Automation and Jobs: When Technology Boosts Employment
Will new technologies cause industries to shed jobs, requiring novel policies to address mass unemployment? Sometimes productivity-enhancing technology increases industry employment instead. In manufacturing, jobs grew along with productivity for a century or more; only later did productivity gains bring declining employment. What changed? The elasticity of demand. Using data over two centuries for US textile, steel, and auto industries, this paper shows that automation initially spurred job growth because demand was highly elastic.
