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The rise of robots in the German labour market

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Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#41

Post by thephyber »

sien wrote: post #37
usrusr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The data says that in 2010 there were ~160K jobs in advertising in the US but in 2015 there were 200K. 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.

> The next thing to look at would be the change in IT jobs.

We are already deep in the current cycle of disruption by software. "IT" (if you include programming, security, data centers, support staff etc) is fairly large and more diverse than advertising and/or "newspaper".

I don't think it works like a waterfall / Gantt chart; it happens in parallel and we are currently seeing lots of white collar office jobs changing. (HR|Finance|Recruiting|Legal Council|Retail) are all getting optimized to the point that their ranks are thinning quickly. My first job was moving physical file-folders between a storeroom and an office -- that job is now obsolete as those files have largely been digitized.

Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#42

Post by walshemj »

znpy wrote: post #22
wiz21c wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh the things I could say... There are probably things you don't even immagine to pay for, that are now done by machines, and that used to be performed by humans. Think of circuit-switching telphony, when you used to say "operator, connect me with number xyz-xxx" and someone on the other side would phisically create a connection between you and someone else to talk. Consider mail delivery. There used to be a milkman.…

with the runaway growth of telecoms in the early years manual operators had to be automated to some extent quite early on as there would physically not be enough workers to staff all the manual boards

Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#43

Post by paulddraper »

wiz21c wrote: post #10
sarabande wrote: post #2

It's admirable to me that unions protect low-skilled workers from losing their job, not by preventing them from getting fired at current wages, but by accepting wage decreases for their workers while getting them re-trained into jobs of higher cognitive skill. That seems like the fair and humane thing to do for workers, while at the same time not screwing over capital owners or stifling automation.

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…

I think there are more than 3k adults in the entire US that can "create and maintain machines".

Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#44

Post by paulddraper »

avar wrote: post #12
wiz21c wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

US agricultural jobs dropped from 70% to 20% in eighty years.

50% of careers gone within one lifetime. And the US did better then ever.

Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#45

Post by adventured »

jojoo wrote: post #23
kensai wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a member of the German Education and Science Union i have to strongly disagree. Germany is becoming a low income country for a lot of jobs and the unions are doing nothing against it. Year after year all German workers have collective bargaining agreements close to inflation, while the economy booms. The union-reps are in bed with the companys and workers eat it up.

Where are you seeing that the German economy is booming? It hasn't net expanded in ten years.

GDP 2007: $3.44 trillion vs 2016: $3.46 trillion

It has been averaging around 1.5% GDP growth since 2011. That is not booming. Germany may finally climb above the pre great recession era GDP numbers in 2017. Germany is having the problems that it is, precisely due to the lack of meaningful economic growth. There's no scenario where you're going to see almost any wage growth if GDP is mired in 0.5% to 1.5% type expansion; to make matters worse, the next recession will easily swat the recent modest gains right back down (which is one of the many reasons faster growth is a must, inevitably a recession will occur).

Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#46

Post by adventured »

usrusr wrote: post #30
agumonkey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Has the American Midwest recovered from not being one of the coasts?

That's not a great reference point. It only works well if you're only talking about New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

California's GDP per capita is only about 8%-10% higher than Nebraska. Iowa is as high as Oregon. Illinois is 30% higher than Florida. Indiana is higher than Vermont. Wisconsin is higher than North Carolina. Minnesota is close to Maryland. South Dakota is higher than New Jersey or Virginia. Kansas is 20% higher than Maine. Missouri is higher than South Carolina. Ohio is on par with Rhode Island.

The US mid-west is an economic juggernaut compared to the rest of the world. It's larger than the economies of France or the UK, and nearly as big as Germany. Averaged out it's very comparable to the coastal states.

Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#47

Post by matt4077 »

sarabande wrote: post #2

It's admirable to me that unions protect low-skilled workers from losing their job, not by preventing them from getting fired at current wages, but by accepting wage decreases for their workers while getting them re-trained into jobs of higher cognitive skill. That seems like the fair and humane thing to do for workers, while at the same time not screwing over capital owners or stifling automation.

At the core of the comparatively good relationships between labor and capital in Germany is the law requiring labor representation of 50% - one vote on large companies' boards.

This results in a complicated role for both sides that isn't just adversarial as it is in most other countries. Labor shares the responsibility for the company's future and gets to be part of every step of the process when it comes to making hard decisions. But it also requires management to strive to improve their employees' well-being, since they will often require their cooperation.

If these specific solutions are anything but band-aids/wishful thinking/PR remains to be seen. Germany has, just like all other countries, seen an increased use of time-limited contracts and temp agencies, leaving many employees in perpetual danger of immediate social decline if the economy hits a road bump. And it isn't quite clear if the rise of machine learning + robotics isn't the one innovation and bucks the trend, and actually does create a class of people that is essentially shut out of the jobs market by machines that are strictly more productive at any job they can realistically perform: there's only so much programming you can teach a bricklayer in his 50s.

Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#48

Post by Top19 »

Animats wrote: post #39
Top19 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

"Rising Sun" was made into a movie.[1] It has some of the early MIT Leg Lab robots in it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film)

Oh man forget about these / that movie! As another aside, current really David Halberstam’s “The Next Century”, published in 1991, and his main focus in the book, after Eastern Europe, is Japan. All of this is laughable now (though some say Japan will be a superpower due to the military it’s built up to counter North Korea after NK falls), but makes you wonder, what threat do we all believe in now that will really turn out to be a paper tiger in the years ahead?

EDIT: quote from the book...”the Cold War is over, the Japanese won”

Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#49

Post by neilwilson »

There's a serious category mistake in this analysis.

Germany is not really a separate country. It is a state in a union called the Eurozone, and controlled by a constitution called the Treaty of the European Union.

You cannot compare a currency zone such as the USA to Germany - a state in a currency zone.

Germany drains demand from the rest of the Eurozone to maintain its employment level. The unemployment arises in Greece, Spain, et al instead.

If you look at the near fully employed state areas in the USA and draw a line around them, then compare those with Germany you'll get a better idea.

Within the US there is an 'export boom' from California and New York to the rest of the union. Similarly in the UK from London to the rest of the country.

It's time for economic analysis to catch up with monetary theory. Floating rate currency zones matter.

Re: The rise of robots in the German labour market

#50

Post by lucaspiller »

karllager wrote: post #29
jojoo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a member of the German Education and Science Union i have to strongly disagree. Germany is becoming a low income country for a lot of jobs and the unions are doing nothing against it. Year after year all German workers have collective bargaining agreements close to inflation, while the economy booms. The union-reps are in bed with the companys and workers eat it up.

> Germany is becoming a low income country for a lot of jobs and the unions are doing nothing against it. Yes, this is true. About 39% of the currently employed have so called atypical jobs [1] - some of which are actually subsidized by the state, because income is so low. Germany is an austerity poster child - I wonder what will happen, if the export boom is over. Things might become much worse, once the debt-financ…

It sounds like Germany is just catching up with the rest of Europe.
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