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  3. (1) " One million jobs to vanish in 10 years," shout the Monday morning headl

(1) " One million jobs to vanish in 10 years," shout the Monday morning headl

游客2024-11-06  3
问题    (1) " One million jobs to vanish in 10 years," shout the Monday morning headlines just to get the week off to a good start. But it’s not another scary intervention in the referendum debate by a pro-European or a Brexiter. It’s more serious man mat.
   (2) The culprit on tins occasion is me British Retail Consortium (BRC), the people who speak for shops of many sizes and employ one in six of British workers, about 3 million people. They think that 900,000 of them (not quite me million of me FT’s headline) will disappear in the next decade, more in smaller businesses and poorer areas.
   (3) Why so? This is an upgrade of an old story, the impact of disruptive technologies on existing patterns of employment, bigger and smarter computers, more online sales. But since George Osborne decided to become the worker’s friend and raise the minimum wage to a "national living" variety (NLW), albeit slowly, it’s also a political story. Higher wages imposed by government will put low-paid shop workers’ jobs in danger, says the BRC.
   (4) Don’t be smug, Mr. Lawyer, Ms Doctor, Sir Financial Adviser. Tech is starting to eat good middle-class jobs, much as automated production lines ate so many well-paid working-class jobs a generation ago. We know about this in journalism because our business was one of the first white-collar industries in the queue. Facebook and Google are busy eating our lunch; if we aren’t nimble enough, we’ll be pudding.
   (5) Nothing too new there either. It was Keynes who first spoke of "technological unemployment". But it’s getting faster, as it did for handloom (手摇纺织机) weavers around 1800. The result for all such businesses, so the conventional scenario goes, is the pear-shaped labour market, which sees huge rewards for a tiny elite at the top and a lot (though not enough) insecure ones for millennials working in the gig economy.
   (6) The BRC warning (it comes a month before the minimum wage rises to ￡7.20 for the over-25s, a ￡9ph NLW by 2020) couples this development—which it supports, in theory—with rising business rates, price deflation (bad for profits, good for customers) and the online shopping effect, to say it’s going to get worse for jobs. The chancellor hasn’t quite realised what he’s done, though there’s an important clue in the fact that he has done something. More on that later.
   (7) In the tech jungle, nimble firms will move fast to adapt and survive. Retail banking, as useless at tech as the NHS, is finally moving at your semi-automated local branch. So, more ponderously, is the NHS. Amazon and Morrisons have announced a hook-up, and didn’t Sainsburys eat Argos the other day? The Mirror Group is launching New Day, a mid-market newspaper to challenge the Daily Mail and the Express. Good luck all.
   (8) Gloom, gloom, gloom. But is it all true? Martin Ford’s 2015 book, The Rise of the Robots—and Jerry Kaplan’s Humans Need Not Apply—was a techno-pessimist’s vision, one in which a jobless future looms for millions (probably).
   (9) It assumes that rapid technological change will continue at the pace it has sustained since the late 18th century in Britain, a little later in most of Europe and the US, in Asia in the 20th century. Living standards barely rose for 1,000 years after the fall of the western Roman empire, along with a life of drudgery for most people. Steam power and the internal combustion engine (内燃机) , trains, electricity, proper medicine, good food and flush toilets, cars and aircraft, the list from the first industrial revolution amounted to a staggering transformation, even before we touch on the current, third and digital one. The transformation is both wonderful and scary.
   (10) But is it overstated? Is the Apple and Facebook world as transformative as the flush loo, the plane, the lightbulb and washing machine? Are fast-slowing productivity rates in most industrial countries a sign that the age of peak growth—the "30 glorious years" of postwar France—is over for us, soon for China too, as Taiwanese mega-manufacturer of iPads etc., Foxconn, shifts output towards cheaper India?
   (11) In other words, after an aberrant few decades, do we face a return to the historic norm in a medieval sense, stagnation and no steady rise in incomes for most people, great wealth for a few? That’s what French economist, Thomas Pikketty warned against in Capital, last year’s improbable bestseller.
   (12) That was reflected in Tyler Cowan’s thesis in The Great Stagnation (2011). It is shared by Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016)—here’s fellow economist Paul Krugman’s review (paywall), which asks if Gordon is right and replies with "a definite maybe".
   (13) Against which we should set optimists such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age (2014), which sees new technology as opening up more time for leisure, less time for drudgery in a world of ever greater abundance. It’s reviewed in a very thoughtful way by the novelist John Lanchester, along with Average is Over, by Tyler Cowan, another protagonist in the war into which the British Retail Consortium’s report stumbles.
   (14) Robert Gordon and Cowan seem to belong to a third group—I am indebted to the FT’s US commentator, Edward Luce, for an excellent overview (paywall)—who say optimists and pessimists may exaggerate an uncertain future about which we, the public, and assorted experts know less than we all think. Just look how silly many—never all—past predictions of the future, gloomy and upbeat, have proved to be. In any case, as Lanchester points out, it took more than 100 years before the first working steam engine (1712) became the first serious working train, Stephenson’s Rocket of 1829.
   (15) That’s a picture we can all recognise, can’t we? Our high streets are full of banks, estate agents, pawnbrokers of one kind or another, and we all seem to be trying to charge each other for services such as parking, which were once free. Finance has got too big, governments know it and promise to "rebalance" the economy.
   (16) It isn’t easy, but it is always worth trying. So UK retailers are right to warn of challenges ahead, but Chancellor Osborne is also right to push, even slightly against, the spiral of lower wages, albeit at the risk of job losses. Society can’t be passive in the face of high finance and high tech. [br] With regard to the risk caused by high tech, which of the following statements is CORRECT?
选项 A、Paul Krugman didn’t agree with Tyler Cowan.
B、John Lanchester’s point of view cohered with Tyler Cowan’s.
C、Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowan hold completely different opinions.
D、Edward Luce was on Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s side.
答案 B
解析 细节题。文章第十三段最后一句提到，小说家John Lanchester对此进行了深入细致的评论与Tyler Cowan在《平均时代的终结》中的观点类似，故[B]为答案。第十二段提到，Tyler Cowan在《大停滞》(2011)中的理论体现了这一点。Robert Gordon在《美国增长之起落》(2016)中也对此表示认同。Paul Krugman被问及Gordon的观点是否正确时，他的回答是“非常可能”，故排除[A]和[C]；第十四段提到，美国评论员Edward Luce认为无论乐观主义者还是悲观主义者都可能对不确定的未来夸大其词了……，由此可知，Edward Luce并没有站在Erik Brynjolfsson和Andrew McAfee一边，故排除[D]。
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