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Workers: Fear Not the Robot Apocalypse (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: For retailers, the robot apocalypse isn't a science-fiction movie. As digital giants swallow a growing share of shoppers' spending, thousands of stores have closed and tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs. The brick-and-mortar retail swoon has been accompanied by a less headline-grabbing e-commerce boom that has created more jobs in the U.S. than traditional stores have cut. Those jobs, in turn, pay better, because its workers are so much more productive. This demonstrates something routinely overlooked in the anxiety about the job-destroying potential of robots, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation. Throughout history, automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys. The reason: Companies don't use automation simply to produce the same thing more cheaply. Instead, they find ways to offer entirely new, improved products. As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people.
History is basically the working class trying and failing to pry money out of the hands of the ruling class. Why the hell people don't see this is beyond me.
Just because people can see something doesn't mean there's jack-shit they can do about it. I think most Americans can see what's been going on, but they're powerless to change anything, so they just keep getting screwed over and over and over.
I'll grant you there's plenty of fudge-factor in the govt numbers. But there's a truckload of bs in your number. Out of your "36% unemployed" number, how many aren't of legal age to work? How many are retired? How many are truly physically / mentally handicapped to the point of inability to work? ect, ect
The % of the total population working isn't the point. It's the % of the actual labor force working that matters. They're not the same thing.
Workers are hired until the marginal value of their labor equals the marginal cost of that labor. You hire Alice at $50,000 salary because she'll bring in $100,000. Bob, because of diminishing returns, will only bring in $75,000, but at $50K hiring him is still a no-brainer. But if Carol will only bring in $50,000, you won't hire her unless you can get her for less than that.
What this means is there is no general economic law that connects changes in worker productivity to a particular kind of change in employment levels. It depends on what you do with that productivity.
Imagine a world in which computers were laboriously assembled by workers on breadboards using prototyping techniques. Let's say it costs you $10,000 to assemble a computer this way. In that case you'd only sell a small number of computers because they'd be highly specialized machines. Now suppose you introduce modern assembly techniques, with printed circuit boards and wave soldering. Now the computer which cost you ten thousand dollars to assemble can be made for well under $100.
If you continue to sell a very small number of computers at high prices, you'll lay off most of your workforce. On the other hand if you start selling your computers for $180, you'll end up adding to your workforce. Both scenarios turn increased worker productivity into increased profit, but in different ways.
Now let's imagine an entirely different scenario: a fast food restaurant. It's hard to imagine selling a lot more Big Macs because you drop the price. Nonetheless the same principle applies. If you can find a way to make money off the newly surplus labor, employment wont' go down. If you can't, you'll let people go.
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Actually, the top 10% lost way more than everyone else during the crash. However, they have made it all back and then some. Plus they could afford to lose it ("Oh no!! I can only buy 18 Ferraris this year instead of 20!")
The bottom 90% lost less money in the crash itself, but have not made the money back.
The ATM graph doesn't appear to show what the author claims it shows. It looks like ATM's greatly delayed the growth of bank teller employment. Without ATM's, it looks like the total tellers would be roughly more than double the current quantity (although the chart doesn't cover enough years to get a good feel for the pre-ATM rate). The rate of teller growth may be finally going up again, but that's probably despite ATM's if we look at the pre-ATM rate. Using that chart, it appears ATM's indeed did take a big bite out of overall teller jobs.
Table-ized A.I.
Meh. The unemployment rates also provide actual facts, and facts that paint a much more accurate and complete picture than the labor participation rate.
The declining labor participation rate is largely because of:
both of which significantly reduce the number of people who are out looking for jobs, and neither of which is a sign of actual unemployment. That's why U-3 uses the LPR as a baseline. It removes the bias that would otherwise be caused by non-job-market-related trends in employment numbers.
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