Tag: conservative

Call $15 minimum wage what it is: the robot full employment act

Call $15 minimum wage what it is: the robot full employment act

The Cloud Pepper robot, which can speak multiple languages, appears at a tech conference in Barcelona on Monday. (Getty Images) Thirty-plus years ago, I became (nerd alert) fascinated with economics and read up on libertarian-conservatives like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell and liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson. It was captivating to see how they marshaled seemingly powerful evidence for and against policy proposals, only starting with whether heavy government spending could spur growth of the economy. I would read academics on one side and think of course they’re right, then read the other side and reach […]

This 2020 Candidate Puts His Money on Universal Income

This 2020 Candidate Puts His Money on Universal Income

America needs a new vision of what it means for humans to work. That is the unique message of entrepreneur Andrew Yang, a man who hopes – against all odds – to ride his vision to the White House. Even in a large presidential primary field – and the 2020 roster of legitimate or semi-legitimate contenders is shaping up as the largest in party history – there are Americans who fill out the qualifying forms every four years, only to be completely ignored and then forgotten.

On paper, Andrew Yang is one of those Democratic presidential candidates. But he’s more […]

Someone Needs To Tell Trump About Automation

Someone Needs To Tell Trump About Automation

WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 05: President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives at the U.S. Capitol Building on February 5, 2019 in Washington, DC. President Trump’s second State of the Union address was postponed one week due to the partial government shutdown. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty) The first substantive claim President Donald Trump made in his second State of the Union address concerned what is perhaps his favourite non-Wallean topic: blue-collar jobs.

If there are two professions that Trump has awkwardly and effusively embraced during his tenure as […]

Someone Needs to Tell Trump About Automation

Someone Needs to Tell Trump About Automation

WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 05: President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives at the U.S. Capitol Building on February 5, 2019 in Washington, DC. President Trump’s second State of the Union address was postponed one week due to the partial government shutdown. Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty) The first substantive claim President Donald Trump made in his second State of the Union address concerned what is perhaps his favorite non-Wallean topic: blue-collar jobs. If there are two professions that Trump has awkwardly and effusively embraced during his tenure […]

“Lean In” and 8 Other Bad Business Buzzwords

“Lean In” and 8 Other Bad Business Buzzwords

A take on some of the key features of the bad business utopias that are busy colonizing the future. Photo by Morsa Images/Getty Images The near future is more likely to be a neoliberal dystopia than the tech-enabled utopia conjured up by big business, writes Peter Fleming in The Worst Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide . He argues that we need “radical pessimism” to aim for the future we actually want, and aids the effort with sardonic humor that skewers the mythologies of our exploitative economic system.

In 1949, the right-wing economist F. A. Hayek published […]

Opinion: Automation and our jobs

What’s next in automation as Missouri minimum wage increases?

Missouri’s minimum wage will increase to $8.60 per hour in January, thanks to the voter-approved Proposition B that appeared on the November ballot. The increase is part of a four-year escalator that will raise the minimum wage to $12/hour in 2023 for non-exempt employees.

Proponents argue it’s time to increase the minimum wage to help those on the low end of the economic spectrum, closing the gap in income inequality. Opponents suggest raising the minimum wage leads to fewer jobs that less expensive automation could accomplish.The Show-Me Institute, a politically conservative think […]

Automation causes trade

Automation causes trade

David Levey pointed me to a Samuel Hammond review of a book by Oren Cass , who is a conservative critic of neoliberalism: Accelerating productivity and automation aren’t to blame for working class woes, either. On the contrary, despite prophecies of robots rendering work obsolete, Cass marshals convincing data to show U.S. manufacturing productivity has essentially stagnated. More importantly, whether job destruction is from automation and globalization has very different implications. When a factory automates a process, output per worker rises and local labor demand may even increase. But when a worker is dislocated by trade, Cass notes, “the […]

Japanese fear automation will take more jobs than foreigners

Japanese fear automation will take more jobs than foreigners

Pew survey: Only 15% of adults feel youths will be better off than their parents Nearly 90% of Japanese think robots and computers will take over most of the jobs in the next half century. © Reuters TOKYO — The Japanese public is happier about the economy than at any time in nearly two decades, though few think the next generation will have it as good. People’s biggest fear is automation, not foreigners, taking jobs from local workers.

While 44% of respondents to a Pew Research Center survey said the current economic situation is good, 15% answered that today’s children […]

Universal Income, Incentives and Well-Being

Universal Income, Incentives and Well-Being

Photo: iStock/Getty Images

Marx objected to the 19th-century Speenhamland revision to the Elizabethan Poor Laws—which was a top-up grant regardless of income—because it would incentivize employers to lower wages, and Marxists are big believers in labor (versus leisure or capital) as the source of economic value.

Interest in a guaranteed income arose in the 1960s wave of “cybernetics” (man-plus-machine automation) and the debate over whether the modern economy was evolving from labor to leisure and away from full employment. It has re-emerged in this era of artificial intelligence and robotics in the grander-sounding “universal basic income” (UBI) which risks metastasizing […]

Long Before the Day After

Long Before the Day After

In Greek mythology, Talos was an automaton that protected Europa in Crete from pirates and invaders: Wikimedia Book: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Author: Yuval Noah Harari
Publication: Jonathan Cape
Pages: 368
Price: 799 The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari earned fame with Sapiens, a wonderfully lucid prehistory of the human race for the lay reader, and disappointed a little with Homo Deus, a speculation on the eventual future of the human race. Sapiens made the reader think afresh — even the reader familiar with Denisovans and the debate about the cultural accomplishments of […]