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• The Possible Job Creation and Job Destructive Effects of Technological Development

  53-61

  József Boros

  Views:

  323

  Throughout history, technological change has often provided the basis for employee anxiety. Between 1811 and 1816, a group of workers in England who called themselves "Luddists" destroyed machines, because they thought it would endanger their workplace. 19th-century thinkers and economists such as Karl Marx and David Ricardo predicted that mechanizing the economy would ultimately worsen workers' conditions, depriving them of a decent wage. Over the last century, John M. Keynes (1930s) and Wassily Leontief (1950s) have expressed their fears that more and more workers will be replaced by machine solutions that will lead to unemployment. In recent years, Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) have argued that existing technologies reduce the demand for labor and put some of the human workforce at a permanent disadvantage. However, there are a number of compensation mechanisms that can offset the initial displacement effects of automation and process innovation in general (Vivarelli, 2015). First of all, while workers are being replaced in industries that introduce new machine technology, additional workers in new industries are needed. Second, automation (and process innovation in general) reduces average costs. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) found that this results, on the one hand, in the effect of price productivity (“priceproductivity”) (as production costs decrease, the industry can expand and increase labor demand); and, on the other hand, it leads to economies of scale in production (the reduction in costs due to automation leads to an increase in total output and increases the demand for labor in all industries). Similarly, Vivarelli (2015) argues that lower average costs can result in lower prices (if the industry's market structure is perfectly competitive), stimulate product demand, or result in extra profits (if the industry's structure is not perfectly competitive). If these extra profits are reinvested in the company, this investment can create new jobs. The presentation intends to present these counterbalancing cases and to provide real examples based on the literature.

• Labour Economics - From the Technological Development Perspective

  1-11

  József Boros

  Views:

  52

  The impact of technological advancements on the labor market and innovation processes is a critically important research area. The aim of this study is to examine the emergence and frequency of technological innovations in scientific publications, with a particular focus on the Journal of Labour Economics from 2000 to 2020. The research employs content analysis methods, searching for eight different terms and expressions related to technological development (e.g., technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning) across 1405 articles. The study also analyzes the number of occurrences and annual publication trends of these terms. A total of 9469 instances were identified, indicating that in 64,7% of the cases, at least one technological term appeared. An analysis of annual trends reveals an increase in the usage of certain keywords (technology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning). In a smaller subset of articles, only 1%, technological terms were mentioned at least 50 times. The results suggest that although the topic of technological development plays a significant role in labor market research, the frequency of its appearance and the depth of analysis vary considerably. The increase in the appearance of technological terms is predominantly observed in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. These findings are specific to a single journal, indicating the need for further research involving other labor market journals to ensure representativeness.