MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

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  Bisley

  Yes, automation is replacing some jobs, particularly unskilled labor that is being priced out of the market by governments increasing minimum wages to unreasonably high levels where the cost of employing such people is more than than the value they can provide an employer. However, outrageous levels of regulation and taxation are making it so difficult and expensive to do business in the US that many companies are going out of business, and those that can afford it and for whom it makes financial sense, are leaving the country. This article is more political propaganda than fact.

  Jan 17th, 2017 - 04:10 pm - Link - Report abuse -3
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  ElaineB

  I think this article is right in essence. Add to that the U.S. consumers driving force of ever cheaper prices and that has driven a lot of production abroad. I have heard the complaints about foreign goods but once they have to pay the price of U.S. made electrical goods and cars they will be not be at all happy. The U.S. consumer has driven down prices in many areas. It is why their airlines are so blooming awful and hotels (apart from the luxury level) are so stripped bare of any comfort.
  
  The rust belt has been particularly hit hard and I sympathise with the people there feeling left behind but it is not the 'evil foreigners' fault. The problem is that it is much easier to blame some foreigners rather than their own push for ever cheaper goods.

  Jan 17th, 2017 - 04:57 pm - Link - Report abuse +1
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  Paragon

  Well ummm,
  
  This guy is also barking up the wrong tree He mentions ATM's as an example of Automation taking jobs
  
  According to an article in the Economist,
  The automated teller machines (ATMs) might have been expected to spell doom for bank tellers by taking over some of their routine tasks, and indeed in America their average number fell from 20 per branch in 1988 to 13 in 2004, But that reduced the cost of running a bank branch, allowing banks to open more branches in response to customer demand. The number of urban bank branches rose by 43% over the same period, so the total number of employees increased. Rather than destroying jobs, ATMs changed bank employees’ work mix, away from routine tasks and towards things like sales and customer service that machines could not do.
  
  There are numerous more examples in Industry, Computers and Automation thus reallocate rather than displace jobs, requiring workers to learn new skills.
  Only manufacturing jobs expanded more slowly than the workforce did over the period of study, but that had more to do with business cycles and offshoring to China than with technology,

  Jan 17th, 2017 - 08:38 pm - Link - Report abuse 0
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  DemonTree

  @ElaineB
  I guess this idea is finally coming into the mainstream. There is a lot of potential in the future to automate increasingly higher skilled jobs, and this will just add to the pressure from globalisation.
  
  But it's a special problem for America and other developed countries. Supposing Trump succeeds in forcing companies to bring back production to the US, then we can expect to see a lot more automation than we do now. It may well be cheaper to pay a worker in China than to automate some part of production, but this is not true in America; the higher wages will be a huge incentive to automate as much as possible.
  
  @Paragon
  That may be true in the US, but in the UK the number of branches fell from 20,583 in 1988 to 8,837 in 2012. How much job growth do you think there has been here?
  
  It's perfectly true that changes in technology in the past often reallocated rather than eliminated jobs. But this may not continue. Even if it does, that doesn't mean the new jobs are at an equivalent skill level, that they are in the same location, or that they pay as well as the old ones.
  
  As we have seen, people in rural America are not at all willing, and may not be able, to move to a city and learn a completely new skill set, starting at the bottom in a new profession. Nor can they be expected to be happy that reliable, well paid manufacturing jobs have been replaced by low paid, casual customer service roles.

  Jan 17th, 2017 - 09:29 pm - Link - Report abuse 0
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  Paragon

  @DT
  Whilst I agree with most of what you say, up to a point, its still murky water
  Economists would disagree completely
  
  You are right about the job creation in the US being almost all low paid service jobs and many have to hold down 2 jobs due to the low pay.
  
  While it is easy to see fields in which automation might do away with the need for human labour, it is less obvious where technology might create new jobs. We can’t predict what jobs will be created in the future, but it’s always been like that, Imagine trying to tell someone a century ago that her great-grandchildren would be video-game designers or cybersecurity specialists, These are jobs that nobody in the past would have predicted.
  Focusing only on what is lost misses a central economic mechanism by which automation affects the demand for labour, that it raises the value of the tasks that can be done only by humans. Ultimately those worried that automation will cause mass unemployment are succumbing to what economists call the “lump of labour” fallacy. “This notion that there’s only a finite amount of work to do, and therefore that if you automate some of it there’s less for people to do, is just totally wrong, Those sounding warnings about technological unemployment “basically ignore the issue of the economic response to automation
  An oft-cited example is that of Instagram, a photo-sharing app. When it was bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion, it had tens of millions of users, but only 13 employees. Kodak, which once employed 145,000 people making photographic products, went into bankruptcy at around the same time. But such comparisons are misleading, according to recent research. It was smartphones, not Instagram, that undermined Kodak, and far more people are employed by the smartphone industry and its surrounding ecosystems than ever worked for Kodak or the traditional photography industry.

  Jan 17th, 2017 - 10:32 pm - Link - Report abuse 0
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  DemonTree

  @Paragon
  I agree automation can create new jobs, but how is having a job done by a robot in the US different to having it done by a low paid person in China?
  
  Besides, even if new jobs are being created, there is no guarantee that the unemployed will have the talent and ability to do them. Not everyone is capable of being a video game designer or cybersecurity specialist, even if they can get the education required.
  
  If you are right, how do you explain the current problems with jobs in the US? It seems the 'tasks that can only be done by humans' currently are mostly unpleasant ones that involve serving other people.
  
  Besides, even if things settle down eventually, countries need to deal with the problem now before more people resort to desperate political measures.

  Jan 18th, 2017 - 07:55 pm - Link - Report abuse 0
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