ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

was relatively flat through the 2000s, before starting to increase in 2012.
There were close to 350 robotics patents granted in both 2013 and 2014,
as compared to an average of about 150 in the 2000s. As also indicated in
Figure 5-14, the share of patents that are for robotics decreased from 2006
to 2010 before starting to increase from 2011 to 2014.
CEA also conducted an analysis of patent ownership and found little
evidence of concentrated ownership across industries. However, robotics
are used differently across industries, and so it is unclear whether there is
a concentration of patent ownership within different industries. Going forward,
it will be important to be vigilant about intellectual property related to
robotics. Low concentration in upstream markets implies healthy competition,
which should lead to more innovation and lower prices. As a result,
downstream firms should be able to acquire robot inputs at competitive
prices, which should help to drive productivity growth even further.
Effect of Robotics on Workers
While industrial robots have the potential to drive productivity
growth in the United States, it is less clear how this growth will affect
workers. One view is that robots will take substantial numbers of jobs away
from humans, leaving them technologically unemployed—either in blissful
leisure or, in many popular accounts, suffering from the lack of a job. Most
economists consider either scenario unlikely because several centuries of
innovation have shown that, even as machines have been able to increasingly
do tasks humans used to do, this leads humans to have higher incomes,
consume more, and creates jobs for almost everyone who wants them. In
other words, as workers have historically been displaced by technological
innovations, they have moved into new jobs, often requiring more complex
tasks or greater levels of independent judgment.
A critical question, however, is the pace at which this happens and the
labor market institutions facilitate the shifting of people to new jobs. As an
extreme example, if a new innovation rendered one-half of the jobs in the
economy obsolete next year, then the economy might be at full employment
in the “long run.” But this long run could be decades away as workers are
slowly retrained and as the current cohort of workers ages into retirement
and is replaced by younger workers trained to find jobs amidst the new
technological opportunities. If, however, these jobs were rendered obsolete
over many decades then it is much less likely that it would result in largescale,
“transitional” unemployment. Nevertheless, labor market institutions
are critical here too, and the fact that the percentage of men ages 25-54
employed in the United States slowly but steadily declined since the 1950s,
as manufacturing has shifted to services, suggests that challenges may arise.
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