Basic income causes workers to fear automation less

One of the starkest trends in the changing landscape of work has been, and will be, automation through technological advancement. The threat of robots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence replacing workers has been studied extensively. In this paper, we exploit a representative sample of the prime aged US working population to look at how workers perceive the automation threat to their jobs and the impact of perceived automation risk on policy preferences, employment responses, populist attitudes, and voting intentions.

We document that self-reported fear of automation strongly correlates with requests for more redistribution and taxation, populist attitudes, and intentions to retrain or switch occupations. We then exploit a randomized information treatment to document the causal impact of perceived automation risk on these outcomes. We find that being exposed to higher job loss probabilities than perceived has a significant causal effect on a range of policy preferences and populist attitudes. In particular, workers exposed to higher job loss probabilities request higher levels of taxation, universal basic income, and income support for the poor. They are also more likely to consider themselves politically left leaning. In contrast, on average workers are not planning to respond to the automation threat by retraining or switching occupations. The only causal employment response is a much higher likelihood to intend to join a union.