 Greetings. I'm Steve Clemens. I'm editor at large of the Hill in Washington DC. We are today in the final episode of Inet Live Series on the Future of Work. It's been an incredible series. I was very honored and privileged to be the moderator of the very first in this series. And today I get to be the moderator of the anchor in this series. We have a fantastic panel to launch our discussion today. We're with Danny Roderick. Danny, of course, I mean none of our people need introductions, but Danny is professor of international political economy at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government. He's president-elect of the International Economic Association. Whenever you see somebody taking a job like that, I know it may be more headache than opportunity. So thank you for taking on that good service with the International Economic Association. We have Paulina Chernova is associate professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Bard College. Very thoughtful essays that she's been writing about job guarantees, which we'll get into in a moment. And of course, the honorable Laura Tyson, distinguished professor of the Graduate School at Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, former National Economic Advisor to President Clinton. Because I have written it, I don't have to walk it back. She's been my candidate for many, many years to be Secretary of the Treasury. That may happen not in this next month, but there's still an opportunity depending on Janet Yellen's tenure. So we will go there. But our job today is really to disentangle, to think about the future of work, the evolution of technology, what our social contract should look like and should entail in this really what has been a convulsive moment on a lot of different fronts, a very traumatic moment as the nation struggles with economic inequality while technology continues to evolve and grow, racial disparities, and of course, a lot of tension on the global trade and technology front as well. I'm going to ask Dr. Tyson, Laura Tyson to help set the stage. And I'm going to ask her to do it in a specific way. And we're going to be very interactive here. We're going to go to your questions as soon as we can, but basically ask Laura to set the stage with regards to the impact that COVID has made. Because if we had this conversation, we rolled back the dial a little bit and we asked ourselves to have this conversation in the pre-COVID period, we would still be looking at social contract issues, still inequality issues, still what the purpose and direction of technology and its impacts are. So what has COVID done to this moment to either give us opportunities or to further sabotage society, if you will. Laura? Thank you, Steve. And hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be in this great conversation. I've been thinking about the future of work as an issue. That's how the whole set of issues has come up over the last five years pre-COVID. I've worked on a lot of studies which have looked at the effect of automation and increasing digitization on the composition of work. On the composition of work. There's no technological unemployment. The technological unemployment is not the problem. The problem to some extent has been significantly the erosion of middle-skill, middle-income jobs. Many of those manufacturing jobs, in fact, manufacturing jobs. There's also been some upskilling. If you vision of employment in the OECD countries, you see the middle declining, but you're top increasing as a share of total top skills and bottom skills. So you get the barbell, but the weight of the barbell growth is actually in the higher-skill area. That's good news. Now we want to move to COVID to think about how those are just some long-run trends. How would COVID affect these? I have seen these staggering surveys. McKinsey is going to come out with a couple reports in the next few months. The percentage of firms in advanced industrial countries, the U.S. and Europe, planning on accelerating automation and digitization 60, 70 percent. And the answer to those surveys is why? To increase labor productivity. And the implication of that is what? To actually reduce the human labor input per unit of output. To automate, to digitize, to reduce the human labor input per unit of output. I think I'm very concerned about that. I will say so COVID accelerates, accelerates, accelerates. It takes whole new sectors of the economy like medicine, and it's going to make it increasingly digitized. So that's a look at that. It's going to take whole new segments of major areas where there is human labor, travel. That's an area where I think we travel in hotels. That's an area where people are a little unsure. They're not sure that people will do the same travel, that companies will have the same people working in office buildings in San Francisco or New York. They're not sure about business conferences. But a lot of those jobs were difficult to, a lot of those service jobs, the people who take care of you in a restaurant, the people who take care of you in a hotel, the people who are your travel support systems, logistic systems. All of those jobs were low income, relatively low wage jobs that could not be automated. And I don't think they can be automated. So for those, I would say how is COVID going to affect demand for those kinds of workers? It's a different problem. They're not going to be automated away or digitized away. But the demand for their services may in fact decline if we have more hybrid work, work out of office, if we have more movement out of big cities into smaller areas. So let me just start with that. But I want to emphasize one thing which never gets focused on much here. And that is the effect of all of this on small businesses because 50% of jobs in the United States are small business jobs. A lot of them were in retail, hotel support service systems and offices, things like that. I don't think we know exactly what's going to happen to those jobs. But one of the things to think about here would be supply chain. I'm motivated by what President Biden said yesterday. If we're going to try to do more by America, one of the things that's really true about those small businesses is they're not in the supply chain. It's very hard for them to be in the supply chain. So this might be an opportunity to take COVID and desire to produce more, to have more resilience by producing stuff closer to home. If that is one of the consequences of COVID, that resilience could lead possibly to more jobs in small businesses. So I think the effect on small businesses is uncertain. It's uncertain. Well, great. I mean, I think you've set up really well. I think a very good starting point of the conversation is that these exogenous things happen, COVID hits, amplifies, speeds up certain trends. It lays out big question marks and others. And this takes me to Danny. Because I've been reading Danny Roderick for years. But one of the areas that Danny, I think, unless I'm communicating this poorly, is that you say we have choices that technology and sort of techno determinism, the evolution of technology is not automatically an enemy. It's not necessarily technology versus shops. There are choices in this. And what I like about that framing is you're really saying we don't need to be a victim of the weather that's being created. Laura is saying to a certain degree that that COVID and the impact that it has had a lot on these trends still continues to put people, I think, in that process of either they're with the wave or they're having the wave come in and drown them. And I guess the question I want to get at, as we talk about, your step in this is sort of technology and this displacement act, is do we have choice? Is there a social choice in this? Or is the notion of, wherever you may sit in society, you may be lucky or you may be screwed. So Danny? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. It's great to be part of this panel. And I agree with what Laura has said. I think COVID essentially accelerates and I would say exacerbates the problems in labor markets. I think Laura described this, the polarization that we've experienced in labor markets in the advanced countries and the collapse of the middle skill, middle wage, middle class jobs, which is a very, very striking part in the United States. It's not all technology, obviously globalization and the institutionalization of labor markets and our policies have helped too. But technological changes have really had probably the predominant effect. And I think you're right, Steve, that I think I've been, along with some others now, have been trying to shake us out of our technological determinism, which is the idea that there's a standard narrative now, which is you can, you read it everywhere in reports coming out of Washington from international organizations, from technocrats and economists, which goes something like that, that, you know, technology is changing the nature of the labor market and it's making increasing demands on skills and specific competences. And therefore, that we need to make sure that our workers have the requisite skills. And therefore, we have to invest in education and skilling up continuous training and so forth. That's a standard narrative. Now, I think that's a narrative gets only half of the story right, which presumes that there is this kind of a completely exogenous trend in technology to which our workers have to adjust, our labor markets have to adjust. So in that narrative, all the adjustment is essentially on the part of society. And technology is sort of somehow given there. Whereas, in fact, you know, we know that the direction of technology, the direction that it takes is driven by policy, by incentives, by norms, by who has power in the workplace on what types of technologies are adopted. I mean, the fact that we've had so much skill bias and capital intensive automation in recent years is partly driven by sort of competition from low wage countries, partly driven by incentives in our tax systems, which is that we subsidize capital and we tax labor. So why not automate? But these have been sort of these incentives have led entrepreneurs and innovators to move technology in a particular direction, which has been essentially labor replacing, particularly of the low skill type. It's also that innovators are driven by a certain set of norms and ethos, which they developed in their closed networks and circles. There's a story that I'm sure many of you in the audience will remember. In 2016, Elon Musk announced that the Model 3 of Tesla was going to be built in this essentially entirely automated factory. Everything would be done by robots that essentially all the parts and the inputs would come in. The raw materials would come in from one part of the factory and out at the end would be the completed car. There would be virtually nobody in there. The machines would be working, robots would be working so rapidly that in fact it would be even unsafe for humans to be around them. That was back in 2016. In 2018, it turned out that none of that actually worked and Tesla had to construct an entirely different factory full of human workers in order to ramp up production and satisfy. Elon Musk said something at the time, which was when he was interviewed, said, I completely underestimated the importance of human talent when you need to respond to unforeseen contingencies. He said that I've underestimated humans is the tweet that he sent out. The point is that innovators can make mistakes even from the perspective of their own private profitability. There's absolutely no reason that they're going to internalize all the social consequences of the technological decisions that they're making that when labor disappears, local communities suffer as significant. So there's no reason. Our job as a society and as a government is to actually make innovators face up to the consequences of their choices. In automation, I gave the example of Tesla and then the mistaken decision to over automate. There are other trends that are going on that, for example, BMW and Mercedes-Benz are essentially leaders in using shop floor apps and AI in order to allow mini robots, co-bots that work together with workers rather than replace them because you don't have to physically separate them. There are some more robots that essentially allow lower skilled workers to do the job of higher skilled workers. The key there is that what these systems allow is to produce in highly customized models. These people can respond to consumer demands and trends and to customize models to a much greater degree. That's where you have the interaction, the human machine interaction that can be helpful. That's a very different model of using and deploying technology that actually does not replace workers, but actually augments the skills of the existing workers. That's only one margin of technological choice. I can give you more examples and we can talk about how the policy can affect us. But there are these choices and we have done very little in thinking about how governments can affect these choices. I think I'm happy to talk more about that later on. Terrific. I want to get Pavlina. Before I do that, I want to jump to Laura for just a moment. In response to Danny who said those that are automating and building these next machines and innovating, this is an area that you know well too, that they can't get away with just sort of not paying attention to the social content. I guess whenever I hear that, and I hear the phone ringing somewhere, but when I hear that, I think about China. I think about other nations out there that have their own ecosystems of innovation and hits on a certain class of competence and work and how they're doing it. And I guess, Laura, in a global sense, can some of the things that Danny talked about, which is sort of awareness and social responsibility connected to the evolution of automation and technology, can that exist very long if you're sitting next to a society that doesn't necessarily do those things? So I'm going to immediately Danny mentioned BMW. I'm going to immediately go to Germany here because look, the terms in terms of automobiles they're the most robot intensive in the world. But they have because of their very strong institution, unions, worker voice, employer associations working with unions because of their middle stock companies which have very long-term investment horizons. Those firms are actually doing exactly what Danny said. They're taking the technology and complementing it with the labor. They're taking their labor force and skilling it and using it with robots. Now, I think over time what that does mean, and you see that in the German data, is you do see that manufacturer employment over time will decline. It is declining, it will continue to decline. And that middle-skill jobs in Germany are also declining. They are declining and that's partly because it's a different issue for the new entrance into the workforce. There may be fewer of these jobs because of the automation and AI. For those in the workforce, in a firm, in a plant, they're not being laid off, they're not being thrown out, they're being reskilled and trained to work. So I think the society is responding very differently to this. And I think a lot of the upskilling you see in Germany is taking those workers who might have gone into middle-skill jobs and training them so when they're new entrants, they go into the more automated, more digitized BMW plans, which are highly productive, but they do require different skills. So I think Germany now, let's think about COVID again. Germany went for a model, a short-time work, Kurtzarbeit. So most German workers and the kinds of jobs we're talking about have their jobs. They have not lost their jobs. Their income has been cut to some extent, but they have. U.S. firms, just when it was right, when they felt there was not enough demand for their workers, just let them go. So German firms will think about automating and keeping that workforce and working with the workforce because the society has made a decision that the workers will stay employed. In the U.S., we made an unemployment compensation, very generous, lay people off, lay people off. But then the firms may never bother to bring those workers back. They can figure out other ways to do what they... So we can affect how the technology... Well, this is the perfect launch place. This is the perfect launch place, starting to interrupt for Pavlina, because Pavlina has a fix, right? So Pavlina, tell us what you think in response to Laura Tyson and those displaced workers. You can, as you innovate, Laura has written papers where there are winners that are created innovation and losers, or as she prefers the term displaced. So what is the Pavlina Churneva fix to this? Thank you. It's a great part of this conversation. Let me connect my remarks to the conversation of technology. I mean, I think the point that Laura and Danny are making is that technology actually can exacerbate inequalities that are already brewing in the labor markets. And I take the point of roboticists that say that AI and technology is really not there to create mass unemployment, but there are structural shifts in the labor market that we are observing. And usually we notice labor replacing technology that is taken up in downturns. So it wasn't just the problem of COVID. We have seen this in previous recessions, but it happens at the lower end of the income distribution. It happens for low wage work. We don't see automation for doctors, lawyers, etc. So what we have is a labor market that exacerbates inequalities by causing job loss at the lower end of the income distribution. But another engine of this inequality mechanism is mass unemployment. And so the focus of my work is that how can we move forward to address unemployment, whatever the cost, whether it is deficient aggregate demand, whether it is labor replacing technology, unemployment is with us. And so long as we sweep it under the rug, we don't pay attention to unemployment, however large or small it is slowly eroding the social contract, which was always based on jobs and on the access of good jobs to all, which means that if there is a whole lot of people who could not access good, well-paying jobs, then those who have jobs will feel the pressure of unemployment and their employment conditions are going to be undermined by the fact that there is a whole lot of folks that are seeking employment. So basically I think the social contract has to once again put good jobs access to good jobs front and center, and that it has to be based on the idea that just like technology is something that society and policy adopts their choices, as Daniel was saying, is the same issue as with unemployment. There's nothing inevitable about just having mass unemployment or a technological employment, whatever it is. So for me, the most straightforward solution is for the public sector to step in into the engine of job creation and complement the engine of job creation that takes place in the private sector. Laura was mentioning the loss of manufacturing work and good, well-paid middle income jobs that were associated with that. Now, manufacturing work was awful work a hundred years ago. It was very poorly paid, it was very precarious, and yet manufacturing work was then formalized, family wages were being paid, it engendered kind of economic life and, you know, communities that thrived off manufacturing work. Now, today we're looking at an entirely different economy, a service-based economy, and so what we've got to do is something similar that what we once did for manufacturing work, which would be providing better paid employment opportunities for the service sector. So apart from raising minimum wages, apart from instituting some basic benefits that are missing from the compensation package, I think a public option for jobs is going to, you know, move to go a long way to providing basic security in the labor market. Now, what would that be? You know, I write about the job guarantee, which is essentially a public option for jobs. If somebody goes into the unemployment office, in addition to all the other mechanisms which we have to help them find employment, we could add another, and that would be per public service employment opportunity at a base wage, base wage benefit package that will be the floor for the economy as a whole. And the reason why this is necessary is, you know, it's for two reasons. Because it really addresses the problem of unemployment, it's a very straightforward solution to addressing unemployment. But the second reason is that there is a whole host of work that is essential, that is necessary, that is not being performed. Environmental work, the most glaring scientific example, and we don't have a private sector mechanism to address the environmental concerns, which you don't have obvious commercial returns. So this is the purview of the public sector. So what we've got is actually a problem. We're just running out of time. So just ask you to bring your big thoughts to a close. We're not using technology. We actually need to accelerate the use of technology. We need ecological solutions for environmental problems, but we also have the opportunity to create millions and millions of well-paying jobs for people who are seeking work. So to me, the social contract would include jobs for all, and they will not be in competition for hours. They are not going to be the sacrifice for adopting technology. We need sort of a two-prong strategy to address these looming problems before us. Thank you. I want to remind the audience that you can post your questions in the Q&A session. I'm going to begin moving to them just a moment. Before I do that, I want to ask Danny and Laura to quickly and briefly respond to your notion on the question of should the government just pick up all the slack? Should we provide... I used to know when I'm in the 1990s and visit Laura Tyson in her office and wondered when the IT revolution was happening during the Clinton administration and you had displacement. I just wonder what would have happened if the government said, okay, we're all going to move you from this equation to now you're going to become government employees working in some other social need. But so let me go to Danny and then to Laura and then we're going to go to the audience. Danny? I think the idea that there's a public option, that there is a backstop in the form of public jobs is an important idea. And I think as Padina said, it's part of the arsenal of tools that we have in order to ensure that we have a floor, that the bottom of the labor market just doesn't collapse, that there is no race to the bottom, that we have the social and labor standards where work is rewarding and work allows families to enjoy middle-class standards of living. So I viewed public sector, job guarantees as possibly something that could contribute together with other labor market institutions. I just want to say one point, which is that we are not going to solve this problem that the tensions that technological change creates in the structure of the market without simultaneously addressing the issue. The problem is that we need to create productive jobs for workers at the low end of the labor market. It's not simply providing them with no opportunities that we can simply pay them through the tax rolls. The issue is that ultimately, we will succeed only if we're able to create a productive job. So there's a productivity angle here. And the problem right now with the productivity angle is that all the productivity is going to the top end. So what we need to figure out is a way of an innovation that spreads the benefits of innovation to the bottom of the labor market. Thank you. Laura Tyson, final word before we go to the audience. I think the public job option, I would consider possibly as part of the greater use of automatic stabilizers on the labor market. I think if this were well-designed as counter-cyclical policy so that when you have a fall-off in demand and you're going to have rising unemployment, I could imagine that one thing the government could offer besides unemployment compensation is access to a public sector job. I think I would say, though, that number of those jobs really we need to think through what are the public goods where public sector jobs would actually serve the public interest. Because otherwise I think maybe having just a better unemployment compensation system is the right counter-cyclical tool, but let's go to public jobs. We heard that infrastructure is long. Yes, infrastructure and green, green jobs. I want to point out, I think it is absolutely not the case that the private sector is not going to be and already is a massive source of investment and job creation in green technologies. If we're going to have an effective climate change resolution for investment, transportation and employment, it's going to be funded by the private sector. It's going to be funded by the private sector. The government simply doesn't have the wherewithal to do that. So that's one. Let's take another one that hasn't been mentioned here. That's care. So this is a huge part of the U.S. economy, a growing part of the U.S. economy. A lot of low-wage workers, a lot of low-income families rely upon care so that they can go to their jobs, their bad jobs. I think if you're thinking about public employment, I would actually say think about care and can we raise the standards and the wages and the benefits associated with child care or with care for the elderly? These are jobs. Already, they're jobs. They're bad jobs. They're low-income jobs. They are endangered by the population who relies on them but whose own income has declined. So I'm not adverse to thinking through the public sector job option. I tend to think of it as in two ways. One is would it be an interesting counter-cyclical tool, an automatic stabilizer? So there are some jobs like that when the economy goes into a slowdown. And then where are there public goods where actually we want the private sector? We want employment. We want growth. We want good wages. We want good working conditions. And should some of those be public sector jobs? That's the way I would think about it. Well, that's very, very useful. I think that there are people like Ernie Moniz, the former Secretary of Energy, have promoted this idea of right now coming up an energy jobs coalition that I think would fit into Yasmin's model. But it also raises this question of how do you sunset that down the road? But let's begin taking some questions from the audience. I've got some very good ones. We have Yasmin Hilpert. I apologize if I'm butchering names. From the Council on Competitiveness, who says taking Germany as an example, by keeping skills high, there's also an increasing amount of manufacturing related services that are growing, leading to a new group of high-skill service workers, very different than the United States. And so this is more of a comment. But since Laura, you were talking about Germany, which parts of that German model are potentially replicable in the United States? It's a very tough question. I do think, and I don't remember who mentioned first, that the importance of institutions here. I think the role of unions, the role of works councils, the role of these Mittelstadt companies, which are often privately owned, they have long-term investment, they're often family owned, they're very connected to their community. So they don't make the same kinds of decisions about employment and digitization as the very large firms do. We don't have those. And we're going to, I don't see us building those. So, but I do think, and this goes to Danny's point, we can do much better at vocational and educational and apprenticeship training, which is a real strength of Germany. And I think we can learn from them. I think we are. I think certain states are trying to learn from Germany and Switzerland and trying to do more of this. I think their unemployment, I think that we should try to move, we should redesign our unemployment compensation system to allow for easy access to short-time work. So that you shouldn't have to be, allow workers to, maybe to have, allow a firm to reduce the time, allow the worker to go and partial unemployment. So they're partially covered, but they're partially still employed. You got, you got to redesign the unemployment compensation system to allow for some of this flexibility and moving the worker time up and down depending upon the state of demand. Great. Thank you for that. Let me ask Pavina and Danny, this one, Jack Gow of INET asked, can the panel help us imagine an alternative path, one that is more gainful, inclusive, and progressive? What would that require? Danny? Again, I mean, I would, I would go, I mean, there's a, you know, a number of different things. I mean, as Laura just mentioned, I think we can do much better on skills and training, but I don't think that's going to be the silver bullet. I think we can do much better on what used to be called industrial policy, but it's really essentially the, you know, the deployment of production, productivity extension services by state agencies to smaller and medium sized enterprises in order to, to improve their, their, their capabilities. And, and I think we work on, on, on, on sort of how we can have technology adopt to society as much as we expect society to adopt, to adapt to technology. And so there, I think there are, one is, you know, sort of the existing incentives. I mean, I think, you know, the, as I was mentioning that I think we need to consider what our, you know, tax system is doing to incentives to automation, we need to consider there's a lot of investment in R&D innovation that's do, you know, specifically directed by the public sector, such as, you know, the DARPA or the Department of Energy. And that's pursuing specific military or military related ends or clean energy kinds of ends. But the idea that new technology should also be friendly to, to labor and should be labor augmenting, not labor replacing, that has not yet seeped into the consciousness of our sort of the public sector in the way that it directs technological change. That's another margin. The, the, the, you know, sort of, there is a huge role that's being played. Again, it's come up before in what Laura said about sort of who gets the say in the workplace. I think the Germany is very different because in Germany you have workers in the works councils and co-determination and workers have a lot more voice in the types of technologies that are adopted. And so leveling the playing field in terms of who has the power in terms of making those decisions, I think is very important. And finally, I would say norms. I think, you know, sort of, you know, if you think about the green transition, the awareness of climate change, this is an existential threat. A lot of that, I think the action on that is being driven by younger people, sort of having internalized the sense that this is, you know, we need to really make a difference here. And I think we lack, we need a similar kind of transformation in the way that Silicon Valley and other younger entrepreneurs and innovators think about how technological change can, has these various margins of choice, sort of adopt a somewhat different ethos that pays a lot more attention to the human and social consequences of innovation decisions. And I think, sort of, changing norms and behavioral norms I think is also another important area that, where again the public sector could lead, but we've seen it working in other areas, but we have to start yet here. Thank you, Denny. I'm going to ask you the same question, but I have another question also for you, which is, you know, how would, from Raleigh to Nikolayova, said how would displaced employees respond to publicly provided opportunities given work identity issues? So as you discuss how to be more inclusive and progressive, which I, I think you already have, I think the question here is, you know, if I'm reading it right, is how would they respond? Do you create stigma and further divides even unintentionally? To me, providing a public option for him. Yes, can you hear me? Yeah. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. To me, the public option, the job guarantee is actually the inclusive solution compared to the current quality of dealing with unemployment. Look, if there is massive employment, I mean, right now we have lost hundreds of millions of jobs globally and we are staring at a potentially very protracted public recovery. But I want to say that even in the best of times, we do not create employment opportunities for all. There's a shortage of jobs, which means that somebody is going to be sending a resume. Somebody is going to be applying for a job and they will not get it. Who will that somebody be? We know who that is in the United States as people of color. We know that it is caregivers who have been out of the labor market for a very long time. It's people with disabilities who can and want to work, but they have many employment opportunities. A scenario in which we solely and exclusively rely on unemployment insurance is as an economy that is not really truly inclusive. It is the right thing to do to provide good income support for people who don't have it. But we have to have another tool to provide the employment opportunities. How would people respond? Well, compared to unemployment, those who are seeking work will have a choice. We now have constrained the amount of choices that are out there. Now, we also have a recent number from the Fed that came out that unemployment is 20% among the low wage workers. So we know that that's what the economy does, COVID or not COVID. Whenever there's a hiccup, whenever there's a downturn, people at the low end lose their jobs first. So we got to be able to stabilize the economy there. Now, with respect to what kind of jobs and the role of the public sector, there's just so much to do. The IPCC report came out yesterday. I don't know if you saw it that said that the rate at which ice is melting is consistent with the worst case scenarios that they have examined. I mean, we have an enormous amount of work to do. Now, the job guarantee was put into the Green New Deal as a core component with very good reason, because a lot of the climate conversations, frankly, didn't go far because folks who are relying on fossil fuel jobs in small towns, rural areas, they are not so willing to embrace this green future if they don't have some sense of a guarantee. But the job guarantee, the public option, is actually that green job score that we need as part of this all hands-on-deck strategy. The conversation that we've had is quite right that we need an industrial strategy. We need to think of multiple ways to attack this very large problem. But I just want to bring the focus again on the unemployment problem, because the most vulnerable are going to lose their jobs first. And if we're generally committed to an inclusive society, we've got to be able to provide that guarantee that no matter who you are, you will always have access to decent employment opportunity. And the challenges are so big. We have probably more work to do than we have people to do them. So I have no doubt we can create the public employment opportunities that will be productive, but also because unemployment itself is extremely unproductive and it brings enormous social costs. I mean, youth unemployment globally is very high. That is, I think, a social catastrophe. We've got to address it aggressively. Oh, now I cannot hear you. Yes. I think, is Dave speaking? I am speaking. I am speaking. I muted myself, so there was no feedback. My apologies, folks. Let me ask Laura and Danny this question. And this question is from Katya Klinova from the partnership on AI. And Katya asked, how can we think through the trade-off that labor augmenting tech creates? On the one hand, it can reduce the skill requirements. On the other hand, makes workers easier to replace and hence reducing the incentives for employers to treat workers well. And they become more expendable, in other words, increasing the risks of them being exploited, more expendable, etc. So, Laura, how would you respond to this? I mean, I think you have responded in a way by talking about that hollowing out of the middle-skilled positions, which this sort of describes. But I'd like to go to you and Danny for quick answers on this one. So, I am a believer that the evidence through history and the evidence up to now indicates that technological change, whether it's probably about automation, digitization, now AI, creates technological unemployment. No, it doesn't create technological unemployment. It does not. It changes the distribution of jobs by skill level, by wage level, by the training level. I started talking about COVID to a certain extent, whether a lot of low wage jobs come back into the U.S. right now, that's really the hit has been the hardest on retail, on leisure, on travel, on taking care of offices, on things like that. That doesn't have anything to do with automation and AI. So, the question really is, what do we do about making those better jobs? What do we do about making? So, I would say, if we're focusing on good jobs, we need to think about where is, I think, over time, automation and AI is actually being more enabling. It does, and therefore, that's why I pointed out at the beginning, you see this long run trend towards higher skills as a share of total employment. You actually see that growth occurring. So, I think that's really good news. I think if we're dealing with the unemployment problem, which is the problem that Fabulous is talking about, which is very important, if you look at the skill, where did unemployment occur? Where has it occurred even during this recession? It's largely in the labor-intensive service sectors of the economy where automation and digitization have not been playing major roles, except digitization has been knocking out traditional retail because people buy it online, and then you create a whole bunch of warehouse jobs and moving products around jobs. So, you've got another set of low-income jobs that actually replace the low-income jobs of in-person retail. So, I think that I'm on balance and optimist about the role of technology in creating productivity and creating high-skill job opportunities. I think we can ask a lot of questions about training and also about the distribution of the returns to productivity, because I want to say we haven't talked at all here about the fact that if the technology enhances productivity and enhances growth over time, it depends on how those returns are shared. And there I think we have some issues about social contract, about the power of unions, about taxation. We have a number of things we can do to try to share the returns more effortlessly. Got it, right. Well, thank you for that. Danny? Yeah, I mean, just picking up from where Laura just ended, I mean, it's interesting that recently advanced countries have been suffering from this apparent productivity paradox. So, on the one hand, we're talking about AI, digitization, robots, and seems like innovation is everywhere. But yet, you know, aggregate productivity growth in the advanced countries is actually slowed down. I think one way to understand this in connection with our central discussion is that aggregate productivity has slowed down because the rate at which productivity benefits are being disseminated from the very top, from the very advanced sectors, from the vanguard, the productive vanguard, if you will, the technologically most advanced parts of the economy. To the rest, that dissemination has significantly slowed down. So here is where, in fact, our discussion of product inclusion, a more equitable and inclusive society, and the objective of generating more growth, more aggregate productivity. That conversation joins, it becomes one and the same, because the only way that you can actually increase economy-wide productivity growth is to enable more people at the lower end of the skill distribution to be able to benefit from those be the direct beneficiary, not through tax transfer schemes, but be a direct beneficiary of this productive so that those innovations are disseminated through the smaller firms, through less skilled workers in the economy, through regions that are being left behind. And that's only going to be possible if we have a pattern of technological change that is actually more inclusive of the capabilities and abilities of those regions that are being left behind. Now, most of this, I think it's been implicit in everything what we've said, is all of this now, most bulk of this will have to happen in services. And because of manufacturing, I think there's no way that we can save employment in manufacturing. That's just, I think, is gone. So all the new, more skilled, more productive employment will have to be in services. And there we have huge choices that we have to make that we're not paying attention to. Take my profession, teaching. Now, we can imagine a model where essentially you have, you know, superstar teachers who basically lecture to the entire world. And the technology and innovation that we develop is one that's geared to their needs, where you'll have a very few teachers get all the benefits of technological advance. You have an alternative model where you can actually empower much less skilled, much less, you know, sort of experienced teachers through AI systems, through ability to have real time feedback on how they're doing and the needs of their students to provide much more sort of customized training to smaller batches of students at that time. So once again, the theme of customization and serving smaller groups, where you can actually have, you know, increase the demand for teachers and for less skilled teachers that can do the jobs of, you know, advance the education because you're, you're providing, you're serving the needs of students much better because you're providing them exactly the type of a needs as more suited to their learning styles, that's more suited to their needs. But that's going to require customization is going to require these students at the teacher serving smaller groups of students. And that will require a totally different type of technology that's actually much more inclusive. And that's going to be a huge, potentially a huge area. So it's another example where I think the decisions that we make are not driven are driven, you know, unless we make them, somebody else will make them for us. And it's not entirely clear. They'll serve the social purpose. Listen, I am, you know, oh, go ahead, please. I just want to say you, I just want to underscore an important theme in Danny's work that I know you're interested in and I'm quite interested in, too. And that is he's redefining to a certain extent industrial policy. He's basically saying, and I think that's right. I think the focus on small business, getting them to get to the technological frontier, getting them to share in the productivity benefits of the technology, extension services, thinking about how we design, take the technology and design important service sectors of the economy. I mentioned care. Another one is education. Those are those are industrial policy, because you're either focusing on a sector or you're focusing on a region or you're focusing on a size of business. And I think the point of trying to bring diffuse the technology and the benefits of technology across regions and across firm size. Those are really important agenda items, I think. I think, I think it's super important what you just said, Laura, because you know, when I'm listening, I was listening to Danny, but also listening, you know, to Bob Lena's contract and, you know, where it needs to go. You know, I know firms like AT&T that have the nano degree and are trying to upskill from within their company or Tim Ryan, the CEO of PWC North America, who said, you know, I can go higher skills any day by buying that skill, but it's a harder thing, but perhaps a more resilient better thing inside the company to try to, you know, upskill and retrain it. But that is not a behavior that you see across the board. And as I listen to you about small businesses, what does technology allow you to do? It should allow you to be this, you know, Einsteinian quantum twisting of space and size and scale so that you can in fact do those things, which brings me, we're in our last seven minutes. So I'm going to ask the three of you. Well, one of my favorite, I mean, they're all great questions and I want to tell everyone, thank you. But Robert Owen of the University of Nantes has a great question that gets it part of what Laura just raised. He says rapid technological change raises the critical question of lifelong learning. However, there are very different public-private sectors, supply mixes across countries, I would say different mixes across states in this country, by the way. What might be the optimal design of incentives for effective educational support in light of apparent distribution issues? I would also say cost issues and others because, you know, this is very personal for me because I am related by blood to lots of folks that were military families, lesser educated, went to work low-level tech companies, got displaced by offshoring and they are angry and they supported President Trump in the last election. And part of the question is where has that social contract gone bad and where can we get real as opposed to fake about helping folks that have been displaced find that training, find that job and build continuous education, lifelong education into the system. And if you can do it in a minute and a half each, everyone would be really happy. But let me start with Pavlina and then we'll go to Danny and then last word to Laura. Okay, thank you. I think training is important. I don't think it's going to do it. Training just shuffles people along the unemployment line. What we have are serious real social problems. We have overcrowded classrooms, unemployed teachers, overcrowded hospitals, not enough nurses that need to be trained. Of course, we need to train a generation of nurses of teachers. But it's not just the training part. We also have to create the net new employment opportunities. And so, you know, incentives are all well and good. But I think it's time to move on some direct action because we really have urgent problems to solve. And we have forgotten that the public sector has a visible hand and we have to employ it and, you know, help it with some more direct solutions and direct investments. And the job guarantee I think is, you know, as So we hear that the JG, the job guarantee. So we've got that in the in the docket now. Danny Roderick. I share the same skepticism about training, although I think we can do much, much better. I think training is always the answer to our problems all the time. And but, but, you know, it's always, you know, condemned. Let me interrupt you, Danny. I mean, I know, let me just interrupt you. This is a friendly interruption. I know we say it's the problem. You know, we say it all the time. But when I worked on trade policy in the 1990s, we had fake programs on retraining workers displaced by trade. But now I'm wondering whether or not we have progressed enough in our knowledge and our understanding, you know, as we see this, whether or not that the terms of that equation are different today, and whether we can do a better job, whether compared to 1996, 97 versus today with so I don't want to extend this too much. But I had to jump on that say it has it have our have our abilities in that front, not change. No, it has. And we actually know a lot now about the kind of training programs that work for the United States. We have a lot of experience with so called sectoral training programs that have been thoroughly evaluated. And we know both that they work. And we also know why they work because they engage with employers in a particular kind of a way. You know, as Laura has emphasized, we know that the kind of the workplace training programs in Germany are very, very good. And we know, you know, sort of those some of those continental programs that work, you know, with lifelong long learning, we now have experimentation going on with these sort of lifelong accounts that people get that they can spend on training and skilling up at any point in their time. So there's interesting experiments going on. But again, what I want to stress is that I think we'll be totally, you know, misguided if we believe that the solution to this problem that technological change poses to our labor markets is going to come through better training. I think better training is what we need to do, but we're always going to be behind technology if we simply force our labor markets to adjust. I think my colleague and friend, Ricardo Hausmann, has a nice phrase. He says that, you know, it's, you know, our job is to provide jobs for the workforce we wish we had, is to want to provide for the labor force we do have. In 30 seconds, I want to say just one more thing. We have not talked about developing countries. And I think this is a serious, serious problem because all the issues we've talked about the advanced countries exist in a multiplied form in the developing world, which is that take all the skill bias technological change that's already taking place, apply it to the circumstances of developing countries where they're only low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where they're really only resource they have plenty of is low-skill labor. And essentially leaving these countries in a very, very stark developmental challenge. I've been doing some work recently in Tanzania and Ethiopia, where we've got to end it really fast, Danny, really fast, I apologize. It's incredible how, I mean, the stark choice that these producers and firms in those countries face where the only way they can be productive is by adopting excessively capital and skill-intensive techniques. And that means that they'll remain essentially island in the economy and won't be able to absorb employment. Right. Thank you. Laura, unfair to you, but we've got about a minute left. And I'm going to ask you to solve this lifelong education challenge and whether or not you think that's a track we should be investing in more strongly. Or like Danny and Pavlina, do you think that that's a false choice? Yeah, I don't. So I think we let's end with the definition of the challenge we face. I think there is a short-term challenge of unemployment. It has to do with the COVID recession. It has to do with the great recession before that. It has to do with inadequate levels of aggregate demand. I think one could think about good jobs as a possible policy within that, but that's a problem. There is the problem of good jobs. I think good jobs, it's independent of the state of unemployment. Good jobs is what's the composition of the jobs we have and what kinds of wages and benefits do they offer. And I think there, I would say, I begin to think about, yeah, I think skill training is really, really important. I think minimum wage and EITC is really, really important. I think it may very well be the case. EITC is an example of tax policy. So tax policy can be part of the solution. I want to end by saying I bring, and I don't know if Danny's sharing this yet, but Danny has a wonderful matrix showing all of the ways you can intervene to try to create good jobs. You can start in pre-distribution, education. This is education, training. The human capital people bring into the workforce. Then there's the production area. And then you can talk about minimum wage. You can talk about industrial policy. You can talk about the diffusion of the technology from the superstar firms to the small firms, all those wonderful things. And then at the end, there's redistribution policy. If you don't like the market distribution of income at the end of all of that, you've got to do something with the tax policy to try to affect that. I think there is no silver bullet. I'm going to end, of course. My father was trained by the GI Bill. That was his exit out of low-class into middle-class and upper-class life because of that education. So I continue to believe that it's a fundamental tool. It is not just shuffling people around. I think that is really understates the value. Let me end with community colleges. We know that the U.S. has a very powerful community college system. We know that if people complete those courses, they have access to better jobs, they are more stable, they have higher wages, they have greater longevity. What's the matter? The matter is that most people who start community college can't finish because they have income problems, the issue of paying the tuition, there are family problems. We should think about completion rates, getting the community college systems to work better. It's not shuffling. It's really going to help those people get through. I want to thank you. Look, the great thing about INET Future of Work forums is that there's never enough time. It's an extraordinary discussion where we had some very provocative, big ideas. You didn't all agree with each other, which is terrific. I'm going to rush to Danny Roderick's matrix real quick. I'm going to look at JG and look into Paulina's work. It's been really extraordinary. I do want to mention that we had some other really great questions. Some of them were hitting on developing country issues. For those of you who watch Al Jazeera English to show you how diverse this is, I have a TV show once a week. Tomorrow night, I interview Jane Goodall. We got a conversation about endangered species, natural security in the world, environmentalism. What did we end up talking about? Jobs and the economic conditions in the developing world. These are very pervasive questions that really matter at a systemic level. I want to thank Danny Roderick, Professor of International Political Economy at the JFK School of Government at Harvard, Paulina Cherneva, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at Bard College, and Laura Tyson, former National Economic Advisor to President Clinton, distinguished Professor of the Graduate School of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. This will conclude our last session of Inet Live's Future of Work. You can watch past episodes of the series and watch all the episodes at InetEconomics.org. They've asked you to follow Inet Live at the little at Inet Economics. Now we're going to move, for those of you who are interested, to continue the discussion with Inet's Young Scholars Initiative. You can click Young Scholars Initiative on the link at the bottom of your screen to join that discussion. So, this is the end of my session. It's a pleasure and a privilege. Great to see you, my dear friend, Laura Tyson. Great to see you, Danny Roderick. Paulina, wonderful to hear your big thoughts today as well. Thank you all.