Yes, Sally, the Mechanization of White Collar Jobs Can Be Easier than that of Blue Collar Jobs

From Paul Krugman's article today on education in the New York Times:

Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate....

And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers.

This makes intuitive sense, doesn't it? Most white-collar jobs have historically been premised on knowledge. Anyone can move boxes around a warehouse or change the oil in a car, but only a select few could navigate a personal injury claim or handle accounting books because of the specialized intellectual abilities involved. But computers are better at storing and retrieving knowledge than they are at making physical environmental adjustments.

A few months ago, I got into an argument with someone who claimed that the answer to the U.S.'s future was more intensive education, to essentially out-school the Chinese, Indians, etc., by promoting math and sciences education. I asked him point-blank what he would do if he were starting out at 18 today rather than at 58. Without hesitation, he said "engineering, just as I did back then."

The problem, of course, is that economies change and what "worked" 40 years ago doesn't necessarily work today. Although engineers seem better off than young lawyers, I know many an engineering grad my own age who was told to get a master's after believing a B.S. would land them a set-for-life job. And given that much of engineering is following explicit rules to produce well-designed products, I imagine we'll see computerized engineers long before we see computerized janitors.

Education is a fantastic normative goal, but we have to collectively realize that it has finite (and shrinking) returns economically. Because it benefits our democracy to have educated and hard-worked people, even if they can't all have jobs that require education, we also have to take steps to prevent citizens from being penalized for their intelligence or education, but that, I believe, is a much larger issue deserving of another entry entirely.