Easing the Pains of Labor

The worst labor-market fears about innovative dynamism are either unjustified or can be allayed by better policies. Except during the depths of recessions, more jobs are created than destroyed. Job loss is usually gradually and often can be foreseen. The pains of labor can be reduced through policies that avoid repeating the Great Depression or the Crisis of 2008. The pains can be further reduced by fostering more robustly redundant job markets, such as in Silicon Valley, where most workers can quickly and easily find new jobs. Some innovative entrepreneurs succeed at turning their startups into the fast-growing gazelles that create most of the new jobs in the economy. Redundant job markets can be fostered by minimizing regulations on the gazelles, and by reducing the credentialism exemplified by occupational licensing. Robots and artificial intelligence are not to be feared because they are more complements than substitute for human labor.