salary than what taxi drivers were making.

  • by epine ( 68316 ) on Saturday August 10, 2019 @04:32PM (#59074524)

    I despair at the idiocy of these headlines from time to time.

    First question: are we talking general or special relativity here? Are we discussing a proximal economic dislocation due to size, velocity, or acceleration?

    The real wage myth [econlib.org] — circa May 2019

    BTW, these time series understate the growth in total labor compensation, as the cost of fringe benefits such as health care has risen faster than nominal wage growth.

    Fringe? A large component of the rise in total compensation for the lower and middle class over the past decade or so is entirely contained in terms not reflected in hourly wages paid.

    Okay, so this economics blogger actually understands how compensation number work, but then he pulls this clanger out of his backside in the very next sentence:

    Whatever explains the rise of populism in America, it is not stagnant wages.

    WTF? Perception never drives behaviour? In what alternate universe does this blogger reside?

    What's happening is that the cost of longevity has an exponential term, certainly beyond about 75 years of life expectancy, further small gains are obtained at a great price.

    Pfizer Gets Back to Growth [fool.com] — 9 February 2016

    With peak annual sales of roughly $13 billion, Lipitor was the planet's best-selling drug in the 2000s; however, sales of Lipitor plummeted after the drug lost patent protection in November 2011.

    Quality-adjusted life year [wikipedia.org]
    The value of atorvastatin over the product life cycle in the United States [nih.gov] — 2011

    Assuming increasing statin use over time (with a mean of 1.07 million new users per year) and a 3% discount rate, the cumulative incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of atorvastatin versus simvastatin ranged from cost-savings at release to a maximum of $45,066/QALY after 6 years of generic simvastatin use in 2012.

    Over the full modeled life cycle (1997-2030), the cumulative ICER of atorvastatin was $20,331/QALY. The incremental value of atorvastatin to US payers (after subtracting costs) was estimated at $44.57 to $194.78 billion, depending on willingness to pay.

    I remain a bit perplexed over how these QALY partial derivatives are teased out, when the average person cresting 60 years of age is assigned an entire portfolio of similar prophylactic drugs. This is inherently a "weak link" class of system. You only need to die once to become a statistic. If you find yourself taking three of these drugs at the same time, does $/QALY triple in size. $150,000/QALY is starting to look like real money even for the upper middle class.

    The medical-industrial complex craves tenuous longevity with a ferocity unrivalled in human history.

    Historical [cms.gov]

    U.S. health care spending grew 3.9 percent in 2017, reaching $3.5 trillion or $10,739 per person.

    Norwich University: The Cost of U.S. Wars Then and Now [norwich.edu] — undated (definitely don't attend this second-rate institution of higher learning)

    Though it lasted fewer than four years, World War II was the most expensive war in United States history. Adjusted for inflation to todayâ(TM)s dollars, the war cost over $4 trillion and in 1945, the warâ(TM)s last year, defense spending c

    • Ah, that's why I pound these posts out. I just experienced a self-inflicted cluestick moment.

      The medical-industrial complex has a death grip on trying to force Americans to value their distance future selves.

      This is why compensation structure is now rigged to provide the largest increase where least observable. If it were observable, it would certainly also be discretionary (why else bother making the observation?) If discretionary, little chance your present-self hoards these funds to later enrich the medi

  • In fact, the world is purposely automating a number of things, which includes a lot of low-end jobs since it is hard to find workers for them.
  • average employee wage ~ (total profits - shareholder_pay - management_pay)* willingness_to_pay_factor / number_of_employees

    Increase the number of employees and be amazed at what happens next.

  • by Sqreater ( 895148 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @05:00AM (#59075770)
    Once again they avoid the real problem. Tech is leaving behind the lower IQ levels as the jobs walk up the IQ curve relentlessly. Call it what it is. Deal with reality by speaking about reality in a real way.
  • by dcw3 ( 649211 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @07:02AM (#59075872) Journal

    If you're getting your news from The Atlantic, you're doing it wrong. And, I'm not picking sides...same can be said for Fox & MSNBC. They're fine if you want fluff and opinion, but otherwise should all be ignored.

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