Tag: conservative

How can Britain solve its productivity ‘puzzle’?

How can Britain solve its productivity 'puzzle'?

When analysts and business commentators talk about economic productivity the understandable reaction of most people is to switch off.

As obscure, abstruse economic concepts go, productivity is right up there. No one really – not even economists – really understands why it goes up and down, but all are convinced it’s very important indeed.

But maybe we should all be taking more interest in the concept. Leaving aside debates about inequality and relative poverty, the real determinant of the prosperity of a population over time is probably its productivityThe UK’s comparatively poor productivity rate, which according to the latest figures has […]

Jeremy Corbyn: UK must embrace technological change

Jeremy Corbyn: UK must embrace technological change

The state should work with business to help the UK maximise the benefits of automation and other technological changes, Jeremy Corbyn has said.

The Labour leader said he was not "one of the doom-mongers" who thought new technology would "inevitably herald an era of mass unemployment".

But he argued that adapting the UK for the jobs of the future "can’t simply be left to the market".A recent report suggested robots could affect 30% of British jobs by 2030.The PwC study estimated that nearly a third of existing jobs in the UK were potentially under threat from automation, compared with 38% in […]

Jeremy Corbyn: UK must embrace technological change

Jeremy Corbyn: UK must embrace technological change

The PwC report suggested gains in productivity from robots and Artificial Intelligence would boost the economy The state has a vital role to play in helping the UK maximise the benefits of automation and other technological changes, Jeremy Corbyn is to say.

The Labour leader will say he is not a "doom-monger" about mechanisation, saying jobs have been "lost, replaced and transformed" down the centuries.

But he will argue that adapting the UK for the jobs of the future "can’t simply be left to the market".A recent report suggested robots could affect 30% of British jobs by 2030.The PwC study estimated […]

July 5: In the Khadr case, $10-million talks. Plus other letters to the editor

July 5: In the Khadr case, $10-million talks. Plus other letters to the editor

Omar Khadr answers questions during a news conference after being released on bail in Edmonton on May 7, 2015. He was once the youngest prisoner held on terror charges at Guantanamo Bay. (Dan Riedlhuber/Reuters) Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com

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$10-million talks Re Ottawa To Offer Apology To Omar Khadr (July 4): Thank you. Please send the invoice […]

A. Barton Hinkle: There’s more to a job than just making money

A. Barton Hinkle: There's more to a job than just making money

Men at work in New York City. “The most fundamental cause of economic poverty,” said Richmond’s 2013 poverty commission report , “is inadequate access to remunerative employment — that is, to good, steady jobs.”

The absence of work causes other kinds of poverty, too. As Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser points out in a new article for City Journal , “jobless husbands have a 50 percent higher divorce rate than employed husbands.” The loss of a job inflicts a much greater degree of unhappiness than a reduction of income does. A loss of income likewise causes much less divorce, and […]

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp: New divisions will run deeper than left or right

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp: New divisions will run deeper than left or right

Deliveroo riders holding a protest over pay outside the company HQ in London. Could protests like this become more common as our economic model grows increasingly unstable? POLITICS and economics have been going through rapid evolutionary change in the last few years. Future historians may refer to it as a revolution. Political and economic thinking are deeply intertwined and while the economic order of our lifetime has failed and shows no sign of recovery, our politicians have failed to realise the new reality and are still arguing in terms of left and right, because that’s all they understand.

Left and […]

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp: New divisions will run deeper than left or right

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp: New divisions will run deeper than left or right

Deliveroo riders holding a protest over pay outside the company HQ in London. Could protests like this become more common as our economic model grows increasingly unstable? POLITICS and economics have been going through rapid evolutionary change in the last few years. Future historians may refer to it as a revolution. Political and economic thinking are deeply intertwined and while the economic order of our lifetime has failed and shows no sign of recovery, our politicians have failed to realise the new reality and are still arguing in terms of left and right, because that’s all they understand.

Left and […]

Don’t tax robots to save jobs… they might just create new forms of employment

Don’t tax robots to save jobs… they might just create new forms of employment

An automated welding arm. In a recent interview, Microsoft founder Bill Gates created quite a stir when he suggested that robots be taxed because society will not be able to manage the speed and magnitude of the impending automation of everything.

While his intent was to suggest ways to stave off the massive social unrest that will surely come with wholesale unemployment, it wasn’t a week before the editorial staffs at the Economist and BusinessWeek weighed in on impracticality of the idea, saying it would slow down technology investment and automation rates, and seriously damage American competitiveness.

Curiously, they framed the […]

Facebook, Tesla CEOs lead charge for guaranteed income: ‘I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,’ Zuckerberg says

Facebook, Tesla CEOs lead charge for guaranteed income: 'I don't think we're going to have a choice,' Zuckerberg says

WASHINGTON – Across their three presidential debates last year, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump uttered the word “jobs” 86 times – but the word “automation” never came up. And by all accounts, nothing is going to transform the American labor market more dramatically, and likely for the worse, than the increasing trend toward automation: on assembly lines, in self-driving cars , even clerical and white-collar positions once considered unthinkable for robots to occupy.

Credible projections now forecast that 40 percent of all jobs in the United States today could be eliminated by 2030, just 13 years from now, have led […]

“Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism”: Has the Time For Universal Basic Income Finally Come?

The phrase fully automated luxury gay space communism is the meme-culture embodiment of the left’s traditional aspiration toward utopia. Like other forms of postmodern commentary, fully automated luxury gay space communism internalizes a dialectic of irony. Willful naiveté acts as its animating self-contradiction. The effect is to evoke sincerity while seeming to undercut it, pointing toward a social horizon to giggle at while chasing.

The dialectical nature of fully automated luxury gay space communism squares nicely with the contradictory status of technology in Marxian economic theory. Marx identified technological progress as one of capitalism’s fundamental sources of agitation. Capitalists extract […]