Abstract
AbstractMany, especially low-skilled workers, blame globalization for their economic woes. Robots and machines, which have led to job market polarization, rising income inequality, and labor displacement, are often viewed much more forgivingly. This paper argues that citizens have a tendency to misattribute blame for economic dislocations toward immigrants and workers abroad, while discounting the effects of technology. Using the 2016 American National Elections Studies, a nationally representative survey, I show that workers facing higher risks of automation are more likely to oppose free trade agreements and favor immigration restrictions, even controlling for standard explanations for these attitudes. Although pocket-book concerns do influence attitudes toward globalization, this study calls into question the standard assumption that individuals understand and can correctly identify the sources of their economic anxieties. Accelerated automation may have intensified attempts to resist globalization.
Highlights
From the United States to Europe and beyond, populist leaders are enjoying a resurgence propelled by widespread resentment toward globalization
Immigration and trade only account for a small percentage of layoffs, globalization takes the brunt of the blame for labor market anxieties (Card, 1990; Peri and Sparber, 2009; Ottaviano et al, 2013; Helpman, 2018)
Decades of studies in economics have documented the distributional consequences of technology related to employment, income, inequality, and health, the political effects of automation are not well understood
Summary
From the United States to Europe and beyond, populist leaders are enjoying a resurgence propelled by widespread resentment toward globalization. Populists blame globalization for causing underemployment, wage stagnation, growing inequality, and the disappearance of well-paid factory jobs. Globalization has important distributional effects, neither trade, immigration, nor offshoring explain the preponderance of affected workers’ plight. The existing scholarship highlights technology’s link to many of the structural economic changes witnessed in advanced industrialized countries (Bekman et al, 1998; Acemoglu and Restrepo, 2018, 2020). Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020), for example, find large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages across commuting zones. Technological change is linked to job polarization and increasing income inequality, hurting especially those in the middle of the education and earnings distribution (Goos and Manning, 2007). Automation had mostly threatened workers who perform routine and repetitive tasks in the past, rapid developments in robotics and artificial intelligence threaten even non-routine jobs. Frey and Osborne (2017) estimate that 47 percent of American jobs are at high risks of automation
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