Tag: conservative

Living, minimum wages reduce employment

Living, minimum wages reduce employment

What future will America have when so many of her citizens lack the ability to engage in critical thinking, refuse to connect the dots and fail to use common sense?

This unwillingness to think clearly is no better demonstrated than by the continued support for the minimum wage. After all the studies and the near-unanimous opinion of economists — and even after the negative real-world effect of the minimum wage — it still remains popular.

Why?Sadly, most people are simply unaware of the argument against the minimum wage. They just don’t know about the vast body of research that shows the […]

America’s growth challenge, in 2 charts

The following two charts, from that great McKinsey Global Institute study I mentioned earlier, do a good job of illustrating the productivity challenge facing advanced economies, including the United States. If you want to grow as fast in the future as in the past, productivity growth is key to offset a demographic headwind: McKinsey further breaks down the growth challenge, and highlights how automation can help: GDP growth was exceptionally brisk over the past half century, driven by the twin engines of employment growth and rising productivity. However, declining birthrates and the trend toward aging in many advanced and […]

Robots will destroy our jobs – and we’re not ready for it

The McDonald’s on the corner of Third Avenue and 58th Street in New York City doesn’t look all that different from any of the fast-food chain’s other locations across the country. Inside, however, hungry patrons are welcomed not by a cashier waiting to take their order, but by a “Create Your Taste” kiosk – an automated touch-screen system that allows customers to create their own burgers without interacting with another human being.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many jobs have been lost by the deployment of the automated kiosks – McDonald’s has been predictably reluctant to release numbers – […]

Manufacturing, Automation, Jobs, and the Future

Manufacturing, Automation, Jobs, and the Future

A conservative financial/economics newsletter I read pointed me to this article.

Some highlights:

The U.S. has lost 5 million factory jobs since 2000. And trade has indeed claimed production jobs – in particular when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Nevertheless, there was no downturn in U.S. manufacturing output. As a matter of fact, U.S. production has been growing over the last decades. From 2006 to 2013, “manufacturing grew by 17.6%, or at roughly 2.2% per year While it has been easy to blame China or Mexico for job losses the truth […]

A stronger economy won’t save obsolete jobs

A stronger economy won't save obsolete jobs

Automated robots build a 2015 Chrysler 200 automobile at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in Sterling Heights, Mich., in March 2014. In South Africa, people who speak Afrikaans use the word "robot" to mean the same thing it means in English. But it is also the word for "traffic light." Why? Before automated signals, motorists on busy streets were directed by police officers standing on platforms. Those cops were automated out of a job.

This bit of trivia comes from the dazzling new book "Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World," by University of Illinois at […]

What can governments do when jobs run out?

What can governments do when jobs run out?

As automation makes more jobs redundant, policymakers cannot put off discussing universal basic income as an option. (Shutterstock image) Martin Ford writes in the Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future that around 47% of total employment in the US, around 64 million jobs, have the potential to be automated perhaps within a decade or two. Europe is already facing a crisis of jobs. Youth unemployment in Italy stands around 36% while it is nearly 44% in Spain. Thanks to offshoring and automation, we are seeing a polarisation in the labour market that is […]

White House: To Prevent AI From Killing Jobs, Educate the Workforce

White House: To Prevent AI From Killing Jobs, Educate the Workforce

Image Credit: jeffedoe/Flickr Earlier this week, a team lead by the Executive Office of the President released a report examining automation’s potential impact on the economy. The findings were far from reassuring, especially for low-skilled workers.

The paper notes that artificial intelligence technologies could lead to economic benefits, but “[t]hose economic benefits, however, will not necessarily be evenly distributed across society.”

The White House said that other researchers have projected potential job losses in the next 20 years at anywhere from 9 percent to 47 percent, and that lower-skilled and lower-paid jobs are likely to be most at risk : Research […]

The White House’s Fix for Robots Stealing Jobs? Education

The White House’s Fix for Robots Stealing Jobs? Education

Chip Somodevilla-Getty Images A new report from the White House warns that millions of jobs could be automated out of existence in coming years. But it cautions against one much discussed solution: giving away free money.

The report , published this week by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, joins a growing body of work forecasting massive jobs losses due to automation and artificial intelligence. A paper published in 2013 by Oxford University researchers, for example, estimated that as many as 47 percent of all jobs could eventually be automated. The new report, likewise, forecasts millions of job losses in […]

How to support yourself after the robot revolution

How to support yourself after the robot revolution

Steve Gardner

Here’s a startling prediction: if current labor trends continue, one out of three American men, ages 25-54, will be out of work by mid-century.

That’s what former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers expects. “Job destruction caused by technology is not a futuristic concern,” Summers wrote this fall. “It is something we have been living with for two generations.”Contract jobs, gig work and robots have all made work more precarious. Silicon Valley pioneered many of the changes, and now some tech entrepreneurs believe they have a solution to the economic anxiety they’ve helped create.Put bluntly, it’s free money. […]

Technology is coming for your retail jobs

Technology is coming for your retail jobs

Amazon recently unveiled a new type of grocery store — one that doesn’t require cashiers at all. Called Amazon Go, the brick-and-mortar location uses sensors and gates to automatically identify what you bought, calculate your total and charge you for your purchases when you leave. It gets rids of pesky long lines in front of cashiers or self-checkout kiosks, but also more or less eradicates the need for checkout counters altogether.

While that’s exciting for loathers of long lines (like me), it also sounds like it could cause a decline in employment, just as automation wiped out millions of manufacturing […]