Day: September 19, 2018

Automation, future of work, and other distractions

Michael Reddell labour party, Productivity

The Labour Party, led by the now Minister of Finance, has made great play in recent years of the looming “threat” of automation, and the claimed need to think hard about the Future of Work.  There was a taskforce in Opposition, repeated references in ministerial speeches, and now even a Future of Work Forum.  I’ve always been a little sceptical: the application of new technology has been a key part of how living standards have improved over the last few hundred years, and I’m sure most people are hoping for further improvements for themselves and their children/grandchildren.   And employment rates seemed to be about as high as they’ve been for decades.

And so I was interested this afternoon flicking through today’s online Financial Times to find an article citing some new OECD work suggestiong that New Zealand is among the advanced countries with some of the lower propotions of jobs at significant risk of automation.  Here is the key chart from the OECD paper.

automation2

New Zealand fourth lowest share of jobs at high risk of being automated, and lowest in the OECD for the combined high and significant risks.

For the geeks, here is some text from the paper on how OECD researchers have been revising down their estimates.

automation 4

Automation will, no doubt, continue to happen.  It should.  We’ll generally be better off for it (even if some individuals will face difficult adjustments, as they did in every phase of activity –  indeed every business cycle – since the Industrial Revolution).  But particularly if this methodology is even approximately right, it reinforces my sense that the Labour Party – and now the government –  (probably with good intentions) use the Future of Work issue, and automation risks/possibilities, as a distraction from, and substitute for, their lack of interest/ideas in addressing the real economic elephant in the room: decades of underperforming productivity growth that mean we would now need a two-thirds lift in productivity (all else equal) to once again match the leading countries, most of whom we used to consistently outstrip.

As Morning Report reminded us today on the anniversary of women’s suffrage, we should celebrate the automatic washing machine, for all the time it freed up, and opportunities it allowed people (then largely women) to pursue.  It is only one of a myriad of such innnovations, past, present and future.

But New Zealanders get fewer of the gains than most advanced country citizens, as successive governments have done nothing to reverse the productivity failure.

 

An age of diminished expectations?

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Uncategorized

The Westpac McDermott Miller consumer confidence survey results are out this morning.  To the extent they get any media coverage, no doubt the focus will be on the headline result.  Here is the summary chart.

westpac 1

In Westpac’s words

Consumer confidence fell sharply in September, taking it to its lowest in six years.

There probably isn’t much predictive value in these results for actual economic data, but I find the results interesting in their own right: how people generally are feeling about their economic fortunes and the economy more broadly.  After all, respondents aren’t just the “ideological enemies” of the government.

The Westpac results don’t seem out of line with the most recent Colmar-Brunton poll (taken six weeks ago) in which respondents are asked a single question.

“And do you think during the next 12 months the economy will be in a better state than at present, or in a worse state?”

colmar brunton

The public no longer seem very optimistic at all.

But in some ways I was more interested in the longer-term trends in a couple of the sub-components of the Westpac index.   For example,

westpac 2.png

People are now less optimistic about improvements in their own personal position than at any time in the last 30 years outside periods when the economy was already in the midst of a recession (and materially lower than in the fairly shallow 1997/98 recession).  And look at the contrast between confidence levels from say 1994 to 2007 (across two different governments) and those now.  It looks a lot like a fairly steady trend decline.

And then there is the question about the longer-term prospects for the economy itself.  Respondents might not know much analytically about the issue, but their perceptions are interesting nonetheless.

westpac 3

The latest observation isn’t startlingly bad (and there was that sharp –  but brief – dip a couple of years ago) but look how diminished expectations are now (last three years or so) relative to the entire history of the series.  There are individual quarters that are weaker (though note, not in the 2008/09 or 1997/98 recessions) but in thirty years there has been no three year period where medium-term optimism has been weaker than over the last three years (under National and Labour governments).   And this pessimism isn’t tied to the last recession –  look how upbeat people briefly were in the couple of years after the recession ended.

(The medium-term picture is less bad in the ANZ’s consumer confidence survey, (which has a much shorter run of data) and it would interesting to know the precise question asked, to help understand that difference.)

Then again, in an economy that has managed very little labour productivity growth in the last five or six years, and none at all in the last three years, perhaps it shouldn’t surprise.

real GDP phw jul 18

In an economy where the promises of economic reform decades ago came to little  (for younger readers, that is the then Minister of Finance back in 1989/90)

caygill 1989 expectations

And where none of the political parties – especially not National or Labour that have led all our governments – seem to care much if at all, or have any serious proposals for turning around the continuing decades of underperformance, isn’t the public quite rational in being much less optimistic than they were?

A more interesting question is why they/we don’t find a way of demanding something better.