How to create more jobs in the United States

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I believe you like the United States very much, or you should have something to do with the United States.

The warm early spring weather in New York brought supporters of the Occupy movement back to Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. On the 17th, hundreds of supporters returned to the park to celebrate the half-anniversary of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. However, in the past six months, the Occupy movement, which once swept nearly a thousand cities around the world, has become increasingly sparse in followers. With campaign funds set to run out by the end of the month, the most ambitious left-wing movement since the mortgage crisis is coming to an end.

Although the street movement has faded, reflection in American intellectual circles is heating up. Both are focusing on the same focus: the widening gap between rich and poor in the United States.

Simon Kuznets, the Russian-American Nobel Prize winner in economics, proposed the famous Kuznets curve theory in 1955. He believed that with the development of industrialization, the income gap will show an n-shaped trend, that is, in the early stages of industrialization, the income gap will It will get bigger and bigger, and with factors such as democratization and welfare state policies, the income gap will gradually fall back after hitting the top. This theory indeed reflects the real situation in the first half of the 19th century. However, in the second half, especially since the 1970s and 1980s, the n-shaped trend reversed into a U-shaped trend, and the income gap in the United States began to expand sharply.

According to the latest research by Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (Weibo), the income of the richest 10% of Americans as a proportion of total personal income in the United States began to rise sharply after the 1970s. Although It fell back during the Asian Financial Crisis and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, but the current ratio is close to the level before the Great Depression in 1927, which means that the richest 10% of the US now controls about half of the national income. Even more astonishing is that during the 2009-2010 recovery period, 93% of the new wealth in the United States was captured by the richest 1%.

Since the 1970s, the situation of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is weakening the American middle class. The concentration of wealth at the top is changing the shuttle-shaped social structure that the United States is proud of. The middle class The proportion of households has dropped from 65% in the 1970s to 44%.

As for the cause of this phenomenon, the Occupy faction simply attributed it to the greed of capitalists, but this is obviously not very convincing, because capitalists did not become greedy after the 1970s. American academic circles are increasingly inclined to attribute this phenomenon to two reasons: technological progress and globalization.

Looking back on the first industrial revolution, technology was also an important reason for the widening income gap. For example, the output of a workshop using steam engines must be higher than that of a workshop using labor or livestock as power, so the income gap between the two will inevitably widen. Nowadays, technology plays this role again. The gap between people's natural intelligence and knowledge has been infinitely magnified by technology. The rapid development of science and technology and financial technology has begun to show increasing asymmetry, that is, smart people will use technology to Tools to gain more social wealth.

Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is an example. In less than eight years, he went from a poor student to the sixth richest man in the world with a net worth of more than 30 billion U.S. dollars. This myth of sudden wealth has always been It was obviously unimaginable a hundred years ago.

While scientific and technological progress makes the rich richer, it may also make the poor poorer. In what Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff calls the "intelligent machine age", robots (23.400,0.47,2.05%) are moving from It takes jobs away from blue-collar workers and even ordinary white-collar workers, and decouples economic growth from job creation. Facebook is expected to have a market value of more than US$75 billion after its listing, but it will only employ less than 3,000 people. General Motors, a representative of traditional manufacturing, has a market value of US$35 billion, but employs 77,000 people in the United States and 210,000 people worldwide. . An even scarier picture is that robots will also take over these jobs in the future.

Another reason for the widening income gap and the decline of the middle class is globalization. The reallocation of resources by capital on a global scale has improved global economic efficiency and enlarged the global economic pie. But in this process, developed countries are both beneficiaries and victims. Those who benefit are high-end finance, technology industry and other sectors, and those who suffer are industrial workers in low-end manufacturing. Industrial outsourcing has not only hollowed out the manufacturing industry, but is also hollowing out the traditional middle class in the United States.

The current total number of U.S. manufacturing jobs is 11.8 million, a 40% decrease from the peak of 19.6 million in 1979. Sebastian Malabe, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a Financial Times column: "U.S. technology and globalization have amplified productivity differences among workers. If pay is based on performance, incentives will Maximization, then the expansion of inequality is an inevitable result."

The famous American political scientist Fukuyama published a worrying paper "The Future of History: The Decline of the Middle Class" in the "Foreign Affairs" magazine at the beginning of the year. Will it lead to the end of liberal democracy? ”, he believes that scientific and technological progress and globalization are dismantling the foundation of the liberal democratic order established by the West after the war: a solid middle class. In the era of technology and globalization, new institutional arrangements must be made to respond to this crisis.

Obviously, from an overall perspective, the United States is a huge beneficiary of technological development and globalization. Therefore, the way to solve this problem is definitely not anti-technology and anti-globalization, but the government needs to implement a redistribution mechanism. Make adjustments and develop an institutional design that rebalances interests between groups that benefit from technology and globalization and those that suffer. The "Buffett Rules" (raising taxes on the rich) and the "Volcker Rules" (restricting Wall Street) that the Obama administration tried to introduce after the subprime mortgage crisis can be seen as part of this effort, but it is clear that this effort is still far away. Not nearly enough.

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