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Unemployment and the lack of economic opportunity: Annotated Bibliography

Crystal Vining

University of Arizona Global Campus

GEN 499: General Education Capstone

Kassandra Bahr

February 27, 2021

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Unemployment and the lack of economic opportunity: Introduction

Are you scared of losing your job? 22 million Americans lost their jobs due to the

impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdowns in 2020, and many still remain at risk

of long-term unemployment and a lack of economic opportunity. Even before the pandemic,

systemic issues linked to globalization, such as the offshoring and automation of low-wage jobs

had already displaced much of the workforce in vital economic sectors such as agriculture and

manufacturing. There are serious ethical implications to this topic, ranging from equity of

income distribution by ethnicity and race, to the rise of poverty, educational inequality, poor

living standards and mental health issues. However, government policy can play a part in

mitigating the damage. This paper will contend that government policy can play a significant

role in alleviating the issue of unemployment and the lack of economic opportunity, because it

can create new jobs and skilled workers through training and strategic investments, when faced

with the impact of offshoring, technological automation and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unemployment and the lack of economic opportunity: Annotated Bibliography

Frey, C. B. & Osborne, M. A. (2017). The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to

computerisation? Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114 (1), 254-280.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.08.019

This article uses a new methodology to calculate the probability of automation for 700

job roles, and predicted that there was a high risk of automation for up to 47% of

American-based professions by 2033. These included both high-wage careers such as

accountants and lawyers, whose roles could be taken over by text mining, analytics, and

semantic software, alongside manufacturers and machinists whose roles could be

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automated by assembly line robots. The authors also demonstrate empirical evidence that

the probability a job is automated is negatively correlated with wages and educational

qualifications. In other words, low-wage, low-skill and low-education jobs would be

more likely to be automated.

The article is relevant to my paper because it shows how the issue of automation

is linked to the loss of employment and economic opportunity, which supports my claim

for the need for government policy to alleviate the forthcoming loss of jobs. The article

also demonstrates how macro-factors linked to globalization, such as automation,

offshoring and pandemics, will continue to impact employment and economic

opportunity, and pose ethical implications in terms of how these impacts are distributed.

Clearly, low-wage, low-skilled workers are at greatest risk in the case of automated jobs.

The authors provide strong empirical evidence using a machine learning methodology

and a Gaussian classification process to demonstrate the external validity of their

findings.

Grossman, T., Sorells, B., Chessell, D., McQuay, L., & Connolly-Barker, M. (2018). Artificial

Intelligence, Workplace Automation, and Collective Joblessness. Annals of Spiru Haret

University Journalism Studies, 19(2), 64–86. Retrieved from

https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=729608

This article discusses the role of automation in reducing economic opportunity by

country, gender, job role, age and geography, and shows that there are structural

inequalities in the way automation impacts employment and economic opportunity for
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certain groups. The authors of this study use empirical methods and existing research to

demonstrate how automation would lead to a decline in economic opportunity in terms of

labor's proportion of national income and displace key jobs in areas such as

manufacturing, psychiatrists, statisticians, telemarketers, cooks and technicians. The

study also shows that Hispanics and blacks are disproportionately more likely to have

their jobs automated, at 61.2% for Hispanics and 55.1% for blacks, compared to Asians

(43.2%) and Whites (48.9%) (Grossman et al, 2019). Notably, the source provides a

counterpoint to Frey & Osborne (2017), by demonstrating how automation's impact on

employment cuts across almost all job industry roles, although lower-income, lower-skill

roles are more adversely affected. For example, food preparation, construction and

cleaning have a 60% automation risk, but business administration, IT and healthcare jobs

do not fare much better at 35-45% risk. The article is relevant to my paper because it

shows how the issue of automation is linked to the specific loss of employment and

economic opportunity in key roles and sectors. Hence, targeted government policy is

necessary to retrain and reskill workers accordingly.

Angelucci, M., Angrisani, M., Bennett, D. M., Kapteyn, A., & Schaner, S. G. (2020). Remote

work and the heterogeneous impact of covid-19 on employment and health. National

Bureau of Economic Research, 277(49), 120-129. http://doi.org/10.3386/w27749

The source analyses how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected employment and health

outcomes, comparing between remote and non-remote workers in the US. Remote

workers are defined as those that have the capability to work from home, while non-

remote workers are defined as those who have to be on-premise to work. The authors
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leverage a large representative panel dataset over four months of 2020 for the study. The

authors demonstrate that non-remote workers had three times the rate of unemployment

as remote workers. From an ethics and equity perspective, this gap in unemployment and

job losses widened for women and ethnic minorities such as Hispanics and African

Americans, alongside less-educated workers.

Furthermore, non-remote workers who retained their jobs had a decline in

respiratory health, likely because they could not protect themselves properly from

COVID-19 in their frontline worker roles. The income and health losses were thus borne

disproportionately by non-remote workers from minority, female-led, low-income

households, which worsened existing inequality. The source is relevant to a study on the

role of government in alleviating unemployment and a lack of economic opportunity

because it shows the disparity and unfairness in income and health outcomes for remote

and non-remote workers, as well as marginalized female and minority workers. It

therefore provides a strong case for how government policy should be implemented to

target these marginalized groups for relief.

Chessell, D. (2018). The Jobless Economy in a Post-Work Society: How Automation Will

Transform the Labor Market. Psychosociological Issues in Human Resource

Management, 6(2), 74–79. https://doi.org/ 10.22381/PIHRM6220187

The scholarly article by Chessell (2018) discusses the role of automation based on data

from Citigroup, OECD, Statista and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to show how job

automation is more likely for women and minority races/ethnicities, and how there is a
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significant risk of automation for a large share of the general population. The author

provides detailed empirical research and theoretical mechanisms for how such

displacement may occur. The source is firmly supported by empirical data and provides

strong policy recommendations, and is reliable as a peer-reviewed source. However, the

article may be biased in favor of the key regions and industries studied, and neglects to

mention that automation and technological change may also lead to more jobs being

created due to an increase in economic output. The source is relevant to a study on the

role of government in alleviating unemployment and a lack of economic opportunity

because it shows how automation disproportionately impacts women and minority

races/ethnicities, and thus provides a case for targeted interventions for these

communities and segments based on their likelihood of job displacement.

Dauth, C., & Lang, J. (2019). Can the unemployed be trained to care for the elderly? The effects

of subsidized training in elderly care. Health economics, 28(4), 543-555.

https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3863

The article discusses the potential for the unemployed to be trained in a high-

demand role in developed and ageing societies, which is that of elderly care. The study

uses a dataset based on unemployed individuals who received subsidized training for

elderly care professions in Germany over 11.5 years. The study's results show that short-

term and long-term retraining courses have a large impact on increasing the long-term

employment of workers, with 5% of employed nurses being trained unemployed workers.

Unlike other studies, this study is helpful because it provides context and evidence on a

genuine solution to solving the issue of unemployment. The study is useful to my thesis
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because it shows how government policy in subsidizing training for high-demand sectors

can be effectively used to transition workers from a long-term state of unemployment and

lack of economic opportunity, toward a situation where they are effectively deployed in a

sector that is difficult to automate away.