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WSJ Columnist: Robots Aren't Destroying Enough Jobs (foxbusiness.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Will millions be unemployed after a job-destroying robot apocalypse? That's "starkly at odds with the evidence," argues a Wall Street Journal columnist, who says the real problem is robots aren't destroying enough jobs. "Too many sectors, such as health care or personal services, are so resistant to automation that they are holding back the entire country's standard of living." Noting that "churn relative to total employment" is the lowest it's ever been, he writes that "The pessimism would be more plausible if the evidence weren't moving in exactly the opposite direction...
"In April, nonfarm private employment rose for the 86th straight month, the longest such streak on record. Monthly job creation has averaged 185,000 this year, more than double what the U.S. can sustain given its demographics. This has driven unemployment down to 4.4%, a 10-year low and below most estimates of 'full employment.' Growing labor shortages have boosted the typical worker's annual wage gain to more than 3% now from 2% in 2012, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Instead of worrying about robots destroying jobs, business leaders need to figure out how to use them more, especially in low-productivity sectors... The alternative is a tightening labor market that forces companies to pay ever higher wages that must be passed on as inflation, which usually ends with recession.
"That is a more imminent threat than an army of androids."
"In April, nonfarm private employment rose for the 86th straight month, the longest such streak on record. Monthly job creation has averaged 185,000 this year, more than double what the U.S. can sustain given its demographics. This has driven unemployment down to 4.4%, a 10-year low and below most estimates of 'full employment.' Growing labor shortages have boosted the typical worker's annual wage gain to more than 3% now from 2% in 2012, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Instead of worrying about robots destroying jobs, business leaders need to figure out how to use them more, especially in low-productivity sectors... The alternative is a tightening labor market that forces companies to pay ever higher wages that must be passed on as inflation, which usually ends with recession.
"That is a more imminent threat than an army of androids."
Ahh yes must keep those wages low so we can pass on the cost savings to you, the shareholder.
"Too many sectors, such as health care or personal services, are so resistant to automation that they are holding back the entire country's standard of living."
To which I reply with this:
“When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country". - Oswald Spengler
As Spengler was writing nearly 100 years ago, for "Englishman" we may conveniently substitute "American"; and for "millionaires", "billionaires".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Maybe it's better increased automation comes slowly as rapid automation generally causes social disruption. Also, after years of declining wages for many Americans it's good to see them come up a bit.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
I mean, wasn't that a primary factor for disenfranchised americans to vote for Trump, because unemployment was rampant and everyone but Trump seemed to ignore it?
Define unemployment. If your numbers agree with th BLS numbers, then you aren't counting enough of the people that aren't working.
Correct still 93 million out of work using Trump measurements.
Unemployment as defined by the gov't is low. Problem is, gov't keeps redefining what it means to be unemployed.
Technically a guy who used to make $30 an hour full time in a union factory job, then laid off, and now works part time for $12 an hour, is not unemployed. Also if you plain give up looking for a job and go on charity/welfare/whatever, you're not unemployed.
Wages should be considerably outpacing inflation, and that improves the economy, since the working class actually spends their income. However, we should be automating more, but aren't, because of the cheap labor he's complaining isn't cheap enough. Make the minimum wage $30 an hour, and anything that can be done by a robot will be soon. Paired with appropriate socioeconomic reforms, eventually landing on a UBI, and then things are better for everyone.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Not worth reading as we all know that WSJ are fake news. :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Very entertaining the way the summary seems to recoil in horror at the thought of hiring people and paying them a decent wage.
How can an economy like that ever hope to thrive?
I take their opinion on work matters serious as soon as their editors or subscribers ever actually worked a day in their lives. Them writing about working is like an eunuch talking about fucking. Yeah, we've seen it done, but there's not really much first hand experience.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Or more likely person with an agenda that stands to profit from distributing alternate facts. 86 months is just 7 years and _not_ a long-term trend that can be used to predict what is going to happen in 5, 10, 20 or 50 years. Also, much of what is already used in automation these days is in an experimental phase or in its first, limited deployment.
Anybody that believes "new" jobs will replace the ones lost to automation long-term is completely disconnected from reality and deeply stupid. Of course, there are many people around that are adequately described by these two characteristics.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The definition for unemployment hasn't changed since the Great Depression. It's not perfect, but it's necessary so that we can do an apples to apples comparison over long stretches of time.
I read the main quote as...
"In April, nonfarm primate employment rose for the 86th straight month..."
For a moment I wasn't sure if our future dystopian nightmare had arrived sooner than I'd expected or if things were actually looking up.
Taking a look at U6 unemployment rate, instead of the too-often-reported U3, it's at 8 and some change percent.
If it dips below 8 into a solid 7, the powers that be will of course trigger a recession/depression.
Need to get those financial gains that are only possible by cyclically screwing over the common working man. Capture (and destroy) something physical so those numbers in cyberspace align.
What's the way out of this and still play ball? A group of common working people pool together money to purchase, commission, and maintain a robot system, and rent it to their employer or some other employer.
To hell with inflation being bad, only the ultra-rich care about inflation as it drags those with money and assets down to a lower level. (makes things more equal). Yes, there can be too much inflation as well as anything else.
The definition of "unemployment" is useful for short-term planning, not analyzing long term trends.
The number you actually want to look at is labor force participation rate; that dropped sharply under Obama, in part due to demographics, in part due to Obama's economic policies.
As always, unlimited amount of magic financial instrument money are just 'productivity'; but any rise in real wages means that we are just days away from Wiemar hyperinflation. I'm totally shocked that the Wall Street Journal might hold this opinion.
'Full employment' should mean everyone has as much work as they want. So it would be 2% or less, entirely made up of those people moving between jobs.
But economists and their paymasters don't want this so they have invented NAIRU, Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. The idea is that below this unobservable (and therefore arbitrarily chosen) level of unemployment inflation starts to rise, and no amount of human misery is too great a price to pay to prevent that nightmare scenario.
quick automate all the things!
"Problem is, gov't keeps redefining what it means to be unemployed."
No, the government hasn't changed what it means to be unemployed. The economy has changed so that many are under-employed or laid off from high paying jobs. Go back to Ayn Rand school and stop positing bullshit about the government.
Can someone explain this fool's logic to me how the standard of living would improve when people no longer have any income because they dont have a job?
Technically a guy who used to make $30 an hour full time in a union factory job, then laid off, and now works part time for $12 an hour, is not unemployed.
...so are we now supposed to base our economic policies on what labor was worth at some point in the past when propped up by organized crime and industrialized extortion? That seems a little silly to me, but I digress.
If the hypothetical union worker is now employed, even at $12 an hour part-time, then he's not "unemployed". He might be "underemployed", but he has a job, and is making an income. That income might be lower than he's used to, but that falls into the "income" statistics, not the "employment" figures.
Also if you plain give up looking for a job and go on charity/welfare/whatever, you're not unemployed.
Yes, that's also correct. If you're not looking for a job, you're not in the statistics that track people who are looking for a job. There are other statistic sets that track welfare enrollment, often broken down by reason.
The only thing the BLS job numbers are intended for is tracking the state of the economy, not the state of people's lifestyles. Pundits and politicians (from all parties) like to confuse the issue for their own ends, but that's really all there is to it. The job numbers tell you how many people are able to find jobs. If you want to know whether the jobs are good or not, you'll have to look at other data sets that align with your definition of a "good" job.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
What you are describing is NOT unemployment, it's a form of "underemployment."
Liar. Just about every quarter he was in office the numbers improved. He started with an economy in free fall and by the end of his first term the numbers were showing regular increases in the labor force participation rate.
Just because you don't like it, doesn't make it any less true.
What about the 92 million unemployed Americans who are waiting for new coal mining jobs?
And this is related how?
Am I to understand that you'll be doing to right thing and throwing yourself on the heap of jobless - to help everyone's standard of living ?
Right behind you....
Requiem for the American Dream
actually according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics labor force participation did decrease during Obama's presidency, from about 65% to about 63%. Why it decreased, and why it decreased _then_ more than in the couple of years before (it appears to be essentially flat during Bush's second term), is of course up for discussion.
However, the same site's figures for Employment Level shows an increase in the absolute number of employed people (over 16) from 2010-2016, following a drop from 2008-2010, for a net increase overall. So we have a lowering percentage of the population linked to an increase in absolute numbers. Assuming there's not a definition mismatch, that would imply that employment growth is not keeping up with population growth.
May I suggest WSJ takes an extensive look at scripting, because their hacks seem to be pretty easily replaceable.
Also: The gain was more than offset by the increase in the number of incoming people employed (H1-Bs, Green Card, "undocumented", etc.). The native population continued to lose jobs.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is another problem with government 'unemployment' fantasy numbers. If Joe loses his job as an $100k engineer, but gets a job on minimum wage making coffee, he has no impact on the 'unemployment' figures, but has a heck of an impact on his life.
The other is that the government has been pushing more and more unemployed folks onto disability instead. They get free money for life, and aren't counted as 'unemployed' any more.
And, don't forget, the push to get more and more kids into university, where they won't count as 'unemployed' as they borrow $250,000 to pay fat-cat professors to give them a worthless degree in Diversity Studies.
and robot editors, that is what we need.
For there to be a sale, there has to be a buyer. As Henry Ford inadvertently found when he paid his workers what was then considered an outlandishly high wage, if workers are being underpaid, then increasing their wages actually increases economic activity. His workers were paid enough to afford to buy the cars they were building. And the increased sales of his cars helped catapult Ford into one of the wealthiest men in the world.
Countries where the rich keep the masses in check (South/Central America, Middle East) have stagnated at a productivity level of around $10k-$20k per capita per year. To reach Western levels of productivity ($30k-$60k per capita per year), you have to pay workers much closer to the actual value of their productivity. If you don't pay the masses enough, they can't afford to buy stuff, economic activity suffers, and your per capita productivity drops.
So the doomsday scenario of automation taking away everyone's jobs is highly unlikely to happen in developed nations. If it did, the wealthy would actually start to lose wealth because the masses would be underemployed and no longer able to buy the products being produced in automated factories. Every sale needs a buyer. It would then become in the wealthy class' best interest to find ways to put the unemployed back to work - so they can earn money and once again start buying stuff the wealthy are producing in their automated factories. Everyone (wealthy, middle class, poor) will be on the same page, and government action to rectify the situation will pass effortlessly.
The only thing the BLS job numbers are intended for is tracking the state of the economy, not the state of people's lifestyles. Pundits and politicians (from all parties) like to confuse the issue for their own ends, but that's really all there is to it. The job numbers tell you how many people are able to find jobs. If you want to know whether the jobs are good or not, you'll have to look at other data sets that align with your definition of a "good" job.
Were every working adult in the country suddenly transitioned to minimum wage jobs overnight, surely you would agree it reflects a change in state of the economy. Arguably, then, using a trinary value such as "has a job", "does not have a job but looking for one", and "does not have a job and not looking for another" is insufficient at tracking the current state of the economy.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
And this is related how?
It's as much of a lame troll as the original article?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Sure it has. Anyone who can't find a job and is returning to school is not counted as unemployed, even though in earlier times they would have been working instead of having to go back to school in the hope of finding a job later on.
Someone being paid 1 hour a week is considered employed for the purpose of statistics. The reality is that their "employment" is a joke. Part-time used to be considered 15 hours a week minimum.
If you're not actually engaged in what they call "active job search activity", you're not counted as unemployed. In other words, looking at job posting on the net and in newspapers doesn't count as looking for a job. So if you can't find anything you're qualified for so you don't apply anywhere, you're not unemployed - even though you are. Bunch of bullshit number manipulation to hide reality.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
In my country, the economy is collapsing yet businesses are hiring people: They have more employees but the total hours worked is dropping. This makes the government metrics look good but spending and taxes will obviously be much less than the government numbers predict. The government has quietly reduced pension payments after several high-profile attempts to buy votes (from the people who already voted for them) failed. Now they're planning surveillance of welfare recipients, which is just code for white man-bashing at the taxpayer's expense.
U3 is bullshit. It is not representative of REAL unemployment. Real unemployment is still standing at 8.6%. These are people who don't have jobs, but are able-bodied and WANT TO WORK.
And as I stated when he took office the economy was in free fall. Equating a 2% drop with his policies is a ridiculous lie. His policies are why it was only 2% over the course of his presidency.
Blaming his policies for losing jobs is rather ridiculous when the economy was already plummeting when he took office.
Exterminate jobs. Exterminate them all.
It's the same logic that says that cutting taxes for the ultra rich will somehow improve the standard of living for the middle class. Basically, it works by Unicorn Farts.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The UK's use of robots and computers in hospitals have made them very happy in the last couple of days.
Of course, why would anybody put a mission critical application on Windows? Stupidity or gullibility.
Let's see, there was Trump getting elected by appealing to the unfortunate victims of globalization. Then there was the 1% movement. Then there was Occupy Wallstreet. I could go on but that makes the point.
The WSJ is tone deaf to the electorate.
Oh, I get it. The WSJ doesn't cater to the electorate, just the wealthy and powerful business class. And they get some thrills about sounding clarion calls to action and Capitalism, even if it p*sses off Main Street.
However at this point you have to ask, how much money will satisfy the rich? How much pain can we inflict upon working people? Crushing unions wasn't enough. Making government cheaper (by reducing funding for poor people, thank you) wasn't enough. Increasing wage disparities to historic levels wasn't enough. Destroying innumerable corporate pension funds wasn't enough. Nearly wreaking the Western banking system through deregulation wasn't enough.
Yes, the WSJ sure likes to piss in the Cornflakes of the middle class. They clearly have too many entitlements, like jobs, schools, baseball diamonds and healthcare. It's time to displace millions of workers with robots and only benefit shareholders!!
Watch what happens when cleaning and care-robots become normal and not just something barely moving out of the novelty zone.
Point in case: I checked out vacuum robots a few days ago. Dyson is still cleaning out software bugs and comes with a but-ugly charging station and roomba has a lauchable dust compartment. They're just not quite there yet.
When I'm in my 80ies (34 years to go) I hope carebots can take 95% or the burden from my daughter and the rest of society. Once that happens, jobs will go away.
Same goes for transport. Self-driving cars are two re- regulation and three Tesla software upgrades away from actually driving around on our roads. Once that's on thats roughly 80 million jobs globally up for grabs.
Bottom line: Prepare for incoming. Whats happening right now is just a transition phase.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
He needs to take a look at what it was like at the local telephone company back in 1910. Lines of women plugging in cords to complete each call with supervisors using roller skates to assist operators on those long lines of benches now replaced by less than one worker for hundreds of calls is what he would see. He could also walk into a factory and see how many machine operations it took to make a part and how many workers were involved and then look at a modern multi axis water cutter machining parts without a human involved at all. Or he could look at farms in 1910 and see the hundreds of workers in the fields now totally obsolete and even with robotic farm tractors working without an operator. He mentions hospitals but fails to know that all kinds of signals go from the patient electronically to a room with computers that watch numerous patients with only one or two attendants creating a situation where less nurses are on the floors. And we are only seeing the tip of a huge iceberg which is coming at us at high speed.
What the WSJ never never never says is that the 86 months of growth ware achieve under the oppressive regulations and policies of the Obama administration.
That cheap labor is largely supplied by illegal immigration. Meaning, if you don't want so much cheap labor and more automation, just deport illegal immigrants.
As I recall, the cost to deport someone is in the neighborhood of $30k. There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. The right move economically is to pardon these people and make them participate in the legal economy like everyone else. There is zero economic justification for deportation; I'm surprised you would bother to make the argument.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Two types of people; those who think automation will make us all impoverished and people who understand economics.
I'd venture a guess that they are understated due to the number of individuals who fell off the unemployment roles when their benefits ran out during the previous 6-8 years. They are still unrepresented.
Low production, low paid jobs are difficult to economically justify robotizing. You might save a few tens of thousands per unit purchased over the life of the robot, or you might only break even/lose money.
On the other hand, robotising or automating/augmenting high skill but highly algorithmic jobs pays off a lot more per unit purchase.
It's already been happening. People do more, with fewer staff right across the board. Whilst there's a claim that office productivity is down on the 1960s, the reality is that actual staff numbers are significantly lower - receptionists, telephonists, typists, runners, copyists, stenographers, account clerks etc are frequently rolled into one job.
In the near-to-mid term future, you're going to see a lot more redundant bankers, market traders, sharebrokers, programmers, accountants and lawyers than burger flippers or labourers - and jobs like plumbing/electrician etc will take even longer to automate out of existence even if automation reduces the workforce.
Driving is one area where there's a lot of concentration - but in that area it's not so much because of pay rates (which are low) as restrictions on allowable working hours, the need to return to base frequently and the costs when drivers make serious errors or fail to heed mechanical system warnings. Whilst the push is for "self driving cars", "automonous commercial vehicles" is actually where the payoff happens.
Boomers are retiring. If you were born in 1946 and decided to retire at 65, it would be in 2011, Obama's first term. I'm not sure the labor force participation rate is all that useful, since it will vary a lot with changing demographics.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And in no case you've listed has the government changed how it calculates the unemployment rate. If you return to school because you can't find a job, that's counted as leaving the employment pool now, and it counted the same in 1960. If you got discouraged and dropped out in 1960, it got counted the exact same way it does today.
This means that the unemployment rates published mean different things based on what the economy is doing (the same unemployment rate means different things at the start of a recession and near the end), but that's the nature of employment. It's complicated.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I, for one, welcome our new WSJ robo-columnist overlords.
If they can borrow $250,000 they might as well buy a franchise and make way more money.
Actually the kids saddled with huge debt that you hear about are the ones that got conned into going to for profit colleges where they get a community college level education for the price of a private university.
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At the same time, we keep seeing headlines in the news like: "Apple Pledges $1 Billion Toward Creating Manufacturing Jobs In US"