A New Era of Machinery: Will the Accumulation of Capital Grow and Labor Intensity Decrease?

Abstract

In order to forecast the macroevolution of the contemporary developed societies it appears essential to take into account the dynamics of a number of economic and technological indicators. In the present paper we undertake such an attempt. Almost ten years after the start of the last economic crisis, the world economy is looking for the most effective plans for recovery. Such recovery is often associated with the fourth industrial revolution, in which the technological factor becomes a key driver of development. However, like any technological breakthrough, it will bring not only ‘roses of prosperity’ but ‘prickly thorns’ of disappointment as well. The key challenges will be the provision of a new quality of economic growth and addressing the associated employment problem. In this paper, we attempt to show the trends in the ratio between capital and output, as well as the possible effects on employment in the industrialized countries and China until 2050. We used a modified production function with labor-saving technological progress. It is shown that by 2050 the capital-output ratio will not undergo significant changes, and in case of a rejection of institutional reforms and legislative diversification of new types of labor activity in different segments of the economy, there may be a decrease in the number of employed by an average of 20 per cent. Social Evolution & History / March 2019 68 INTRODUCTION In order to forecast the macroevolution of the contemporary developed societies it appears essential to take into account the dynamics of a number of economic and technological indicators. Such an attempt is undertaken in the present paper. Despite the considerable efforts made by financial regulators to overcome the consequences of the 2008–2009 crisis, the economies of industrially developed countries show sluggish growth. In the case of the US economy, this was described as ‘secular stagnation’ (Summers 2014). Researchers who analyzed more than ten years of stagnation in the Japanese economy cited low efficiency of capital use as a reason (Ando, Christeris, and Miyagawa 2003; Hayashi 2006). The same process was named ‘Stagnation Traps’ (Benigno and Fornaro 2015), when under conditions of pessimistic expectations, the gap between large volumes of production and low growth rates can coexist. In their joint study, the Japanese and Korean economists consider the extremely low rate of capital expenditures for development as the reason for the stagnation of the Japanese economy. Thus, there is a clear trend that has been defined in economic policy to overcome stagnation: stimulation of aggregate demand, a policy of maintaining a low interest rate, new investments in the economy and a number of other regulatory measures. At the same time, another way has been outlined to solve the problem of economic stagnation: the search for new technological solutions that could qualitatively change the entire economic landscape and give a new impetus to development. Recommendations for the development strategy of Industry 4.0 for German manufacturers (Kagermann, Wahlster and Helbig 2013), and two American concepts: Industrial Internet (Evans and Annunziata 2012) and Internet of Things (Swan 2012) should be noted here. The famous work on artificial intelligence, published in 2003 (Russel and Norvig 2003) laid the foundation for the industrial development of systems with artificial intelligence. At the World Economic Forum in 2016, K. Schwab initiated a broad discussion on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab 2016). Hence, one can easily notice an obvious accumulation of the necessary ‘critical mass’ of new knowledge and technologies that, like an explosion, can create new conditions for development, and this new ‘critical mass of knowledge and technologies’ can be defined as a new machine era. Obviously, its development will require significant amounts of capital and expenditure on maintaining human resources. The subject of our further consideration will be two questions: what kind of capital / output ratio will take place and what is likely to happen in the employment Akaev et al. / A New Era of Machinery 69 market when new intelligent machine systems, global computer networks and markets create conditions for both free job search and for partial replacement of human knowledge with intelligent machines? SOME INITIAL ASSUMPTIONS Nicholas Kaldor (1961) has formulated five empirical regul arities, known as ‘stylized facts’, which are valid in the long term, when the consequences of various economic and financial shocks and crises are smoothed out. Some of these laws have remained valid so far and there is reason to believe that they will continue to act in the twentyfirst century, at least in the first half. For our study, the following three empirical laws of Kaldor (Kaldor 1961) are of interest: 1. The ratio of physical capital to output is almost constant. 2. The shares of labor and physical capital in the national income growth are almost constant. 3. According to the Kondratiev cycles theory at the downward stage of the 6 Large cycle (2018–2050) the effect of capital saturation should come and one must actually assume that the accumulation of capital will take place not through an exponential function, but through a logistic one. The first of these regularities can be formalized as follows: Y = κ · K, κ = const, (1) where κ is the coefficient of capital return. We proceed from the premise that Equation (1) can be observed in the first half of the twentyfirst century. This directly follows from the results obtained by Thomas Piketty and set forth in his work ‘Capital in the twenty-first Century’ (Piketty 2014). Indeed, T. Piketty demonstrated that in the developed countries (USA, Great Britain, Germany, France, etc.) the ratio between capital (K) and output (Y) in the twentieth century, returned to values close to those observed at the end of the nineteenth century (Piketty 2014: 124, 125, 150, 159). Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this ratio, representing the capital intensity Y K   1   , in the leading European states was quite stable and amounted 7   in France and the UK, and 5 . 6   in Germany (Piketty 2015: 135, 153). In the US, this ratio reached quasi-stability at the beginning of the twentieth century at the level of 5 . 4   , and then, starting from the mid-twentieth century, stabilized at the level of 4   (Piketty 2014). As we can see, the changes in capital intensity in the United States were of a very limited scale in contrast with Western Europe, i.e. Kaldor's respective pattern for the United States also worked in the twenSocial Evolution & History / March 2019 70 tieth century. Piketty explains the return of capital intensity in the twenty-first century to a high level close to the indices observed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the transition to a regime of slow economic growth (Piketty 2014: 171). In this regard, Piketty predicts that in global terms the capital intensity (β), which has already approached the 5 mark and reached the 1910 level, will later be around 6 in the middle of the twenty-first century and will reach 7 by the end of the twenty-first century. In our opinion, a significant increase in capital will actually take place, but the ratio (β) will remain practically unchanged, which we will show further on the basis of model calculations. As for the second of the above-mentioned Kaldor regularities, presumably, it will no longer be observed in the twenty-first century, as the share of capital in GDP growth will steadily increase which does not contradict the results that Piketty obtained.