Page - (000065) - in Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation

58 L. SCHLOGL AND A. SUMNER technological standards as resilient jobs in the industrial and the service sectors.5 The service sector is generally considered to contribute strongly to the ARS, as it involves plenty of nonroutine work involving social interactions. The current occupational structure of an economy reflects past (expectations of) automatability. Regarding the second question, there could be a dilemma whereby a productivity boost in the APS (e.g. in agriculture) creates surplus labor, but the ARS (e.g. the industrial sector) is not able to fully absorb it. So-called premature deindustrialization could be due to such “Lewis 2.0” dynamics: workers might be moving to the service sector because the manufacturing sector has no demand for (unskilled) labor. It is fully imaginable from today’s point of view that the industrial sector will at some point be absorbing an equally small number of workers as today’s extractive and agricultural sectors are. A set of highly productive manu- facturing clusters would then produce most of the physical goods there is demand for, while almost all human labor demand would remain in the service sector. If that is the case, this would indicate that the digital revolution creates problems for analysis based on broad economic sectors such as “services”: Castells (2010, p. 244) criticizes analysis based on sec- tors for three flaws: (i) the extreme heterogeneity of the service sec- tor creates a “statistically obsolete category” which (ii) underestimates the “revolutionary nature of new information technologies” and (iii) the diversity of advanced societies and interdependence with the global economy from which different employment and occupational structures follow. The historical productivity revolution in agriculture (or the “Green Revolution” in developing countries) shows how transformative and labor-saving technological change can be. In the British census of 1841, 22% of citizens were registered as being in agricultural employment whereas this number has dropped to below 1% in the present (Office for National Statistics, 2013). Agricultural shares in the developing world, though considerably higher, have also fallen rapidly (to an extent that Eastwood, Kirsten, & Lipton [2007] have argued that developing coun- tries underwent “premature agriculturalization”). Green revolutions have brought drastic productivity gains, allowing and incentivizing the reallocation of labor toward other—often hith- erto nonexistent—economic activities and sectors. Many argue that technological leaps in agriculture allowed Western countries to escape a