Tag: inequality

Rage against the machines: is automation a threat to prosperity?

Numerous commentators have raised concerns about the effect of automation on jobs. In 2015, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andrew Haldane, suggested that as many as one third of jobs in the UK – 15 million – could be lost to automation. Examples could include drivers replaced by autonomous vehicles and administrative staff replaced by intelligent assistants like Amazon’s Alexa. Moreover, where automation in the past affected low-skill jobs, smarter machines and artificial intelligence automation could affect a much broader range of jobs in the future, including many high-paid, high-skilled positions.

Fears about automation have been around ever since […]

As Men Make Way For Machines, Many A Jobs May Vanish

As Men Make Way For Machines, Many A Jobs May Vanish

The speed with which the idea of a Universal Basic Income is gaining adherents in the West should be a giveaway: a lot of jobs are simply not coming back, and there will be those who are permanently unemployable.

On a May trip to Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the things that startled me is the virtual extinction of various categories of jobs. Technology could well be the culprit, although I read somewhere that only a single official job classification has explicitly disappeared in the United States in the last 60 years: elevator (lift) operator. But […]

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 […]

Amazon Buys Out Whole Foods Market

Amazon Buys Out Whole Foods Market

Reprinted with permission from Creators .

Excellent news, folks: A decade after Wall Street greed crashed our economy and crushed the working class, jobs are suddenly plentiful!

As an Associated Press article joyously put it, “The U.S. job market has settled into a sweet spot of steadily solid growth.” At long last, the American dream is back for working families, right? Well … in a word: No. Further down in the article, AP’s sweet news turns sour with this little admission: “About all that’s still missing [in the jobs market] is a broad acceleration in pay.”In other words, you can […]

Buffett: ‘Economy Is Doing Well, but All Americans Aren’t Doing Well’

Buffett: 'Economy Is Doing Well, but All Americans Aren't Doing Well'

Investment guru Warren Buffett sees wealth inequality as the most serious problem in the country: "a prosperity that’s been disproportionately rewarding to the people on top,"

"The real problem, in my view, is — this has been — the prosperity has been unbelievable for the extremely rich people," Buffett said Monday during an interview with PBS NewsHour.

With a net worth of more than $75 billion, Buffett is currently the second richest man alive, according to Forbes. "If you go to 1982, when Forbes put on their first 400 list, those people had [a total of] $93 billion. They now […]

Billionaire Warren Buffett says ‘the real problem’ with the US economy is people like him

Billionaire Warren Buffett says 'the real problem' with the US economy is people like him

Warren Buffett says people like him are the problem with the U.S. economy.

With a net worth of more than $75 billion , Buffett is currently the second richest man alive , according to Forbes. As the CEO of investing house Berkshire Hathaway , he is hallowed as the Oracle of Omaha. But for all his personal success, Buffett says the issue really is the 1 percent.

"The real problem, in my view, is — this has been — the prosperity has been unbelievable for the extremely rich people," says Buffett on PBS Newshour ."If you go to 1982, when Forbes […]

Will jobs disappear as technology takes over our work?

Will jobs disappear as technology takes over our work?

Worldwide the critical question is becoming; what is the future of work in an era of exponential technology development?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is arguably the big game changer.

We already see narrow AI in use in internet searches, customer targeting applications, and in predictive analytics.But AI has much greater capability that will merge into every aspect of our lives in the future. Increasingly devices will learn more about us, provide an ever-increasing range of support and take on more of our tasks.We are automating a lot more activity in literally every sector and that is set to continue at an accelerating […]

Robots are coming: What jobs will still be around in 20 years?

Robots are coming: What jobs will still be around in 20 years?

A study by Oxford University examined 702 common occupations and found that some jobs – telemarketers, tax preparers and sports referees – are at more risk than others including recreational psychologists, dentists and physicians.

Repesentative photo showing industrial robots at work. The robots are coming, the robots are coming!

Regular reports warn us that an automation apocalypse is nigh. In January, a McKinsey & Company study found that about 30% of tasks in 60% of occupations could be computerised and last year, the Bank of England’s chief economist said that 80m US and 15m UK jobs might be taken over […]

Rising Inequality May Be the Real Risk of Automation

Rising Inequality May Be the Real Risk of Automation

If your main worry over automation is losing your job, history suggests you’ll probably be just fine.

After all, even a century of unprecedented technological advancement in transportation, production and communication hasn’t caused labor’s share of national income to significantly budge. Economists David Autor and Anna Salomons reckon that’s because the primary driver of employment has actually been population growth, despite all the emphasis placed in academic circles on how machines augment human labor as well as why they will ultimately replace us anyway.

The bigger concern, they say, is how technological advances will affect earnings distribution.Essentially, the argument that the […]