By Michel Santi, economist
In a world where artificial intelligence and robotics are changing human work patterns, Nobel laureate in economics Daron Acemoglu offers a nostalgic vision.
Tax reform to prevent excessive automation, mandatory consultation with employees before validation and implementation of innovations. In short, an attempt to tame the tide of technology.
In reality, fighting against an irresistible current is like trying to hold back the ocean with a sand bar. This postulate is certainly a noble one, consisting in slowing down the pace of technology in the name of the ideal of social protection.
The Grand Illusion of “Proper” Automation.
Acemoglu talks about “excessive automation,” as if there were a thermometer of technological progress, a slider managed by a ministry that would regulate the amount of innovation that could be tolerated.
What is “excessive” automation? Who determines it? According to what criteria?
Technology does not follow an administrative timeline, but instead follows a learning curve, scale effects, and positive externalities. Taxing a transition would be neither fair nor smart, but it is certainly costly, slow and inefficient. In fact, Acemoglu only proposed reducing the marginal productivity of capital to artificially maintain labor productivity. This is the opposite of what economic progress has demanded.
Let’s have a marathon runner run with a sandbag to give pedestrians a chance.
Back to the beginning of the 20th century
Born in 1900, would Acemoglu have imposed a tax on machines that exceeded the speed suitable for horses, empowering unions to distribute to them a share of the increased productivity of the automobile?
The advent of the automobile wiped out the equestrian industry, taking millions of horses off the roads and depriving millions of grooms, blacksmiths, and servants of the field of work. Will Acemoglu call for a tax on thermal engines to limit their speed to “horse speed” (10 km/h), for mandatory consultations with horse breeders before the launch of the Ford T, to strengthen breeder unions to gain increased productivity from the “new engines”?
Veto the past on the future
The proposal requiring prior consultation with workers regarding the implementation of any technology is one of Acemoglu’s most perverse ideas, and would consist of the creation of internal evaluation committees, endless validation procedures, implicit veto mechanisms, in short a general bureaucratization of innovation.
Can we imagine typists voting on the adoption of computers? Archiver validates database arrival? Cinema projectors agree to digital video? For centuries, no major innovation has been able to survive such a process.
Macro vision to avoid being outdated
Automation is not a political choice or a passing fad: it is a gravitational force driven by global competition, by exponential advances in AI, and ultimately by the quest for mega-profits. Trying to prevent this through taxes or mandatory consultation is the same as imposing a fine on the tide so that the tide will rise more slowly.
Human labor is something that is economically sacred, until now it is no longer the case. And applying the industrial model to a post-cooperative economy is the same as trying to regulate the internet using Postal Codes and Telecommunications. When the real problem – the only one
– is to guarantee income and social stability in a world where automation generates enormous wealth with little human labor.
Upheavals in the way value is distributed require universal income or equal functioning, taxation based more on value flows than employment, mechanisms for participating in the automatic increase in capital productivity, educational systems centered on creativity, analysis, common culture, and not on competition with machines.
Nobel looked at work when it was society that interested me. He calls for a future that slows down and pits progress against social justice.
Michel Santi is a macroeconomist, specialist in financial markets and central banking, and author. He published “A Levantine Youth” with Favre Edition, Foreword by Gilles Kepel. His Twitter feed.
