Automation and increasingly sophisticated computers have boosted demand for both highly educated and low-skilled workers around the globe, while eroding demand for middle-skilled jobs, according to research to be presented to global central bankers on Friday.
But only the highly educated workers are benefiting through higher wages, wrote MIT professor David Autor in the paper prepared for a central banking conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Middle- and lower-skilled workers are seeing their wages decline.
That is in part because as middle-skilled jobs dry up, those workers are more likely to seek lower-skilled jobs, boosting the pool of available labour and putting downward pressure on wages.
“(W)hile computerisation has strongly contributed to employment polarisation, we would not generally expect these employment changes to culminate in wage polarisation except in tight labour markets,” Autor wrote.
Any long-term strategy to take advantage of advances in computers should rely heavily on investments in human capital to produce “skills that are complemented rather than substituted by technology,” he said.
