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Economists Worry We Aren't Prepared For the Fallout From Automation (theverge.com)
A new paper from the Center for Global Development says we are spending too much time discussing whether robots can take your job and not enough time discussing what happens next. The Verge reports: The paper's authors, Lukas Schlogl and Andy Sumner, say it's impossible to know exactly how many jobs will be destroyed or disrupted by new technology. But, they add, it's fairly certain there are going to be significant effects -- especially in developing economies, where the labor market is skewed toward work that requires the sort of routine, manual labor that's so susceptible to automation. Think unskilled jobs in factories or agriculture.
One class of solution they call "quasi-Luddite" -- measures that try to stall or reverse the trend of automation. These include taxes on goods made with robots (or taxes on the robots themselves) and regulations that make it difficult to automate existing jobs. They suggest that these measures are challenging to implement in "an open economy," because if automation makes for cheaper goods or services, then customers will naturally look for them elsewhere; i.e. outside the area covered by such regulations. [...] The other class of solution they call "coping strategies," which tend to focus on one of two things: re-skilling workers whose jobs are threatened by automation or providing economic safety nets to those affected (for example, a universal basic income or UBI). They conclude that there's simply not enough work being done researching the political and economic solutions to what could be a growing global crisis. "Questions like profitability, labor regulations, unionization, and corporate-social expectations will be at least as important as technical constraints in determining which jobs get automated," they write.
One class of solution they call "quasi-Luddite" -- measures that try to stall or reverse the trend of automation. These include taxes on goods made with robots (or taxes on the robots themselves) and regulations that make it difficult to automate existing jobs. They suggest that these measures are challenging to implement in "an open economy," because if automation makes for cheaper goods or services, then customers will naturally look for them elsewhere; i.e. outside the area covered by such regulations. [...] The other class of solution they call "coping strategies," which tend to focus on one of two things: re-skilling workers whose jobs are threatened by automation or providing economic safety nets to those affected (for example, a universal basic income or UBI). They conclude that there's simply not enough work being done researching the political and economic solutions to what could be a growing global crisis. "Questions like profitability, labor regulations, unionization, and corporate-social expectations will be at least as important as technical constraints in determining which jobs get automated," they write.
aside from climate change this is the biggest issue facing the human race this century. We've built a civilization around the notion that if you don't work you don't eat and we're about to run out of work. Productivity gains are already biting into wages. If minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it'd be > $20/hr. Instead it's about half what it was in the 70s inflation adjusted.
I keep hearing they'll be new jobs. But what I see is high paying factory jobs being replaced by low paying service sector jobs. We keep ignoring the fallout from the last few industrial revolutions. Luddite wasn't always a casual insult, it was a movement in response to job loses from new tech. It took 80 years for more new tech to catch up to the job losses from the last industrial revolution. This is fact, look it up.
Finally I get the people who kid themselves and say it's not a problem. What I don't understand is all these folks acknowledge the problem and shrug saying "laissez faire". Seriously, when in your life has the best answer to a complex problem been to ignore it and hope it all works out for the best?
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and it's a stat cherry picked to hide income inequality. It's _average_ income. Take everybody, take all the money, divide. This is why everybody looks at inflation adjusted wages.
Buddy of mine just got a call center job paying $8/hr. He had a job in the 90s doing about the same thing that paid $12. You could buy an economy car in the 90s for $6k. Same car today is $15. Has a few more features, gets about 3-5 mpg more. costs almost 3x as much. Same for rent. 1 bd when he was making $12? $500/mo. Today? $800. Same complex. Inflation's a bitch.
Better example. Woman "retires" from kmart when the store closed. Making $9/hr. She was making $3 something in the 70s. The problem? Adjusted for inflation she was making the equivalent of $16/hr in the 70s. She lost almost half her pay after 45 years of work.
You know damn well why we don't let municipalities choose. The billionaires find it easy to divide and conquer small municipalities. It takes organization on a national level to stand up to that much economic power. This is precisely why their media machines (Fox News, Sinclair, CNN, MSNBC, they're all economically right wing and they're all supply siders) push these "States Rights" narratives. I don't know if you work for them, the Russians, or if you just fell for their propaganda. But either way wake up. If you're one of their shills they'll turn on you eventually. If you're not then they've already turned on you. I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, but you'll lose it in the end.
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