Tag: consumption

How can India create Employment in the digital age?

How can India create Employment in the digital age?

The global window for export- and manufacturing- led development is closing Marc Saxer Delhi

Ever since the Second Industrial Revolution started to peter out in the 1960s, global capitalism has faced a crisis of demand. Ironically, the strategies put in place to restore profitability largely aimed at the supply side: 1) the Rationalisation of production through technological automation aimed at increasing efficiency; more recently the digital revolution as the latest attempt to tackle the consumption crisis by rationalising the consumptive and distributive apparatus. 2) the Globalisation of production by offshoring, profiting from cheap labour cost in developing economies; 3) […]

Factory automation tax unnecessary

Factory automation tax unnecessary

Photo Credit: Creative Commons In a recent interview with news website “Quartz,” Bill Gates offered a rather unconventional approach to the growing use of robots in factories, asserting that robots who replace human workers should incur the same tax rates as the human workers’ income taxes would have incurred.

According to Gates, “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at […]

Automation and the prospects of economic development

Automation and the prospects of economic development

By Joselito T. Sescon

Technological anxiety has been with us since the first modern industries appeared. The angst toward new technologies is mainly about the fear of widespread substitution and displacement of human labor by machines. Historical experiences in early industrialization have shown that new technologies used in production initially had disruptive effects to labor and existing production assets. However, new technologies also ushered in the birth of new industries, created new jobs, becoming the source of productivity, economic growth and development.

Automation, like most new labor-saving technologies, has an effect of raising the comparative advantage and value of jobs that […]

Nowhere to Go: Automation, Then and Now

Nowhere to Go: Automation, Then and Now

Part One

It is in this serious light that we have to look at the question of the growing army of the unemployed. We have to stop looking for solutions in pump-priming, featherbedding, public works, war contracts, and all the other gimmicks that are always being proposed by labor leaders and well-meaning liberals.

– James Boggs, The American Revolution In 1963, James Boggs, a black autoworker employed for over two decades at a Chrysler plant in Detroit, published a short book focused on the nefarious effects of automation on class struggle in the United States. The story told in The American […]

More manufacturing, fewer jobs. Is there a solution?

More manufacturing, fewer jobs. Is there a solution?

Technology and automation have impacted a range of industries, including printing. Manufacturing makes more products than ever before, but not the jobs that once went with them. How can struggling economies resurrect their rust belt regions when factories employ more machines than people?

In a cavernous building on the outskirts of Sydney’s CBD, a lone worker tends to a massive printing machine churning out 70,000 magazines an hour.

Not so long ago, it would have taken six workers to do the job, but advances in technology and automation mean printers at Blue Star Web are able to produce more with less […]

Will automation take away all our jobs? | David Autor

Will automation take away all our jobs? | David Autor

Advanced US 119 Collection ONOFF

Report Subtitle Errors Here’s a startling fact:
in the 45 years since the introduction of the automated teller machine,
those vending machines that dispense cash, the number of human bank tellers employed in the United States has roughly doubled, from about a quarter of a million to a half a million. A quarter of a million in 1970 to about a half a million today, with 100,000 added since the year 2000. These facts, revealed in a recent book by Boston University economist James Bessen, […]

In a crowd of truths, we can discern and reclaim what it means to be human

In a crowd of truths, we can discern and reclaim what it means to be human

This is the second of two responses to an excellent article by Antony Slumbers , the first being this perspective from my mirrored room , in this instance offering that his views offer a far too presumptive picture of how technology will shape our work future. The paragraph headlines are from Antony’s original article. One person’s optimism is another’s pessimism. A decade ago the dream of liberated commute-free teleworking was, to many, the nightmare of enforced seclusion to the soundtrack of the dishwasher. The deployment of robots for the performance of menial tasks creating time and wealth for leisure […]

If the robots are coming for our jobs, make sure they pay their taxes

If the robots are coming for our jobs, make sure they pay their taxes

The problem with the future is that it’s unknowable. But of course that doesn’t stop us trying to second-guess it. At the moment, many people – and not just in the tech industry – are wondering about the impact of automation on employment. And not just blue-collar employment – the kind of jobs that were eliminated in the early phase of automating car production, for instance – but also the white-collar jobs that hitherto seemed secure.

In a much-cited 2013 study , for example, economists David Autor of MIT and David Dorn of Spain’s CEMFI institute found that because computers […]

How do you tax a robot, Mr. Gates?

How do you tax a robot, Mr. Gates?

Bill Gates may favour a tax on robots that devour human jobs. But isn’t Microsoft too arguably a robot by that definition? | Flickr / Stephen Chin Luddites had humanity’s best interests at heart. So does Bill Gates. And with his statement urging taxation of robots to slow down pace of automation, he has proven himself to be a modern-day Luddite. His ideas on robots will, hopefully for the sake of humanity, meet with the same fate that Luddites’ did.

There is little doubt that automation will destroy jobs in sectors ranging from transport to finance . This is a […]

How The Coming Wave Of Job Automation Will Affect You And The US

How The Coming Wave Of Job Automation Will Affect You And The US

A passenger uses his biometric passport at an automated ePassport gate equiped with a facial recognition system at the British border of the Eurostar at the gare du Nord in Paris on February 17, 2017. / AFP / PHILIPPE LOPEZ/Getty Images We can see this trend when comparing companies across time. The most valuable US firm in 1964 was AT&T. Then, it was worth $267 billion (in 2016 dollars) and employed 758,611 people. Today, Google is worth $370 billion and has only 55,000 employees.

Many workers have already been replaced by machines, but the number is only set to rise.

A […]