The great jobs boom
The rich world is enjoying an unprecedented jobs boom
*Capitalism’s critics are yet to notice *
全球就业大繁荣
富裕国家正在经历一个空前的就业机遇，这是资本主义批评没有看见的
每个人都说就业很困难，今天的职场人士，早已失去了对自己生活的控制能力，他们心裡渴望的就是能够不打零工，而且拥有一份真正的工作。他们薪水常常不敷使用，而且被严苛的老闆剥削。更重要的是，他们面临的是一个不稳定的未来，因为自动化随时可能让他们失业。
现在这张惨白景象出现了一个情况，那就是它与现实其实不符。正如《经济学人》本週Briefing的报导，大多数富裕国家正在享受前所未有的就业繁荣，工作机会不仅多不胜数，而且整体而言越来越好。由于劳动力市场的紧张，提高了员工的议价能力，资本主义正在以比过去几年更快的速度提高工人的工资。在美国，失业率仅为3.6％，是半个世纪以来的最低点。被大家忽略的，正是大多数富裕国家丰富的就业机会。
OECD的三分之二成员主要是富裕国家，在15至64岁的这个年龄层，正拥有史上最高的就业率。在日本，这个年龄族群的人，77％拥有工作，而且就业率在过去六年已经上升了6个百分点。今年，所有英国工作者每个月的工作时间加总，将达到创纪录的3500亿个小时。在劳动力规模激增之后，德国正在享受越来越高的税收收入。即使在法国、西班牙和义大利，虽然它们的失业率仍相对较高，但工作年龄的就业率已经接近，或超过2005年的水平。
富裕国家的就业热潮，部分原因来自週期性，这是从上次经济大衰退之后，经过十年的经济刺激、经济复甦的结果，但它也反映了结构性的转变。
整体人口的教育程度越来越高，人力网站也更为有效率的匹配了职务空缺和合适的申请人。更多女性加入职场工作，自2007年以来，女性几乎完全占据了富裕国家就业率的增长比例，这与欧洲的鼓励家庭生育政策有关，但自2015年以来，这种趋势也在美国发生。最后，对福利计划的各种改革，包括一方面不再漫无目的挥霍无度，一方面加强各类资格考试，看来成功鼓励了人们出外积极寻找工作。
由于就业机会的繁荣，「失业」这个曾经一度是政治经济核心的问题，几乎从许多国家的政治格局中完全消失了。失业已被一系列关于工作质量和工作安排的投诉所取代，与就业统计相比，这些是更难以判断及量化的指标。最重要的是，自动化正在摧毁机会，儘管产量很大，但质量往往低劣且不稳定。 英国工党领袖Jeremy Corbyn说：「我们的就业市场，正变成一片不安全的海洋。」
事实上，现实状况充斥着各种意见分歧。在製造业中，机器在过去几十年之间已经取代了工人， 这应证了美国男性长久持续失业的情况。现在，只有中等教育或更低教育程度的这个人口比例，就业率高于2000年。但是对整个OECD 而言，曾经引人注目的机器人和各种演算法预言会带来的就业末日，几乎不见踪影。
随着经济结构的变化，以及服务业（包括零工经济）的扩张，中等水平的技术工作变得越来越难以找到。根据官方预测，到2026年，美国的居家护理人员需求数量将超过秘书人数。然而，随着劳动力市场的空洞化，被创造出来的高技能工作岗位将比低技术含量岗位多得多。与此同时，低端工作的薪酬也越来越高，部分原因是最低工资上涨。在富裕国家，低于全国中位数三分之二的工资变得越来越少，而不是越来越多。
因为未来充满不确定性，美国传统的全职工作，在2017年的就业比例与2005年相同，美国的零工经济仅佔就业岗位的1％左右。在法国，儘管最近进行了一些改革，使劳动力市场更加灵活，但新僱员在永久合同中的比例，最近达到了历史最高水平。
真正不稳定的工作出现在义大利等南欧国家，但无论是剥削性的雇主还是现代科技，都不应该受到指责。真正的罪魁祸首是僵化的法律，它姑息了劳动力市场，排除了年轻的就业者，只为了让原有的工作者继续轻鬆的工作。
在其他地方，工作需求越来越多的连锁效益正在变得清晰。当企业竞争就业人员，而非就业人员争取工作时，平均工资正在提高，这推高就业人员的份额。
紧张的劳动力市场，导致企业从被忽视的人群中去找员工，并在技能短缺的情况下加强培训。美国官僚多年来一直担心着，应该如何缩减残疾福利券，现在紧张的劳动力市场正在为他们解决这个难题。事实上，就业热潮的吸引力之一，在于它可以帮助解决社会弊病，而无需政府做太多事情或花很多钱。
儘管如此，政策制定者确实需要汲取教训，经济学家必须谦卑。他们一直低估了潜在就业，导致犹豫不决的财政和货币政策。正如他们对21世纪金融业的前景过度乐观，结果造成破产一样，他们对2010年就业增长潜力的错误悲观情绪，不可避免地减缓了经济复甦。
左派需要接受一个事实，也就是它在资本主义中所提出的许多批评不符合事实。劳动力市场底层的生活并不快乐，然而，很多工人收入正在改善，做基础性的工作也远比失业要更好。如果不承认这一点，将导致政府过多的干预，这不但是没有必要的，而且还可能危及最近的进展。
就业热潮似乎部分来自于像Corbyn先生这些人所强烈反对的福利改革，而极右派也应该承认，在没有大幅增加劳动力法规的情况下，就业机会已经蓬勃发展。事实上，劳动市场规则已经在激增，儘管批评人士不再关注最低工资上涨是否会损害某些人，例如年轻人，因为这些损害并没有大到足以引人注意。
这样的就业繁荣不会永远持续下去，最终，一个经济衰退将彻底扼杀它。但现在，它还是值得一些称许的。
Everyone says work is miserable. Today’s workers, if they are lucky enough to escape the gig economy and have a real job, have lost control over their lives. They are underpaid and exploited by unscrupulous bosses. And they face a precarious future, as machines threaten to make them unemployable.
There is just one problem with this bleak picture: it is at odds with reality. As we report this week (see Briefing), most of the rich world is enjoying a jobs boom of unprecedented scope. Not only is work plentiful, but it is also, on average, getting better. Capitalism is improving workers’ lot faster than it has in years, as tight labour markets enhance their bargaining power. The zeitgeist has lost touch with the data.
In America the unemployment rate is only 3.6%, the lowest in half a century. Less appreciated is the abundance of jobs across most of the rich world. Two-thirds of the members of the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries, enjoy record-high employment among 15- to 64-year-olds. In Japan 77% of this group has a job, up six percentage points in six years. This year Britons will work a record 55bn hours, on current trends. Germany is enjoying a bonanza of tax revenue following a surge in the size of its labour force (see article). Even in France, Spain and Italy, where joblessness is still relatively high, working-age employment is close to or exceeds 2005 levels.
The rich-world jobs boom is partly cyclical—the result of a decade of economic stimulus and recovery since the great recession. But it also reflects structural shifts. Populations are becoming more educated. Websites are efficient at matching vacancies and qualified applicants. And ever more women work. In fact women account for almost all the growth in the rich-world employment rate since 2007. That has something to do with pro-family policies in Europe, but since 2015 the trend is found in America, too. Last, reforms to welfare programmes, both to make them less generous and to toughen eligibility tests, seem to have encouraged people to seek work.
Thanks to the jobs boom, unemployment, once the central issue of political economy, has all but disappeared from the political landscape in many countries. It has been replaced by a series of complaints about the quality and direction of work. These are less tangible and harder to judge than employment statistics. The most important are that automation is destroying opportunities and that work, though plentiful, is low-quality and precarious. “Our jobs market is being turned into a sea of insecurity,” says Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour Party.
Again, reality begs to differ. In manufacturing, machines have replaced workers over a period of decades. This seems to have contributed to a pocket of persistent joblessness among American men. But across the oecd as a whole, a jobs apocalypse carried out by machines and algorithms, much feared in Silicon Valley, is nowhere to be seen. A greater share of people with only a secondary education or less is in work now than in 2000.
It is also true that middle-skilled jobs are becoming harder to find as the structure of the economy changes, and as the service sector—including the gig economy—expands. By 2026 America will have more at-home carers than secretaries, according to official projections. Yet as labour markets hollow out, more high-skilled jobs are being created than menial ones. Meanwhile, low-end work is becoming better paid, in part because of higher minimum wages. Across the rich world, wages below two-thirds of the national median are becoming rarer, not more common.
As for precariousness, in America traditional full-time jobs made up the same proportion of employment in 2017 as they did in 2005. The gig economy accounts for only around 1% of jobs there. In France, despite recent reforms to make labour markets more flexible, the share of new hires given permanent contracts recently hit an all-time high. The truly precarious work is found in southern European countries like Italy, and neither exploitative employers nor modern technology is to blame. The culprit is old-fashioned law that stitches up labour markets, locking out young workers in order to keep insiders in cushy jobs.
Elsewhere, the knock-on benefits of abundant work are becoming clear. As firms compete for workers rather than workers for jobs, average wage growth is rising, pushing up workers’ share of the pie—albeit not as fast as the extent of the boom might have suggested. Tight labour markets lead firms to fish for employees in neglected pools, including among ex-convicts, and to boost training amid skills shortages. American wonks fretted for years about how to shrink disability-benefit rolls. Now the hot labour market is doing it for them. Indeed, one attraction of the jobs boom is its potential to help solve social ills without governments having to do or spend very much.
Nonetheless, policymakers do have lessons to learn. Economists have again been humbled. They have consistently underestimated potential employment, leading to hesitant fiscal and monetary policy. Just as their sanguine outlook on finance in the 2000s contributed to the bust, so their mistaken pessimism about the potential for jobs growth in the 2010s has needlessly slowed the recovery.
The left needs to accept that many of the criticisms it levels at capitalism do not fit the facts. Life at the bottom of the labour market is not joyous—far from it. However, the lot of workers is improving and entry-level jobs are a much better launch pad to something better than joblessness is. A failure to acknowledge this will lead to government intervention that is at best unnecessary and at worst jeopardises recent progress. The jobs boom seems to be partly down to welfare reforms that the likes of Mr Corbyn have vociferously opposed.
The right should acknowledge that jobs have boomed without the bonfire of regulations that typically forms its labour-market policy. In fact, labour-market rules are proliferating. And although the jury is out on whether rising minimum wages are harming some groups, such as the young, they are not doing damage that is large enough to show up in aggregate.
The jobs boom will not last for ever. Eventually, a recession will kill it off. Meanwhile, it deserves a little appreciation.
Correction (May 28th 2019): An earlier version of this article misstated the number of hours that Britons will work this year. Sorry.
Circuit breaker
Big tech and the trade war
As the fight spreads, it is becoming a danger to investors, consumers and American interests
断电开关器
大型科技公司与中美贸易之间由于抗争加速，对投资人、消费者及美国利益，都正变成一个危险
当美中贸易谈判于5月10日确定破裂时，看起来对金融市场的影响微弱。大部分企业和投资者都认为，这是一种超级大国之间的长期斗争，而不会是那种突然的危机或金融恐慌。
然而，随着后来科技业之间的冲突升级，这种假设如今看起来不符现实。美国商务部5月15日表示，美国企业需要特殊许可，才能与中国巨头华为打交道；其他中国科技公司担心将陆续被列入黑名单，导致股价纷纷暴跌。一个连锁反应正在蠢蠢欲动，因为一个巨大产业，正在准备迎接着一个暴力冲击。
白宫的鹰派人士可能认为，隔离科技产业将减缓中国的长期发展，而且事实上隔离是一种良好的谈判策略，因为中国会在短期内比美国失去更多。但事实上，金融市场、美国的盟友，以及全世界消费者，都将迅速感受到全面科技战争的残酷影响，从长远来看，它反而最后会使中国能够自给自足。
科技对抗始于2018年4月，当时美国将中国硬体公司ZTE（中兴通讯）列为黑名单，因为它违反了对伊朗和朝鲜的制裁，而且它还对此撒谎。由于无法购买美国半导体和其他组件，或与西方银行打交道，因此这家企业差点崩溃。从那以后，美国行动的范围开始扩大，但举证责任却下降了。
华为禁令，是在一场阻止美国盟友使用其5G装备的运动之后发布的，而且可能会进一步加重禁令。据「纽约时报」报导，被列入黑名单的企业还将包括海康威视，该企业生产的系统，用于监视新疆维吾尔族的少数民族。
各国的供应商和客户正在把这些中国公司剔除出去，谷歌和英国晶片设计公司Arm都表示，他们将限制对华为的供应；英国和日本的电信公司也表示，他们将停止销售部分华为手机。华为在过去五年中，在中国境外销售了3亿支手机，他们的买家很快就会发现，这些手机没办法正常运作。
这个对抗是一种提醒，提醒大家美国拥有的强大力量，可以透过阻止外国公司使用其智慧财产权和金融系统，它可以使这些企业破产。白宫是对的，科技战争的成本一开始是不对称的。 美国公司每年可能会损失100亿美元的晶片和零组件许可收入，但是，中国的硬体製造业更大程度上依赖着美国的零组件供应，而这些零组件短时间内不容易从其他地方採购，或在自己国家内生产，所以最后其损失会更大。
华为只剩80天的库存，而且拥有18万名员工。科技产品贸易的中断，将导致中国沿海城市的大量失业。科技产业不像其他行业，如钢铁和大豆般，死抱着白宫的大腿。它的供应链非常複杂，就像2007-2008年金融危机之前，那种相互交叉关联的全球金融体系。
全球的科技硬体公司，都依赖着中国的生产，它们的总市值为5兆美元。在中国的获利超过五分之一的Apple，可能会突然发现自己的产品被抵制销售，其现金充裕的资产负债表可以在震荡中倖存下来，但其股价必定会下挫。 数百家金融体质较差的小型供应商，有可能会因此破产。
连锁效应将损害美国在亚洲的盟友，因为它们拥有供应中国科技製造中心的工厂。例如，2017年10月的数据显示，智慧型手机的零组件佔马来西亚和新加坡出口的16％以上，台湾则已经超过了33％。两家台湾巨头，台积电TSMC（生产晶片）和富士康（装配设备），就已经跨越了科技冷战的断层线，在美国和中国两地都有工厂和客户，韩国三星也是如此。美国的盟友正面临着「忠诚度」这种难以想象的考验。
消费者也会受伤。到目前为止，贸易战的成本已被掩盖，因为生产者即使支付了关税，仍然会悄悄的转嫁给消费者，但现这笔支出会越来越明显。你可以想象一下，如果美国人突然无法购买中国製造的iPhone，这个世界会是什麽景象？
撕裂的代价，意味着双方都可能倒退萎缩。然而，这场对抗将加速各地发展本土供应链的竞赛，以提供各地所需要的技术，甚至可能包括印度这种正奋发向上的新势力。美国对数位经济的控制能力，使其能够肆无忌惮行使其势力。但是，通过如此笨拙地方式展现它的力量，它将加速结束其自身统治地位的脚步。
hen trade talks between America and China fell apart on May 10th, the effect on financial markets was muted. Most firms and investors are betting on a long struggle between the superpowers but not a sudden crisis or a financial panic. As the conflict over the tech industry escalates, however, that assumption looks suspect. On May 15th America’s Commerce Department said that companies would need a special licence to deal with Huawei, China’s hardware giant, which it deemed a threat to American interests (it later said the order would not take full effect for 90 days). Fears that other Chinese tech firms will be blacklisted have caused their shares to tumble. A chain reaction is under way as a giant industry braces for a violent shock.
The hawks in the White House may believe that isolating the tech industry will slow China’s long-term development and that isolation is a good negotiating tactic, since China has more to lose in the short term than America does. In fact the brutal fallout from a full-blown tech war would rapidly be felt by financial markets as well as by America’s allies and the world’s consumers. In the long run it may even make China self-sufficient.
The tech confrontation began in earnest in April 2018, when America blacklisted zte, a Chinese hardware firm, for breaching sanctions on Iran and North Korea and then lying about it. Unable to buy American semiconductors and other components, or to deal with Western banks, ztealmost collapsed (President Donald Trump reversed the ban). Since then the scope of American actions has broadened and the burden of proof fallen. The Huawei ban comes after a campaign to stop American allies from using its 5g gear. Further bans are likely. According to the New York Times, the blacklisted firms will include Hikvision, which makes systems used for surveillance of the beleaguered Uighur minority in Xinjiang. Suppliers and customers are cutting these firms off. Google and Arm, a British chip-design firm, have both said they will limit supplies to Huawei. Telecoms firms in Britain and Japan have said they will stop selling some Huawei phones.
The confrontation is a reminder of America’s awesome power. By stopping foreign firms from using its intellectual property and financial system, it can put them out of business. The White House is also right that the bill for a tech war will at first be asymmetric. American firms will lose perhaps $10bn a year of licensing revenue for chips and components. But much of China’s hardware-manufacturing industry depends on American components that cannot easily be sourced from elsewhere or produced at home. Huawei carries only 80 days of inventory and has 188,000 staff (see article). A hiatus in the trade of tech goods would cause huge job losses in China’s coastal cities.
Tech is not like the other industries, such as steel and soyabeans, that obsess the White House’s trade warriors. The supply chain is so complex that it more closely resembles the interconnected global financial system before the crisis of 2007-08. Tech hardware firms around the world, which mostly depend on production in China, have a total market value of $5trn. Apple, which makes a fifth of its profits in China, could find itself banned or its products boycotted; its cash-rich balance-sheet could survive the shock, but its shares would slump. Hundreds of smaller suppliers with rickety finances could go bust.
The ripple effect would hurt America’s allies in Asia, because they host factories that supply China’s tech-manufacturing hubs and are home to companies that operate in China. In October 2017, for example, components for smartphones accounted for over 16% of exports in Malaysia and Singapore and over 33% in Taiwan. Two Taiwanese giants, tsmc (which makes chips) and Foxconn (which assembles devices), straddle the fault line of the tech cold war, having production and customers in both America and China. The same is true of South Korea’s champion, Samsung. America’s allies face an impossible test of loyalty.
Consumers will suffer, too. Until now, the cost of the trade war has been masked, because tariffs are paid by producers who absorb their cost or pass it on stealthily to consumers. Now the bill could become visible. Huawei has sold 300m handsets outside China in the past five years. Their buyers may soon find that their phones no longer work properly. And just imagine if Americans were suddenly unable to buy Chinese-made iPhones.
The cost of a rupture means that both sides are likely to back down. Yet the battle will hasten the race to develop an indigenous capacity to supply every vital technology in China—and in every aspiring power, including India. America’s hold over the digital economy lets it enforce its will. But by unleashing its power so clumsily, it will hasten the end of its own dominance.
