Tag: consumption

On Automated Future, Treasury Secretary is ‘Out of Touch’

On Automated Future, Treasury Secretary is 'Out of Touch'

Last week, President Donald Trump’s New Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said he’s “not worried at all” about automation , stirring up a lot of controversy. Then, on Tuesday, in an interview on CNBC, Democratic Powerbroker and entrepreneur, also neighbor to Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Jeff Greene explained his world views, saying that Mnunchin is “completely out of touch with reality.”

“I think he’s sort of missing it on the business thing,” Greene said. “I mean, 88 percent of manufacturing jobs were lost because of technology. So, to build a wall and keep Mexicans or Latin Americans out of the […]

Tech will lead to new sub-prime crunch

Tech will lead to new sub-prime crunch

In October 2016, two leading P2P platforms in the U.S. — Lending Club and Prosper — announced a new increase in interest rates for lower-grade loans. The decision was made in order to sustain investor demand, as the model platforms are operating under challenges faced during the last months due to compliance issues with Lending Club and the general turbulence of the P2P lending industry.

However, keeping the investor demand stable is not the only reason for recent changes — as Lending Club announced, delinquencies are growing, especially when it comes to high-risk loans.

October 2016 was not the first time […]

A simple way to see why Trump’s climate order won’t bring back many coal jobs

A simple way to see why Trump’s climate order won’t bring back many coal jobs

A train loaded with coal in Williamson, West Virginia. One of the big justifications the Trump administration is using to dismantle US climate policies is that these moves would help reverse the collapse of the coal industry and bring back mining jobs.

“Will it bring back coal jobs? I think absolutely it will,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said on Sunday, of Trump’s new executive order.

I’ve explained in the past why this is probably wrong — coal mining employment is in decline for a wide variety of reasons: automation of mining; competition from cheap natural gas in the power sector; collapsing […]

Automation and the prospects of economic development

Automation and the prospects of economic development

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 only humans can […]

The optimist’s guide to the robot apocalypse

The optimist’s guide to the robot apocalypse

Machines, you may have heard, are coming for all the jobs.

Robots flip burgers and work warehouses . Artificial intelligence handles insurance claims and basic bookkeeping , manages investment portfolios , does legal research , and performs basic HR tasks . Human labor doesn’t stand a chance against them—after the “ automation apocalypse ,” only those with spectacular abilities and the owners of the robots will thrive.

Or at least, that’s one plausible and completely valid theory. But before you start campaigning for a universal basic income and set up a bunker , you might want to also familiarize yourself with […]

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 […]