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Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs (nytimes.com)
Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they've declared a different winner: the robots. From a report on the New York Times: The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots. The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs. In a paper last year, they said it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually return to their previous levels. Just as cranes replaced dockworkers but created related jobs for engineers and financiers, the theory goes, new technology has created new jobs for software developers and data analysts. From a report on The Verge, which looks at another finding in the study: They found that each new robot added to the workforce meant the loss of between 3 and 5.6 jobs in the local commuting area. Meanwhile, for each new robot added per 1,000 workers, wages in the surrounding area would fall between 0.25 and 0.5 percent.
Few places investigate robots until it's easier than hiring meat, which usually means they're thinking of an 8 hour shift.
Once they get a robot and realize that (excepting maintenance) it can go 24/7 and doesn't need vacation, sick time, it turns out robots are around 6.5x more productive than a human (at a task a robot can currently perform). The fact that they don't need benefits either makes them even more cost effective.
And that's just uptime. Robots - for a lot of tasks, at least - have the capacity to be much, much faster than humans, with a much lower error rate if the task is sufficiently standardized.
Well, the reason this is about Trump is because he has created what is clearly a set of unachievable expectations. Health care is only the first of many failures; where his flights of rhetorical fancy hit cold hard reality. When it comes to manufacturing, even a repatriation of manufacturing capacity is simply not going to deliver the expected significant uptick in employment. In fact, I'd go further as to argue that with increased automation, it makes less sense to locate manufacturing thousands of miles over an ocean from the market, and I imagine what will eventually happen is a good deal of manufacturing happening closer to major markets to bring down distribution costs, but you're not really going to see any significant increase in jobs.
Trump promised a lot of uneasy Rust Belters that the the good times would return, that China and Mexico would be forced to hand back all those jobs, when in fact the only reason many of the jobs ended up in places like China and Mexico was simply due to costs, and as automation increases, not even the lower wages in these countries will be enough to keep manufacturing there. In five or ten years, you'll see a lot of angry and frightened workers in the rust belts of India, China, Mexico and other countries who had been able to supply cheap labor.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The issue isn't really that jobs as a whole are being lost, it's that certain types of jobs are being lost. High paying, low skilled jobs are going away, replaced by a few low paying, low skilled jobs and a few high paying, high skilled jobs. Gone are the days where you can graduate (or drop out of) high school and walk right into a job on an assembly line or manufacturing floor and make enough money to support a single-income family as well as a pension for retirement. Now most of the jobs in that factory floor are cleaning up after the robots (low-paying and low skilled) or programming/maintaining/designing the robots (high skilled-even if just going to technical schools to learn maintenance- and high paying). And to play off the example from the summary: cranes replaced dockworkers and added jobs for engineers and financiers, but how many dockworkers can turn into engineers? There are a lot of people that either can't or won't be able to transition from the jobs that are lost to the ones that are created, and they make up a sizable and motivated voter base which has led to our current political mess. Trying to placate them with policies that "promote" jobs will hold back the progress of the country as well as possibly damage the country itself when you remove environmental protections in the name of job creation (that really won't add many jobs anyway, but it increase corporate profits and makes a good sound bite to those out of work).
I see one solution to increasing automation of our workforce: a combination of make-work and retraining programs. Everyone admits our infrastructure is old and sucks, right? Take all these out of work low skilled workers and after a month or two training, set them to work repairing roads and bridges, or digging ditches and laying down fiber (all under supervision of engineers, foremen, and already trained/skilled workers). They work at those jobs 2-3 days a week, and spend the other 2-3 days getting retrained to do other jobs like electrical, hvac, skilled construction work, cooking, administrative work, etc. Those that can't pass retraining classes can stay on road work/digging crews, or try their luck at retail, working the counter at Starbucks/McDonalds, or try for other low skill jobs. Those physically unable to do manual work can be put to work doing back office support like filing, administrative, etc, also while receiving training to hopefully move on and do those jobs at other companies. This way you've killed 2 birds with 1 stone: you've provided jobs and retrained workers for positions in demand or that can't be easily automated, and you've repaired a lot of the US infrastructure. Sure, it's a borderline Communist idea these days, but those jobs that are gone aren't coming back, so these kinds of jobs are all that will be left. But the political cost to do so would be too big, and let's face it, Trump has shown that playing to out of work blue-collar workers is a good path into the White House so there's no incentive to actually help them, only to appear to do so.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
This chart tells a very clear story:
Since NAFTA passed US manufacturing output is up over 70% in inflation-adjusted dollars and is at the highest level that it has ever been.
But employment is down over 30%
That's primarily due to automation. The exported jobs were the totally shit, sweatshop jobs that couldn't support a living wage in this country anyway.