Fact is suppliers are all automated too. Almost every part on an auto is made on an automated assembly line somewhere. Visteon makes gas tanks, fuel pumps and many other parts. They are heavily automated. Automation gives you a more consistent product ,escaping the human factor.
New auto plant worker make about 1/2 what the old workers make. They have much weaker benefits and rights too. That is the future. Automation takes away a hell of a lot of jobs.
In the last century America has lost well over 90% of our agricultural jobs due to automation and increased efficiency. So…what happened to all those workers? Do you see the point? We will almost certainly lose a similar number of manufacturing jobs, while our productivity in manufacturing will continue to go up. I’m unsure how you think we could ‘fix’ this ‘problem’, even if we wanted to. Go back to high volume low wage jobs to protect them? How would that help us as a nation, let alone the companies who would be trying to implement such a crazy thing??
The thing that seems to always escape the neo-Luddite faction who continuously brings up this subject is that nothing stands still. New innovations are happening practically on a daily basis. Businesses shift and new businesses expand while old ones that can’t keep up fall. If there is a large untapped labor pool in the US that has the skills to do anything worthwhile then SOMEONE is going to take advantage of that at some point…probably shortly after this freaking recession, um, recedes…
-XT
Australia, at the beginning of the 20th century, used to be a leading producer of coffee. But then liberal labor policies drove up the cost of production, at a time when producers started using nearly free labour in Brazil and South America. As a result, Australia all but stopped producing coffee causing the industry to collapsed, and jobs to be lost.
Why is that relevant? Because several decades later, an Australian came up with an automated thrashing machine that could be used to harvest the coffee berries, eliminating the need for manual labour. The result was that the coffee industry came back to Australia, and with it jobs. Per acre, growing coffee (or grapes) is great for the economy.
Moral of the story: quit your bitching, nothing remains constant.
You point of view must involve some amount of willful blindness.
Australian coffee harvesting is an anomaly in that it collapsed, and came back after automation. Most agriculture smoothly transitioned from human labor to nearly complete automation over a long period of time.
The important point is not that Australia is once again growing coffee. The important point is that each ton of coffee grown requires a fraction of the number of man-hours that it used to. You say the jobs came back. No, they didn’t. The number of people required by automated harvesting is a tiny fraction of the number of people required by manual harvesting.
Now usually, at this point in the argument, the willful deniers will try to engage in misdirection by saying “But nobody wanted those jobs anyway”, which is a profoundly stupid thing to say. People want employment, and even awful, backbreaking work is better than none. Gutting fish is a terrible job, but the only reason anyone is still employed gutting fish is that nobody has yet developed an automated fish gutter. Once they do, many thousands of people around the world happily feeding their families by gutting fish will have to try to find other work.
And, of course, the willfully blind will insist that they can be retrained to service the automated fish gutting machine, willfully ignoring the inconvenient fact that the number of people required for that job is a tiny fraction of the number of people displaced by the machinery.
Other stupid things the willfully blind may say, trying to misdirect; they will accuse their opponents of being Luddites. They will repeat their religious mantra that the market will produce new jobs, ignoring that any new jobs will also be accomplished in a way that minimizes human labor.
In the long run, automation is cheaper. The problem is that without an employed population, there will be nobody to buy those product and the whole system collapses.
That is unfortunately the future of America. We are going to have a large permanent unemployed class. We can build roads and infrastructure. But the days of selling abroad are over. The jobs are not coming back.
Education will guarantee nothing. The technical jobs are going to India and China. There is no reason for them to come back. the welfare of America does not figure in business decisions. The future of America is irrelevant to a corporate exec. It is not a factor.
It is not that we will get new technical jobs to replace them. That will not happen.
We could invest in green technology like Al Gore has been trying to push. But that is being done in China. Corporations don’t want to do it here.
As long as another country will offer a cheap, educated, workforce, no regulating of business and allow them to pollute, we can not compete.
Even in China, automation will replace human labor as soon as it makes economic sense. There is no job so poorly paid that it cannot be automated out of existence.
Foxconn, the company in China that actually makes most of Apple’s “Designed In California” products got a lot of bad press because their employees were so poorly treated that a number of them committed suicide. Their solution? Automation.
But their employees got the raises they went on strike for.
Yes, suicide does produce bad press. The response to rising wages is automation. The writer of the article was not able to get a Foxconn executive to say so, but the article is filled with quotes from executives from their competitors:
As soon as the employees demand a living wage, the factories react by increasing automation to reduce the number of employees. Do you deny this is so?
You’re only called a Luddite if you act like a Luddite by opposing automation with some scare tactic about “the whole system” collapsing. When is this magical time that the system is going to collapse? We’ve been automating for over 200 years, and the system has chugged along amazingly by absorbing hundreds of millions of new people into jobs in the economy. Why has the system not collapsed sometime in the last 200 years? Why has “the system” actually gotten stronger and stronger, creating more and more wealth, while giving average people a lifestyle their grandparents couldn’t even imagine in their wildest dreams?
So, what do we do with all these useless people? Give them stern lectures on entreprenuership and gumption?
You heartless bastard*! Obviously we pat them on the head, tell them everything is going ot be okay, then proceed to give them $20k a year until they are old enough to get social security.
*Kidding, if that wasn’t obvious.
I never said they were “useless”, and I don’t accept your characterization that they are.
However, it would be a good idea to take a good hard look at our educational system and see if it needs to be modernized. We’re pretty much using the same system we did 150 years ago when we were mostly an agrarian society. If you’d like throw in some lectures on entrepreneurship, I think that would be just dandy.
Ah, well, there you go! For a second there, I thought you were going to fob off some “free market” platitude and make a run for the exit, but no, no, you’ve got a plan! Modernize our education system! Excellent! So, instead of having unemployed people we have no jobs for, we will have very well educated unemployed people, that we have no jobs for.
Uhm, no. That’s not what I said. You asked if we should give people lectures on entrepreneurship. I said it would be a good idea.
You’re the one who are calling these people “useless”. How do you get to that conclusion? What lessons from history are you drawing on? What theory of economics are you basing your assertion on?
I’m sorry I forgot to mention that other canard, the “Why hasn’t it happened already?” one.
Because the things that are being automated now are things that have never been automated before.
The automation of farming produced a huge number of displaced workers. The rise of factories to produce new consumer goods managed to absorb a large number of those workers. That resulted in a huge migration of African-Americans from the South to the North for these factory jobs. Farming is now almost entirely automated and unemployment in the North is dreadful.
The factories have automated. The measure of this is the much touted statistic “productivity” - the measure of the amount of goods produced or services performed per man-hour. This rise in productivity is a great thing for the value of a company, and is a good thing for the consumer, but is a terrible thing from the perspective of the employee. The factories that used to produce consumer goods in the US have either automated to a point where they employ very few people, or they have relocated to lower wage countries.
We were told this was OK, because we would all get “service sector” jobs. The thing is, those jobs are now also being automated. Have you been to a grocery store or a large hardware store in recent years? They are all installing or have installed self-checkout lanes. Previously, checking out eight customers at once required eight checkout clerks - now there is one person manning a single console. Have you bought music? Music retail is almost completely automated - upload the file to a server, collect the money. No manufacturing, no shipping, no wholesaling, no retail, no returns. The book business is headed in the same direction, as is the movie business.
By the way, have you made any headway on the challenge I made two years ago? It was:
Isn’t that exactly what we have now? A huge number of unemployed, or underemployed, college graduates? The most well-educated collection of unemployed people the world has ever seen.
Oh, well, its a question of terminology, then? I am flexible in terminology, what would you prefer? “Temporarily disadvantaged”? “Momentarily disemployed”? “Fucked”?
As for economic theory? Well, hell, John, you know I’m just a country boy from Waco, don’t have the advantages of sophisticated thinking. To me, a guy without a job is “unemployed”. If the same guy has no job and no realistic probability of getting one, he’s a “problem”. Further, since he is my neighbor and my fellow American, I think that’s our problem. Which economic theory does that reflect?
It’s hard to keep up. They keep changing the term for firing a person “laid off”, “terminated”, “made redundant”, “Reduction In Force”…I think the most recent is “furloughed”. At some point, they are going to run out of euphemisms.
I have to say how amusing it is to be called a “Luddite”. Anyone who has read any of my posts on the subject is aware of my deep and abiding interest in technology. I see the number of jobs being eliminated because I pay such close attention to how those jobs were being done before and are being done now. My problem is not with technology, but with an economic system rewards eliminating jobs, benefiting only those at the very top.
A long time ago, owners of companies were proud of the number of people they employed.
But that was true for every wave of automation-- it affected things that had never been automated before.
Unemployment is nothing new. Even 10% unemployment is nothing new.
You have often told us how you defer to the wisdom of Obama on his policies, and he’s telling us the economy will eventually grow and create new jobs. Why don’t you defer to his wisdom on this subject?
As I said, name some specific new product or service that is employing large numbers of people, or conceivably will employ large numbers of people.
Please tell me if the following statements are true or false?
The cost of technology tends to become cheaper.
The cost of human labor tends to either remain the same or become more expensive.