31–40 of 70 posts
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Men are also inferior to machines when it comes to farm work, but judging from your comment you'd presumably like to go back to the good old days when over 50% of the population worked on farms.
Or the really good old days when 97% worked in agriculture...
(To nitpick on myself, it could be argued that war campaigns were also mostly agricultural work: they were just harvesting other people's fields)
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This. Germany is one of the few places that Unions are working (mostly) as intended. When Germany was under pressure in the Schröder era, it was the Unions that helped dealing with convincing the workers to accept shorter shifts and salaries, instead of pushing companies to relocation or, worse, bankruptcy.
Interesting. For those who know Germany, it's often said that even if the economic numbers are high, there's a lot of poor workers that need two jobs to live. Is it true ? true but only a small % ? normal according to you ?
Wages in Germany stagnated as well, domestic trade is dwarfed by export. Living has gotten much more expensive in the cities continuously moving the shrinking middle class further down.
Germany has a track record of being strong enough, so that revolutions seldom happen. But if they happen, the are almost guaranteed to be catastrophic.
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Interesting. For those who know Germany, it's often said that even if the economic numbers are high, there's a lot of poor workers that need two jobs to live. Is it true ? true but only a small % ? normal according to you ?
In addition to what ManuelKiessling already said, I can also report that in my bubble this is not the case, but it is hard to accurately judge our bubbles. According to this bar chart on wealth distribution in the EU [1] there is a huge difference between the average and median wages in Germany, so I would expect the group of poor workers to be much larger than we think it is. Of course, being poor in Germany might m…
Note how small the ratio of robots to workers still is. 2 robots per thousand workers in the US, 8 per thousand in Germany. Those are still below 1% yet having an effect on wages. What happens at 10%? 20%? 50%? Few people thought in 1980 that there would be more computers than people in their lifetime.
Most mid-1980s technology books expected majority of production jobs taken over by robots any moment soon (and the rest going to ninja-like Japanese workers). Of course what happened is the jobs went to China.
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Interesting. For those who know Germany, it's often said that even if the economic numbers are high, there's a lot of poor workers that need two jobs to live. Is it true ? true but only a small % ? normal according to you ?
Gini coefficient is the among the highest in Europe, about 0.76. About ten years ago, a neoliberal shift loosened labor laws and saved the overall economy by letting less skilled workers not get unemployed, just take a pay cut (what France is trying to push now against a lot of protests, since government realized, the global party is over). Wages in Germany stagnated as well, domestic trade is dwarfed by export. Livi…
I'm not sure how useful it is to look at the effects of robotics in Germany in isolation. Germany exports a fair bit more than they import, and I'd expect if there are people being unemployed as a result of German use of robotics, it'd be in other parts of the EU that can no longer compete effectively.
I'm not sure how useful it is to look at the effects of robotics in Germany in isolation. Germany exports a fair bit more than they import, and I'd expect if there are people being unemployed as a result of German use of robotics, it'd be in other parts of the EU that can no longer compete effectively.
Same for service sector automation: in California it is easy to say that technology will bring new jobs to displace the lost ones, but what is rarely seen is how every engineer at Google or Facebook is replacing whole offices of more traditional (and incredibly inefficient, compared to googbook) local ad media sales and administration all over the world. If progress brings efficiency, there will be less work. Zero su…
https://www.statista.com/statistics/498424/number-advertisin...
However, it's the newspaper jobs that have gone:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/jun/06/alm...
The next thing to look at would be the change in IT jobs.
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It is not admirable at all. It basically means that you're putting a competition between machines and humans. If machines do become smarter, then humans will be moved out of the equation (except for the 0.001% who can create and maintain the machines). This kind of fight may be good on the short term, but it legitimates the fact than man are inferior to machine. For example, it may soon legitimates that, contrary to…
Maybe we should value humans beyond the labor they can fulfill.
Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton did no actual work, yet made a lucrative living, even in their late teens.
Almost everyone has personal family+friends that they value in ways other than needing their labor. But it doesn't scale. People have a Dunbar number of somewhere a little (perhaps a lot) over ~140, but nowhere near a nation-state population.
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Most mid-1980s technology books expected majority of production jobs taken over by robots any moment soon (and the rest going to ninja-like Japanese workers). Of course what happened is the jobs went to China.
Lol I appreciate your comment about the Japanese ninja-workers. Reading business books from the 90’s, it is astounding how many people feared the Japanese and thought they would be the end all be all. Of course it ended with them going into a depression much worse than even our Great Recession. Michael Crichton, who wrote “Jurassic Park”, also wrote a book called “Rising Sun” right before that about just this topic.…
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I've recently read that the east still hasn't recovered from the pre reunification lag... crazy.
Has southern Italy ever recovered from not being the north? Has the American Midwest recovered from not being one of the coasts? Economies naturally concentrate and countering that takes not only effort and dedication but also wise decisions and luck. West Germany used to be very good at this, but concentration to a few major cities has been accelerating recently. It's not only eastern Germany that is being left behi…