Tag: liberal

The despicable inequality and cruel egalitarianism of wealth: towards a draft wealth tax to fund a basic income

The despicable inequality and cruel egalitarianism of wealth: towards a draft wealth tax to fund a basic income

Part 3 of a series. To those who have, more shall be given. Cities get more investment. From those who have little, more shall be taken. Small towns are finding that they are excluded from the excitement happening everywhere else and little investment goes their way.

The idea of capitalism – that goods should bear market prices, that justly acquired property is yours, and exchange between willing participants be free of encumbrances – is everywhere under threat.

There is, however, little policy difference between the extreme-left and extreme-right populist response. Both demand a remarkably statist approach to government, and both are […]

Automation destroyed 20 million manufacturing jobs

Summary:
I am becoming increasingly frustrated by all the articles I’m reading about how trade is supposedly decimating jobs in US manufacturing. I went to the FRED data set, and they have manufacturing output (real) going back to the first quarter of 1987. So let’s start there. Their series shows total manufacturing output rising from 69.789 in 1987 to 129.129 in the most recent quarter. That’s an 85% gain. At the same time, manufacturing employment has fallen, from 17.499 million to 12.275 million. This represents a decline from 17.3% of total employment to only 8.5% of total employment. […]

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. […]

Fast Food Automation, an Old Idea, Gets New Life to Bash Fight for 15

Fast Food Automation, an Old Idea, Gets New Life to Bash Fight for 15

Vox‘s Timothy Lee has written this column several times now. Putatively liberal outlet Vox spends a great many column inches trying to stop the national labor movement known as “Fight for 15” from increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Its most frequent writer on the subject, Timothy Lee, is a former adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, and is on the record opposing any minimum wage (when debating between $12 and $15, he doesn’t mention that he prefers $0), so it’s entirely predictable he would consistently argue against Fight for 15: “What Bernie Sanders Misses About […]

Jobs For All

Jobs For All

Line for unemployment benefits in San Francisco, CA in 1938. Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress The new issue of Jacobin is out now. To mark its release, we’re offering discounted introductory subscriptions . ull Employment . . . has become an aim of Conservative policy and the strongest argument against socialist critics.” That’s famed economist Joan Robinson, in 1962 trolling to her left and her right. British unemployment had been below 2 percent for most of the period since the war, without runaway inflation. Keynes had solved the problem of unemployment, converted the Conservatives, and stolen the communists’ […]

Ontario’s Gritville wins, while Toryland struggles

Ontario's Gritville wins, while Toryland struggles

Toronto has gotten the vast majority of new jobs in Ontario since the last recession, and in parts of the province the decline that started eight years ago has never ended, says a new report from the Fraser Institute that explains a whole lot about what’s going on in our provincial politics.

Liberalville is doing pretty well. Toryland’s pain is worse now than ever. A wildly uneven economy helped Donald Trump win the presidency in the United States and things don’t look that different here.

Yes, the study is from the Fraser Institute, the right-wing B.C. think tank. But the work […]

Confusion about job creation is obscuring America’s productivity crisis

Confusion about job creation is obscuring America's productivity crisis

Robots work on a new Volkswagen Crafter production line at the newly opened Volkswagen factory in Wrzesnia near Poznan, Poland, in September. There is perhaps no other topic in economics that is more prone to illogical thinking than job creation. It is a wellspring of hysterical nonsense.

Let’s start with the canard that technology and automation kill jobs. Notwithstanding the fact that US productivity growth rates are at an all-time low, a growing chorus blames technology for killing our jobs. Writing in The New Yorker, NYU professor Gary Marcus alleges that, “as machines continue to get smarter, cheaper, and more […]

Tech world, you are also to blame for the rise of Donald Trump

Tech world, you are also to blame for the rise of Donald Trump

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES – NOVEMBER 9: Supporters of President-elect Donald Trump of Republican Party, gather in front of the Midtown Hilton Hotel where Trump will make his victory speech as the results of the 2016 Presidential Election became clear in New York, NY, USA on November 9, 2016. Republican nominee Donald Trump won victory against Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton on US presidential election. Photo by Volkan Furuncu/Anadolu Agency/ Opinion: We are largely here because internet technology may have improved global communication, but it has decimated American jobs. Let this be a wake up call

Two months ago, […]

Something like half of all jobs will likely be lost to automation in the next 20 years

Something like half of all jobs will likely be lost to automation in the next 20 years

Back to Topics Mr. Demiurge Bigwig Joined: Aug 2003 Posts: 61667 So sayeth many a science article, but this one will do.

The Future of Employment

Given the number of libertarian-leaning people that float around this board, I’m curious: from your perspective, what do you think the proper response will be to a world in which an ever increasing number of people will no longer have anything to contribute to the economy that an AI can’t do better and cheaper? Take a guess, Luddite. So sayeth many a science article, but this one will do. The Future of Employment […]

Knowledge more crucial than skills in future economy

Knowledge more crucial than skills in future economy

What can the future hold for students seeking majors in a job market moving from part-time employment to emergent automation?

In the United States, neither political party has offered any significant frameworks for the coming challenges of automation displacing workers as economic inequality becomes unsustainable. While one party offers bread-crumb handouts such as education reform and more training for the American workforce, the other peddles the cliché that government is the problem, not the solution, offering fantasy schemes of fewer regulations, a new gig economy and a trickle-down economy by reducing taxes for the mega-wealthy.

A recent article in the […]