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美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-111:EDUCATION AND INCOME INEQUALITY-3

技术性失业

技术性失业，是由于科技进步而引发的失业潮，例如工业革命引发的大量劳动人口的失业：蒸汽机、织布机、电灯等的发明；

以及近代的自动化机械手臂、电子道路收费系统、各式自动化剪票口、未来的自动驾驶汽车等等。

技术性失业通常产生卢德派之类的反科技进步组织，不过他们的抗争没办法对技术进步造成实质的阻碍。

由于近代的工业革命（目前是互连网、物联网科技以及自动化机械）可能造成绝大数人都遭到技术性失业，所以不少社会学家在研究新的制度与对策，以应付大范围技术性失业而造成的贫富差距问题，例如无条件基本收入就是一例。

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Until quite recently, judging from the numerous rounds of successful trade negotiations, globalization has been generally accepted. 

There is little doubt, however, that, driven by rapidly expanding innovation and competition, 

globalization has been a major contributor to the increasing concentration of income virtually everywhere. 

In the past couple of decades, 

innovation, especially Internet-related, has been moving faster than we can educate ourselves to apply advancing technologies. 

Thus, the shortfall of the supply of advanced skills relative to the demand for them is pressing the wages of skilled workers higher relative to the wages of the less skilled. 

There is no compelling reason why the pace of innovative ideas, which often come in bunches, should be immediately matched by a supply of skilled workers to implement them. 

The insights that advance cutting-edge technologies emerge from a very small part of that workforce. 

As globalization increased the skilled wage premium, technological innovation 

was also taking a toll on lesser-skilled workers. 

The demand for moderately skilled workers declined as repetitive jobs were gradually displaced by computer programs. 

I recall architectural and engineering firms with acres of people drawing detailed designs for the newest building complex or jet aircraft. 

Those jobs are all gone—programmed out of existence. 

Lower-income workers, mainly in services not subject to global competition, 

have fared somewhat better. 

Fears of Americans that immigration is undercutting their wage levels have yet to be confirmed by hard evidence. 

In general, lower-income U.S. workers did poorly in the 1980s but have fared somewhat better in recent years. 

During the past quarter century, as incomes at the middle and lower levels of the U.S. income distribution lagged, those of the most affluent rose rapidly. 

Americans have seen this before. 

The last time income in the United States was concentrated in the hands of such a relatively few people was a brief period in the late 1920s and, I suspect more durably, in the years preceding World War I.

397 

THE AGE OF TURBULENCE 

Owing to the rapid development of the United States as a national market in the latter part of the nineteenth century, 

income had become highly concentrated by the early years of the twentieth 

century, as the Rockefellers, Fords, Morgans, and Carnegies were able to reach beyond their local fiefdoms to leverage their incomes by many multiples. 

The newly rich were a much larger group than the prominent few families that so engaged the society pages at the turn of the century. 

The striking income disparities of the early twentieth century, however, 

were driven by a substantially larger concentration of wealth than exists today.

Much of the income concentration of those days reflected interest, dividends, and capital gains from that wealth, rather than wage and salary differentials.* 

In contrast, the income concentration of today owes more to the generation of high incomes from work spurred by the imbalance between the demand for skilled workers and their available supply. 

Nonetheless, the trends are troublesome. 

Corporate managers persistently identify the lack of skilled workers as one of today's greatest ongoing problems and are willing to bid up pay packages to acquire them. 

Technological advance is rarely smooth. 

It can take years for labor markets to adjust to a surge in such demand. 

They do so by bidding up skilled-worker pay scales, which attracts workers from abroad and encourages resident workers to acquire more schooling or otherwise gain greater skills. 

But the response takes time, and access to skilled foreigners is constrained. 

In the interim, the rise in skilled-worker wage levels, unmatched by a proportionate 

rise for those with lesser skills, concentrates income in the upper brackets. 

By and large, aside from many protectionist initiatives, 

globalization's contribution to increasing inequality has not drawn heavy opposition—at least not yet. 

The difficulties encountered in the most recent multilateral effort (the Doha round of trade negotiation) to further ease restrictions on international trade, however, have raised political red flags against a further spread of globalization. 

*Data on wealth distribution in the late nineteenth century are sparse, but the large prevalence of property income confirms the vast anecdotal evidence of those years. 

The decline in the concentration of income in the 1930s and through World War II owed to weakened asset values and capital losses, 

the hypertight labor markets of World War II, and the wage and price controls that inhibited supply and demand from functioning. 

Parenthetically, one consequence of those controls was the emergence of company-supplied medical insurance as a means to attract workers whose wages were frozen. 

The consequences of that system are all too evident to today's U.S. manufacturers. 

398 

EDUCATION AND INCOME INEQUALITY 

(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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