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More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

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Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

#31

Post by ThomPete »

Jabanga wrote: post #12

Industries that lose jobs due to automation cause job growth in more slowly automating industries: http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/24/13327014/productivit... This has been the pattern for over 200 years of labour-saving automation: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite...

simply not true. The number of new jobs created decade over decade have gone down and the politicans have redefined what constitute a job, most today are temporary. You are ironically making the fallacy of the luddite falkacy. Jobs have been created in the world, not in the west. Unemployment numbers are based on temp jobs no real jobs.

Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

#33

Post by nradov »

60654 wrote: post #4

Glad 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…

Robots are a depreciating capital investment, just like a lathe or forklift. They don't last forever and require a lot of maintenance. And there's very little standardization. If you try to sell a used robot expect to take a huge loss; it's not even remotely a liquid investment.

Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

#34

Post by djschnei »

jstanley wrote: post #28
djschnei wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this myopia is and will always be perennial. I think in large part it's a misunderstanding of what the goal of an economy should be; many think it's maximum employment - it's not. Maximum employment is a side effect of a healthy economy, not the goal. The goal of an economy should be maximum productivity. When maximum employment is the priority, you tend to get less of everything. It's a subtle differe…

"The economy" shouldn't have a goal. The economy consists of individuals, who all have individual goals, which may or may not align with each other. But "the economy" as a whole should have no goal. It's like asking what the goal of "nature" should be. Nature consists of individuals who have their own goals, but nature has no goals of its own.

Economic systems and theories are absolutely devised with goals. Entirely agree the economy is nothing but individuals, that's why capitalism is so ingenious, but that doesn't mean the system doesn't have a goal.

Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

#35

Post by colorint »

dv_dt wrote: post #21
colorint wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And hoisting ever-increasing debt on workers only works for so long. I think you are underestimating the capacity for greed as well as the effect of globalization. Even if whole nations of workers are eviscerated, it is possible to sit in comfort and growing your wealth and power with little regard to the balance or even efficiency of the overall system.

I do question the capacity for greed, in the broader sense of, what can happen before a system enters some sort of catastrophic negative feedback? In the immediate term, private debt build-up provokes financial crises. In the long run, there's another balancing factor you're forgetting about: revolution. Workers can safely ("safely") be eviscerated somewhere else, because it's very hard for them to take arms to distant owners. In the countries where the owners themselves live, it's another control system that needs to be threaded.

Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

#36

Post by imglorp »

j2bax wrote: post #30

With the looming take over of the robots, why is the fast food industry still largely meat powered? I would think these establishments at their scale, would be ripe for automation, yet they aren't. Are humans still cheaper in this particular industry?

Not for long: automation gets ever cheaper while compensation goes up.

I envision a fast food store, or even Walmart for that matter, as a large mostly meatless vending machine.

Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

#37

Post by bryondowd »

TimJYoung wrote: post #18
paulpauper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The savings from automation and outsourcing far exceeds what Apple (a common example) could earn from the increased purchasing power from US Apple employees if some of those employees had slightly more money to buy Apple products. The odds of employees taking their increased wages and ONLY buying your goods, is slim, and this logic does not work for companies such as Boeing , that make products that no possible emplo…

You have to keep going and not stop at the first level (for example, who buys airline tickets ?). What you'll find is that, eventually, it all comes back to consumer demand.

But the people making decisions at any one company can't go beyond that level for their decision-making. While it would be beneficial to the company if consumers in general had more spending power, each company's decisions can only make a negligible influence on that, and would in fact just be providing a tiny subsidy that the rest of the market would likely eat up without returning the favor. Most owners and shareholders and such wouldn't stand for that, and whatever few eccentrics who would, wouldn't reach the critical mass necessary for it to benefit anyone much. I don't know of any way to resolve that short of government intervention or massive employee unionization, which are both rather far-fetched in the current environment, but perhaps will become more plausible as more people get their jobs automated.

Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

#38

Post by grecy »

ideonexus wrote: post #5

While 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…

> Automation isn't the problem, living is a culture incapable of valuing leisure time is what needs to change

Leave North America, it's a whole new world(TM)

I recently read "A Year of Living Danishly"[1] - an amazing account of two early-30s brits who move to Denmark and learn how life works there. After an adjustment period, they are floored, and I mean absolutely floored how good the work/life balance is. They are shocked their old life they loved can seem so horrible in comparison.

I asked my Danish friend about it, and he said "Yeah, I like living in a country that focuses on being happy rather than focusing on getting money."

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1785780239/?tag=roadchoseme-20

Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

#39

Post by flyingfences »

60654 wrote: post #4

Glad 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 a pure expense

Unskilled labor in high demand is a pure expense. If your laborers require training that you provide then you could see that as an investment. If your laborers are unlikely to be able to find work in their field elsewhere then you could see your retention of them as an investment. The effect is compounded when both are true. Of course this does rely on a sense of loyalty in the workers, and it's up to the employer to create an environment that fosters that.

Re: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

#40

Post by VLM »

treyfitty wrote: post #16

The stark job loss by industry infographic is quite somber, across those manufacturing industries. Everyone likes to quip "Relevance: gotta retrain to remain" when it comes to automation, but people fail to realize the implicit costs of doing so at an individual level (the time commitment and energy required to face this anxiety all the time). The rate of "innovation" has grown so fast, that we may very well be at a…

"at an individual level"

And the irrelevance at the large scale.

General life advice is not to mix micro-economic problems and solutions with macro-economic problems and solutions.

Obviously on a micro-individual layer, if the bottom 90% are getting fired, getting yourself into the top 10% cognitive elite is quite useful. Its also completely useless as macro-economic societal level advice, there's no point telling the bottom 90% getting fired that they should all work harder to be one of the 1 in 10 still employed.

This is aside from the problem of most of the people IRL giving advice to retrain just coincidentally happen to have a financial interest in signing up as many retrainers as possible, or in calming the masses into not rolling the guillotine out yet because of those fantastic retraining benefits. On a large scale as the job cognitive requirements increase over time, eventually you'll reach a limit where most of the community doesn't have the cognitive power to determine who's a retraining scammer and who's legit at which point the confidence-job scam collapses. Arguably we're pretty close to that with higher education right now, we are at the point now of investing trillions of loans and a tenth of young peoples productive lives into an end result of poverty stricken baristas, waiters, and NEETs, which can only go on so long before the plug is pulled on the system. What do I as a taxpayer get out of spending my tax dollars so my waitress was able to obtain her unusable education degree? It certainly doesn't make her a better waitress.

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