"Lousy and lovely jobs: The rising polarization of work in Britain"

by Goos, Maarten; Manning, Alan (2007)

Abstract

This paper shows that the United Kingdom since 1975 has exhibited a pattern of job polarization with rises in employment shares in the highest-and lowest-wage occupations. This is not entirely consistent with the idea of skill-biased technical change as a hypothesis about the impact of technology on the labor market. We argue that the “routinization” hypothesis recently proposed by Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) is a better explanation of job polarization, though other factors may also be important. We show that job polarization …

Key Passage

the rapidly growing lousy jobs are all ones where it has proved difficult to substitute machines or computers for human labor. (p.125)

Keywords

Lousy Jobs, Job Polarization, Employment, Machines, Automation, Labour Markets

Themes

Employment, Automation

Links to Reference

• https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article/89/1/118-133/57634
• http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/rest.89.1.118
• https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/89/1/118/57634
• https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/rest.89.1.118

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