Tag: conservative

The new economy is coming

Late May is college commencement speech season, and there are always one or two destined to cause upset. This year, add to the list the Harvard commencement speech given last Thursday by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his call for "universal basic income," which is a fancy way of describing a kind of Social Security for all. As might be expected, the tech pioneer was lambasted on such social media platforms as Facebook (which he no doubt appreciated) by conservatives who see UBI as a doubling down on welfare, as well as some liberals who instinctively distrust an idea […]

Mark Zuckerberg called for exploring universal basic income in his Harvard graduation speech. Here’s what that means.

Mark Zuckerberg called for exploring universal basic income in his Harvard graduation speech. Here’s what that means.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg greets graduating Harvard students as he walks in a procession though Harvard Yard at the start of commencement exercises Thursday. Mark Zuckerberg floated a number of political reforms during his Harvard commencement speech Thursday.

Online voting. Personalized learning. Student loan relief. Higher taxes on the wealthy.

But of all the ideas he suggested, perhaps none were as radical or surprising as a thing called “universal basic income.”Zuckerberg said he never would’ve founded Facebook if not for his relative financial security, something other potential entrepreneurs may not enjoy.“We should have a society that measures progress not just by […]

More robots, fewer jobs?

More robots, fewer jobs?

Lately we have been inept at creating new employment-generating sectors Our burgeoning young population is clearly struggling for jobs, despite being in the world’s fastest growing economy. More than 30% of Indians aged 15-29 are neither in employment nor in any training or education, according to a recent survey by the OECD. This added to the gloomy state of employment, for only in March the All India Council for Technical Education had said that more than 60% of the eight lakh engineers graduating from technical institutions across the country every year remain unemployed.

Bridging this employment gap could become an […]

One industrial robot takes away six human jobs

One industrial robot takes away six human jobs

Steve Jurvetson via flickr Adding one industrial robot to the workforce will reduce employment by 6.2 workers and reduce wages for the local economy, says a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research . What’s more, there aren’t any significant increases in other jobs in the impacted areas to offset the losses – one finding that surprised even the study’s authors.

Economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University looked at data spanning between 1990 and 2007 to reach their findings. Overall, they saw that one new industrial robot per thousand workers reduced the employment-to-population […]

Canada, U.S. take starkly different approaches to addressing robot jobs

Canada, U.S. take starkly different approaches to addressing robot jobs

Amigo, a white robot the size of a person, uses information gathered by other robots to move towards a table to pick up a carton of milk and deliver it to an imaginary patient in a mock hospital room at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Netherlands, Wednesday Jan. 15, 2014. (AP / Peter Dejong) Should we be preparing for the coming invasion of job-stealing, career-crushing robots? It’s a question that’s moved from science-fiction novels to the tip of policy-makers’ tongues.

Canadian and American policy-makers have just delivered very different answers.

Canada’s finance minister tabled a budget that mentioned Artificial Intelligence and […]

Congress Beware: Automation Inevitable

One of the most salient issues in the 2016 election was America’s changing manufacturing landscape, which arguably handed Donald Trump the presidency. However, all the half-truths about “bad trade deals” sending jobs overseas distracted from the real culprit behind the death of the American factory worker — automation. Research suggests that up to 85 percent of all manufacturing jobs lost over the last several decades were lost to technological strides, not globalization.

In an interview with Mike Allen of Axios, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s comments on the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) were completely and utterly baffling, particularly in light […]

A robot job invasion: U.S. feds shrug it off, Canada feds fret, so who’s right?

A robot job invasion: U.S. feds shrug it off, Canada feds fret, so who's right?

WASHINGTON — Should we be preparing for the coming invasion of job-stealing, career-crushing robots? It’s a question that’s moved from science-fiction novels to the tip of policy-makers’ tongues.

Canadian and American policy-makers have just delivered very different answers.

Canada’s finance minister tabled a budget that mentioned artificial intelligence and skills training dozens of times, with entire sections on each subject and $5.2 billion for worker re-training.His U.S. counterpart: not so worried about a wave of job-killing automation."It’s not even on our radar screen," U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told the Axios website last week. "(It’s) 50-100 more years (away)… I’m not […]

The Rise of the Robots, Reviewed

The Rise of the Robots, Reviewed

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of reviews of books, written anytime, anyplace, fiction or nonfiction, that help us to understand contemporary trends in the city. Got an idea for a book that you think puts Dublin in context? Email us at arts@dublininquirer.com.

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At the Spar on Camden Street, a machine makes my coffee. At the Tesco up the way, another machine sells me my groceries. At the Bank of Ireland, a little further on, I can withdraw or deposit money through another machine.All these tasks were once performed by people, who were paid […]

Fixing US corporate taxes with a heavy dose of American jobs

Fixing US corporate taxes with a heavy dose of American jobs

Photo: Kurtis Garbutt via Flickr A common bipartisan refrain in Washington these days is that the US corporate tax system is broken. However, Republicans and Democrats can’t seem to agree on how to fix it.

Scott A. Shay , the chairman and co-founder of Signature Bank – a Wall Street Bank that serves the needs of privately owned business clients – has a unique and compelling idea for getting the US out of this tax morass.

Shay notes that none of the proposals to overhaul corporate taxes addresses the two major problems facing Americans and their economy — offshoring and […]

Automation, not foreign trade, kills American jobs

Donald Trump boasts that his "America First" trade and economic policies are bringing well-paid manufacturing jobs back to America. That’s probably his biggest "deliverable" to Trump voters. But is this claim true?

Trump won the presidency partly because he voiced the anger of American workers about lost jobs and stagnant wages. But in the process, he fundamentally misled the country by claiming that trade is the major cause of job losses, and that renegotiating trade agreements would save the middle class.

What Trump is offering is a palliative that has raised false hopes. He implies that a few good trade deals […]