생산성 향상과 일자리, 그리고 농업

제조업의 일자리는 중국이 빼앗아 간 것이 아니라 자동화기기 등으로 인한 생산성 향상이 빼앗아 간 것입니다. 그로 인해 가격이 떨어지고, 돈을 아끼게 된 사람들은 제품을 더 소비하는 게 아니라 서비스를 소비한다고.... 

이것이 농업에도 똑같이 적용되겠네요. 농업생산성 향상이 농산물 가격의 하락으로 이어지고, 경쟁이 붙어 자연스레 몇몇 농민에게로 생산수단이 집중되고, 어느 한계점을 지나 더 이상 농산물 생산만으로는 먹고 살기 어려워 가공이나 체험, 관광 등 서비스를 제공하는 방향으로 나아갈 수밖에 없는... 지금의 모습이네요. 

This chart will change how you think about manufacturing

This chart, contained within slides of a presentation by Robert Z. Lawrence and Lawrence Edwards promoting their new book “Rising Tide: Is Growth in Emerging Economies Good for the United States?,” is quite something.

What this shows is that the decline in manufacturing as a share of overall employment has been ongoing since the 1960s and 1970s, and has not really picked up pace in recent decades.

Consider what this means. If someone had cornered you in 1980 and asked you to predict what the level manufacturing employment would be at in 2009, and you did a straightforward linear projection of the previous two decades, you would have gotten it almost exactly right. You wouldn’t have known about the fall of the Soviet Union or the rise of China or the scale of advances in international communication or automation, but you still would have gotten it almost exactly right.

Their book goes on to show that similar declines have happened, at roughly the same pace, all around the world.

“These data suggest a cause that is common, pervasive and not closely related to the size of the trade balance,” the authors conclude.

Rather, the change is due to rapid productivity growth. That is, automation is reducing the amount of labor required to produce a given amount of goods. That means that prices fall. If people respond those price changes by buying more and more of the underlying good, then sales will increase and employment may not fall. But that’s not happened. Instead, people are saving money on manufactured goods and buying more services, instead. That’s led to the decline in manufacturing jobs.