More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
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Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#2interestingly, the most intense clusters of robots are in Michigan, Delaware and Texas.
by contrast, there's not so much robotic clustering in California.
also, this optimistic note: Some of the sectors with the biggest job losses were ones that didn't automate intensively, like textiles and paper products. That goes to show that keeping out robots won't necessarily protect your job.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#3interestingly, the most intense clusters of robots are in Michigan, Delaware and Texas. by contrast, there's not so much robotic clustering in California. also, this optimistic note: Some of the sectors with the biggest job losses were ones that didn't automate intensively, like textiles and paper products. That goes to show that keeping out robots won't necessarily protect your job.
>>also, this optimistic note [...]
"Folks, would you like the rock, or the hard place?"
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#4Glad to see they're framing as a capital/labor question, because there are additional important considerations about robots replacing labor, in addition to increased productivity:
1. Robots are capital, and therefore investment, while labor is a pure expense. Capital will generate income that can be reinvested back into more capital etc, generating more wealth for the owner, and they can sell those robots later to turn that investment liquid.
But labor is purely an expense, and the money that a manufacturer pays to employees is wealth that they've transferred elsewhere, it doesn't compound, and it can't be owned and controlled like capital can.
2. In terms of taxation, governments in Europe and US tend to: 1. Tax labor relatively heavily (income taxes), 2. Tax capital gains relatively lightly, and 3. Do not tax capital ownership as such. So it's rational for capital owners to try to replace labor with capital if it can perform the same tasks - with tragic effects for labor.
Following Piketty, it seems to make sense to introduce a small but nonzero tax on the ownership of capital (not just on capital gains at the time of a sale) to offset these changes.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#5While the scope of the article is confined to manufacturing, which impacts less-specialized labor, I felt a sense of dread reading it for what it means for people losing their jobs to software. Fresh out of college in the late 1990s, one of my first "high tech" jobs was manually building HTML pages for job listings, copying-and-pasting advertisements from word documents all day long. One day, I recommended the company contract a programmer-friend of mine to automate the process and two weeks later I was looking for work--my job replaced by a script that ran a few minutes every morning.
Over the years I've watched various professions devalued to search engines and spreadsheets, from paralegals to accountants. I don't think it's a bad thing. It's progress and it's freeing up time. The bad part is that we live in a society with an antiquated work-ethic, where your value is measured in capital and the number of hours you put in each week at your job. Automation isn't the problem, living is a culture incapable of valuing leisure time is what needs to change.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#6Glad to see they're framing as a capital/labor question, because there are additional important considerations about robots replacing labor, in addition to increased productivity: 1. Robots are capital, and therefore investment, while labor is a pure expense. Capital will generate income that can be reinvested back into more capital etc, generating more wealth for the owner, and they can sell those robots later to tu…
The arguably more important issue is that spending is income, in both directions. Wages are an expense to companies, but revenue to workers---and likewise, buying goods is an expense to workers and revenue to companies. Those two factors have to be relatively balanced; if you bias too far in favor of capital, you kill growth because you cut off demand for goods. And hoisting ever-increasing debt on workers only works for so long.
This is probably where people start talking about universal basic income, but that runs into a different problem: if you bias income too much to labor, investment can't keep up with the increasing demand and you get accelerating inflation. So there's a tricky control systems problem here (and I prefer the job guarantee for its control theoretic formulation) that gets swept under the rug in favor of dogma about free markets or what have you.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#7Glad to see they're framing as a capital/labor question, because there are additional important considerations about robots replacing labor, in addition to increased productivity: 1. Robots are capital, and therefore investment, while labor is a pure expense. Capital will generate income that can be reinvested back into more capital etc, generating more wealth for the owner, and they can sell those robots later to tu…
>labor is purely an expense
Unless you expand the view and see that an employee that gets paid has money to participate in the economy and buy your goods.
Economics is a sham science.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#8Detroit lost so many jobs, not because of robots, but due to the decline of the domestic auto manufacturing industry. The modern auto assembly line, which uses human-assisted robots, existed a couple decades before Detroit's precipitous decline. The Detroit riots during the 60's and 'capital flight' also didn't help. The argument of robots destroying jobs, imho, has a lot of holes ..the hysteria seems overblown http://greyenlightenment.com/why-robots-wont-take-all-the-jo... The printing press put scribes out of work, but then the entire publishing industry exploded.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#9Glad to see they're framing as a capital/labor question, because there are additional important considerations about robots replacing labor, in addition to increased productivity: 1. Robots are capital, and therefore investment, while labor is a pure expense. Capital will generate income that can be reinvested back into more capital etc, generating more wealth for the owner, and they can sell those robots later to tu…
>labor is purely an expense Unless you expand the view and see that an employee that gets paid has money to participate in the economy and buy your goods. Economics is a sham science.
That second sentence really doesn't follow the first.
Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
#10While the scope of the article is confined to manufacturing, which impacts less-specialized labor, I felt a sense of dread reading it for what it means for people losing their jobs to software. Fresh out of college in the late 1990s, one of my first "high tech" jobs was manually building HTML pages for job listings, copying-and-pasting advertisements from word documents all day long. One day, I recommended the compan…
Your first job sounds similar to that of the worker in the pin factory in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Later on he describes the "torpor of the mind"[1] that you must have felt doing all that copy/pasting.
Smith's argument at the end of the same passage and throughout the WoN is that government intervention and regulation is necessary to avoid the societal decay that the invisible hand of capitalism can produce. Specifically he suggests government-sponsored education as the best solution to the problem.