Although the importance of technological change for increasing prosperity is undisputed and economists typically deem it unlikely that labour-saving technology causes long-term employment or income losses, people’s anxiety about automation and its distributive consequences can be an important shaper of economic and social policies. This paper considers the political economy of automation, proposing that individuals in occupations more at risk of job loss due to automation have stronger preferences for government redistribution. I analyse individual-level cross-national data from the European Social Survey and other sources, covering up to 32 countries and more than 170,000 individuals. I find a robust positive association between occupational automation risk and preferences for redistribution. As long as the conditional (mean) independence assumption is satisfied, my estimates suggest that a one standard deviation increase in automatability increases preferences for redistribution with roughly 0.05 standard deviations, which is comparable to the difference in preferences for redistribution between women and men.

中文翻译：

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工作的自动化和重新分配的偏好*

尽管技术变革对促进繁荣的重要性是无可争议的，经济学家通常认为节省劳动力的技术不太可能导致长期就业或收入损失，但人们对自动化及其分配后果的焦虑可能是经济和社会政策的重要塑造者。本文考虑了自动化的政治经济学，提出由于自动化而面临失业风险更大的职业中的个人对政府再分配有更强的偏好。我分析来自欧洲社会调查和其他来源的个人层面的跨国数据，涵盖多达 32 个国家和超过 170,000 个人。我发现职业自动化风险与再分配偏好之间存在强大的正相关关系。