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Protracted Frictional Unemployment as a Heavy Cost of Technical Progress

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  • William J. Baumol
  • Edward N. Wolff

Abstract

Neither neoclassical nor Keynesian economics displays much patience with the popular notion that technical progress of the labor-saving variety tends to swell the ranks of the unemployed. Those who believe that market forces tend automatically to bring the economy back, if not to "full employment," at least to a fairly stick "natural rate of unemployment" seem inclined to believe that this process will wipe out any joblessness created by technical change, presumably with some modest delay. The Keynesian approach suggests (subject to some recent concessions to the notion of the natural rate of unemployment) that the level of employment can be adjusted by macroeconomic policy and that this is capable of undoing whatever jobless ness labor-saving innovation may engender. We will argue here that there is more substance to the public's fears that new productive techniques can threaten jobs than is acknowledged by these lines of analysis. We will suggest that when technical progress is a continuing process a speedup of change can have two profound employment effects. First, it can increase, perhaps materially, what used to be referred to as "frictional unemployment," thereby raising the natural rate of unemployment commensurately. Second, because of the sunk-cost attributes of the retraining of workers to enable them to use the constantly-emerging novel techniques, speedup of technical change, rather than even-handedly leading to brief periods of unemployment to all of the workers affected, tends to single out three classes of workers, the ill-educated, the older former jobholders and women, particularly of childbearing age, either for declining relative wages for protracted and possibly for lifetime unemployment. There is, of course, a considerable body of writings on the social costs of economic growth. By and large it has emphasized the externalities generated by the growth process -- crowding, damage to the environment, psychological tens
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Suggested Citation

  • William J. Baumol & Edward N. Wolff, 1996. "Protracted Frictional Unemployment as a Heavy Cost of Technical Progress," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_179, Levy Economics Institute.
  • Handle: RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_179
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    Cited by:

    1. Avner Ahituv & Joseph Zeira, 2011. "Technical Progress and Early Retirement," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 121(551), pages 171-193, March.
    2. Karl Widerquist & Michael A. Lewis, 1997. "An Efficiency Argument for the Guaranteed Income," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_212, Levy Economics Institute.
    3. Vegard Skirbekk, 2004. "Age and Individual Productivity: A Literature Survey," Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, vol. 2(1), pages 133-154.
    4. Georg Westermanna & Holger Schaeferb, 2001. "Localised Technological Progress And Intra-Sectoral Structures Of Employment," Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(1), pages 23-44.

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