What is wrong here is this; Capitalism can not and will not protect those who are the victims of our pitiless economic model. Until we, and our cohorts realize this, we can expect social unrest and riots in our streets. Look to France, and you will see an American future; no jobs, no future. America is dreaming.
24
By voting for Trump, these poor folks are voting for their own demise.
35
Robots are so much cheaper than human beings, who require benefits, salaries, and pensions. I think that the death of the working class by the cold hands of the robots is what the Trump presidency is all about. He is the front man, telling the working class that he is advocating for them, and then leaving them empty handed and desperate in the end. This is the real tragedy of the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Republican Party.
32
Funny how machines without brains are replacing people without brains.
43
I guess all the anti immigrant trump supporters could get new jobs that they complain the "illegals" are stealing. Have fun in the fields picking vegetables and cleaning motel rooms.
31
Robots are the new slaves. The new slaveowners are people who own investments in corporations that use slaves. The output of the slave in excess of what is needed to keep him working (power, repairs, programming in the case of robots) belongs to the slaveowner. Free workers must compete with these new slaves, and the slaves win.
Our new slaves have the advantage that they will not revolt or organize unions. They have the disadvantage that they do not consume, so they decrease the need for themselves and the opportunities for owners to earn profit making items to be sold. Our new slaves are schmoos, and schmoos destroy the economy.
If our labor is to be done by uncomplaining slaves, we must all be slaveowners to share in the fruits of this labor. Or we will be warehoused out of the way and given enough (mainly drugs) so we will not make trouble before we die; if the drugs are of uneven potency, this will be soon. A first approach to universal ownership of slaves would be a guaranteed income funded by the productivity of robots; without something like this, our free enterprise system will enter a death spiral and/or transform itself into something else, as foreseen by sci-fi visionaries such as William Gibson.
We must think boldly, outside the box, or we are doomed.
12
The apparent lack of top economists and any scientists in Trump's immediate network should concern us all. The issues we face - climate change, trade, automation and others - should be addressed by the very best and brightest.
Instead, we have ideologues such as Peter Navarro, and talking heads like Larry Kudlow.
17
Lets accept one truth for what is coming in couple of decades down the road will punish the overpopulated nations.
Scandinavia, Denmark Benelux Switzerland, Singapore like nations will reap great harvest while like ours type of nations USA, Brazil, China, India will pay a heavy price.
we need to either find job ( which is impossible ) or pay unemployment to tens of millions of people.
just imagine.
At this moment we are all spending enormous time to Trumps extramarital affairs , because that is only thing he bring to white house.
12
It is abundantly clear that Individual-1 has no idea of what's going on in the economics of trade, industrial operations in the US, or modern manufacturing processes. No help here should be anticipated from kudlow. They do not have a clue as to what they need to do. We're the losers, big time, folks.
13
One thing left out is the impact of consolidation and centralization. Technological advancement is not something that we can or should stop. But anti trust enforcement is something that we can and should do. The number of startups have steadily fallen for 30 years. Breaking into consolidated industries protected by regulatory moats is almost impossible. This leaves workers going to a handful of large employers with monopsony power in labor purchasing. It also leaves our entire society less flexible and less innovation, a sclerotic behemoth unable to rapidly adapt to changing conditions.
That doesn’t provide an answer to the age old problem of what happens to workers left behind. It is easy to look at the past and know what not to do if one will. The vast housing projects that absorbed the tenant farmers displaced by the mechanical cotton harvesters in the 1950’s and 60’s was a social disaster that delivered a bitter harvest that still haunts our nation. The dole is no answer. People need to be useful.
I don’t know how to solve the wage problem for work that the economy does not value, but I do know that every honest job is a blessing and every honest worker worthy of honor. This I was taught and this I believe. Groceries must be stocked, facilities must be cleaned, trash must be removed, children must be watched and the infirm attended. Many a six figure earner could be missed easier than these.
17
You need to confer with Kevin Drum on this - he has been exploring the rise of the robots for some time now. He expects it is only a matter of time before computing power becomes economically viable at a level sufficient to replace humans at nearly every task.
The real problem isn't robots displacing humans - it's apportioning the benefits to more than just the people who own the robots. If the economy needs fewer and fewer humans to operate, who exactly is being served and what is the point if it leaves the vast majority worse off?
This is the real challenge ahead, and the transition is going to be as hard as we let it.
14
@Larry Roth You are absolutely correct, "The real problem isn't robots displacing humans - it's apportioning the benefits to more than just the people who own the robots. " Carrying this further, those who will not own the means of productions will have very few opportunities to earn decent income and will be disposable (we see elements of it in today's gig economy- Uber, Lyft, and all the "via app" services advertised on subways, Google & Amazon with their permanently temporary jobs with no chance for advancement). Educated or not, many, if not most will, compete for the bottom of the barrel dead end service (gig) jobs. AI and automation can be great if the social and labor structures are adopted to accommodate them. So far the movement in the executive and legislative branches on the federal level and on many state levels is in exactly the opposite direction.
15
Jobs that can't be fully automated: Nursing (especially elder care), housekeeping, veterinary medicine, the "Arts"? I'm trying to think of others. I also feel like human services will be a privilege of the rich in the future.
What careers should we be adapting to?
9
Whenever an article or essay written about Ai and Robotics effect on the jobs.
I remember this phrase from terminator movie
"Judgement day is inevitable"
Can some body explain , how advancing AI-Robotics versus 10 billion human in 2050 is viable.
2
We need to begin preparing for a future when 50% or more of those currently employed are not needed in traditional businesses. What will people do? How will they earn money and be paid? Where will be money come from to pay them? Will life in general lose meaning for people who have no direction in their lives other than getting up in the morning, doing what they are told and getting a check every two weeks?
This is one of the most serious problems looming on the horizon. Economists and sociologists should probably be addressing the issue first, followed by politicians and then the rest of us. One potential is a 20 hour work week or a work schedule where people work for three weeks and then have three weeks off, with a partner at work filling in and continuing tasks during their off times.
Men and women who work on offshore oil rigs now have something like a similar schedule with six weeks on followed by six weeks off. Perhaps they should be the subject of the first studies. When I worked at a radio station in Reading, Pa., as a teenager, three hours a day was considered quite enough for a DJ, although some did other works for a few hours in addition to their time on the air. (There are very few local DJs and almost no reporters in small town radio any more.)
The main problem is going to be out to pay people and how to determine what they are paid. What will the new system of allocation be and will people accept it as being fair? These changes represent fundamental shifts.
13
Keep in mind that the median IQ is around 100 so there are lots of people out there with two-digit IQs that are never going to be computer programmers, arbitragers, or even health care workers. They need to work with their hands and we need to find good work for them to do.
21
Dislocations due to technology change in nothing new. BTDT.
125+ years ago farm machinery started replacing hand labor on family farms. Young people migrated to cities for work, and were glad to get away from the farm. Farm families no longer needed ten kids to work the fields. Trend continues. Farmers in California now test new equipment to pick crops vice using immigrant labor.
Steam railroads transitioned to diesel power in the 1950s and it put massive workforces out to pasture. My dad was one of them, a steam locomotive blacksmith / boilermaker by trade, I still have his union cards. Dad said railroads "would never get rid of steam" but they did. In a heartbeat. Efficiencies of scale in the realm of a thousand-fold. Stunning efficiencies. Feeling sorry for himself, and drunk one night (as usual), he stuck his head in the oven. Mom found him there in the morning, kicked him in his butt and said "Charley, next time turn on the gas." He lived to 1986 but talked about steam to the day he died.
In the 1980s we started the PC revolution. In 1990-91 we went to war in the Gulf on PCs. By 1992 my Army agency sent its ancient mainframe computer to scrap. We cancelled contracts for all those techs to care for the mainframe. Out they go. Saved a ton.
It will continue and I expect it to accelerate. Tempus fugit. YMMV.
16
If you are over 50 even with a degree you may be excluded from the work force. If you are over 60 just forget about a good job and sign up as a greeter at Wallmart
11
'The demographic group most hindered by the rise of automation, Sachs wrote, “has been the proverbial white male with less than a college degree and living in rural and semirural areas.”'
White males this, white males that -- white males, white males, white males. Because we know that other males enjoy even greater disadvantages.
8
Perhaps we will have reverse migration back to Europe...they have well developed social programs and negative population growth.
13
Of course his gut tells him more than other people's brains. He never listens to what other people tell him.
6
The robots are merely replacing the automatons.
4
If all of this is true then why does the US need to take in more uneducated and low-skilled migrants from all over the world?
11
You can't hold back history.
1
@American Patriot
Don't you mean the future?
5
Sadness and Irony in Mudville tonight -As "Gutman" takes his toll on the deluded credulous victims who followed him!
"Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut has increased incentives to replace workers with robots, contradicting his campaign promise to restore well-paying manufacturing jobs in the nation’s heartland."
"Trump is convinced that he has extraordinary skills, boasting last month: “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”
But sadly a 42 inch waist is far away fromanormally formed prefrontal cortex.
4
Jeffrey Epstein created some really whiz-bang jobs of the sort in which a human is better - entirely more satisfactory than any mechanical substitute. Could be the wave of the future?
4
The author posits that white males with no college education are Trump voters being replaced by robots. He then takes to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan which voted overwhelmingly for Trump and where no auto factories have ever existed. Bad example. Robots replace those who work in protected industrial environments. Roofers, carpenters, craft brewers, most construction workers, house painters, plumbers, etc. aren't going away any time soon. And many are non-college white males who voted for Trump.
4
@CM and how many roofers, carpenters, craft brewers, most construction workers, house painters, plumbers are needed? How about those who cannot obtain jobs because of automation. After all even lower level (but what used to be high skill) positions in "high prestige" places, e.g., law firms and investment banks are taken over by automation.
3
I'm sorry but a better editorial could've been written better by a computer. It would have managed to do better than regurgitating 19th century luddite tropes.
The lack of computerization has put the US often behind both Japan and Germany when it comes to industrialization. And ideas like these put forth by Mr Edsall helped destroy the American Automotive Industry in competitive comparison.
Automation and development do displace, but protecting jobs from it has never, and will never be the best solution.
Unions as part of corporate boards is important. A general safety net that protects people from when their previous employment and skills become irrelevant is vital. Regardless, we need to value the human contribution more wherever it is needed and necessary.
But we should not become technophobes trying to protect unneeded labor activity. People yes, activity no. We didn't protect farmers from tractors, we didn't protect abacus makers from computers, and we didn't protect blacksmiths making horseshoes from the automobile.
I would say that the 19th called and wants its outdated and bad ideas back, maybe an operator can put you through to it...
3
Corporations love robots — they do what they are told, don’t need benefits, don’t have unions, work 24/7, and can be reprogrammed as work requirements shift. They are exactly what corporations want from their (hopefully) interchangeable human employees in anonymous cubicles, but cheaper.
Eventually even corporate management can be automated, and the owners can play golf or bridge all day and helicopter between parties at night. That is the goal. Some adjutant humans may have to look after details to avoid cluttering the day’s activities, but they won’t intrude too often.
Haven’t quite worked out yet what all those extra humans are good for: — Domestic help? Jokes? Musicians? Ballet? Engaging conversation?? Maybe there are a few things humans can do where robots are too expensive?
In any case, there are far more humans than one can find use for, eh? And we can’t have too many of them living our life style!
6
I think one of the solutions will be the scraping of the traditional income tax and it being replaced by another form of taxation. The present labor based taxation will not be able to support the system. Maybe we should be taxing robots in the future and that’s not a joke!
4
I remember in the 1990s when we were all told that while automation, computerization and robots would eliminated repetitive jobs that the workers who lost those jobs would get much higher paying jobs in installing, servicing, building and designing their automation job replacements. Meaning that workers would move up not down the job/wage ladder. However, this appears now to be absolute incorrect, and workers who have and will lose their jobs will go down the job/wage ladder. Automation and computerization was supposed to free us all to get much better jobs, and to state otherwise would label you a Luddite. Throughout history technological advancements have always resulted an expanded and improved job market with a higher standard of living for all. This column seems to state that this is no longer true. Well, now what?
8
I appreciate the depth of Mr. Edsall's analysis, but somehow, in reading his columns and the accompanying, there is always this sense that Trump voters who voted against their own interests are the true and only victims of their own poor choices. There are a lot of other people in the country and in the world also have to live with the consequences of Trump voters' choices, including the big corporate tax cut that apparently stimulated a faster move toward automation.
The folks got what they voted for, which is sort of how democracy works. They certainly shouted down everybody who urged them to vote otherwise. But somehow, their misfortune resonates just a little louder than everybody else's.
14
Marty Nemko:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-life/201811/what-will-happen-the-bottom-half
Predictions vary as to the percent of jobs that will be lost to automation, offshoring, and gigging, but it’s likely to be between 20 and 60 percent within the next decade or two. The consensus is that much of the remaining decent-paying employment will demand ever more brainpower, technical chops, and communication skills. And with so many applicants available, employers will be able to insist also on people who are likable, reliable, enthusiastic, and healthy.
The Big Question is, what’s going to happen to the many millions of people who don’t get hired for those jobs? I fear that things will be different from previous technological waves in which new technologies, net, created more new jobs. There will likely be a net job loss, in part, because so much of the future economy will be based on digital products, which can be produced by the millions with a push of a button, and on automated services from customer service to legal research.
6
Trump promised these people he would bring back a world that is gone. They took the bait and now we're stuck with a president who's destroying our economy, our democratic institutions and our standing in the world. In 1999 I attended the presentation of an academic paper about the future ramifications of digital technology. The paper essentially said: if you're doing a simple repetitive job that requires little abstract thinking, you better find something else to do. Folks, we're here.
12
This story seems a bit too perfect to me. Has someone actually correlated these different factors? And established accusations as well as correlation? It seems a bit too neat.
1
the new economics of jobs predicts that job-based economies are disappearing. we will need an alternative means of distributing wealth so that markets can flourish and economies can carry on. Experiments are being fielded around the world to test whether distributing allotted payments to people would work to stimulate productive economies. some countries see the est subjects squandering the resources, while ther laces they use it to get aheas. Lee Mobley, Health Economist and Spatial Scentist, Atlanta
1
Terrific article. Thanks for publishing it. This is why I subscribe to the NYT.
5
Train robots to become unemployed . Or fight in overseas wars they cannot win.
Unemployed humans need a government job . Or take over the government .
5
Politics of rapid change will be interesting, and totally different from the White House of today.
2
There is an alternative way. You can see it in Canada if you care to look. The political system would never have produced or supported a Trump. The health system works very smoothly. You do not see Canada having regular massacres in churches and schools. Canadians are civil and polite. The system has built in support systems that pretty much work. Education is valued. To date, lies are out of favor and truth is valued. Disgusting, isn't it?
Supporting all this, Canada has a lot of wild land, space and resources. It has few billionaires. That helps.
The US of today has competition and pressure on all fronts and a decreasingly democratic
system today that currently values competition over cooperation, rich over poor, power over egalitarianism, white over non-white, money and guns over all.
Why is there surprise at the mess it has produced?
17
This is why Trump voters need someone to blame...immigrants, globalization, etc, not their own lack of education/training.
They used to be able to work at a job for decades and get a pension with their high school education. No longer.
3
Working class black and Hispanic and Asian citizens are also equally displaced, with men being more than women . If Edsall's studies do not see this in other racial groups, then something is wrong because they are in the same occupations.
This displacement of working class people of all races is precisely why Pelosi's statements that a 'wall to fend off illegal immigrants is immoral" is not correct.
It is Pelosi's lack of empathy for the plight of these working class American citizens with the obvious further competition from illegal immigrants for scarcer jobs that is actually the immoral position.
5
@Dan I don't think it is wise for the US to keep allowing unskilled/uneducated immigrants into the US.
4
Robots are good news for everyone. No need to portray them as bad news for Trump voters simply because you dislike Trump.
This is a moment in human history when we need to be asking the fundamental question: what is the economy for? Do we control it, or does it control us? Does it serve us, or do we serve it? A system that produces trillions of dollars in goods and services while leaving a vast proportion of its people impoverished and insecure is, by definition, unjust. A system that leaves its people drugging themselves with alcohol and opioids is alienating and dehumanizing. A system that poisons the air they breathe and the water they drink values profit over life itself. These are choices we have made, and we can unmake them. We can create a just and humane economy. We have the numbers. We just need to generate the will.
18
In the aggregate, individual productivity is very very high. In isolation (you or me) it varies wildly and will do so as computers (AI) take over more and more chores. My local Home Depot just eliminated all staffed checkout stations except for the one serving contractors and others buying by the cartload. One clerk serves maybe a half-dozen checkout stands.
My answer? Tax the automation as you would tax an employee. Pay the robot a salary (minimum wage? something more realistic?) and collect payroll taxes on that salary. Then tax the owner on the increased profit he makes paying the reduced machine-earned salary.
Use the taxes to fund Universal Basic Income (UBI) for everybody. Maybe that's enough so you don't have to work at all, or it's enough of a cushion that you can afford to gig your way through jobs of interest, or you have a skill not adequately automated and you can rake in the big bucks like some people still make today.
8
A bright spot in labor and new technology is energy, which is the one area where advanced technology creates more jobs, not fewer.
A study in Germany showed that wind farms required five times more labor than nuclear plans whose electricity had been displaced. One nuclear plan is run by a handful or people while the same amount of energy requires 300 wind turbines. However the overall cost for clean renewable energy is now less than nuclear but a much bigger % goes to labor instead of to equipment, uranium mining, or storage or waste.
Modern coal is also very low in labor cost for mining with huge mountaintop removal equipment and coal plants are similar to nuclear with a few people controlling automated equipment. Yet recently just the cost for coal mines to provide fuel for existing coal power plants is more expensive than building new wind farms to make the same amount of electricity less expensively.
https://www.wvlt.tv/content/news/Study-Keeping-coal-mines-running-is-more-expensive-than-building-wind-farms-500779101.html
As with nuclear electricity that is more expensive than wind electricity, more expensive electricity from coal needs far fewer workers than wind. Much bigger % of cost for generating wind electricity goes to labor.
This is ONE MORE reason to replace the disease causing dirty fossil fuel economy with clean renewables as soon as possible.
12
When GM went broke a few years ago, the 56 billion tax payer dollars should have gone to making sure the company went to the workers instead of to various hedge funds, investors etc. Then GM would not be outsourcing today so soon after they were rescued. Why should workers care about robots if they own them and what they produce? Democrats, you like to whine about the Repubs, but this bailout was done on your watch. Get a spine and start standing up for the little guy - and we’ll all be ok.
8
“In England, workers turned sharply to the left while here they have moved sharply to the right.”
I would guess that one reason is that in America, for workers in the Trump Belt, owning a gun takes priority over all other “rights.” When workers are focused on how they must protect themselves from their neighbors (or strangers), it is unlikely that they will see their neighbors (or strangers) as having a common interest that they should join in together. There has never been a serious leftist movement in America because Americans see themselves embattled not only against the world but against the people on the next block.
9
I remember Robert Reich predicting all of this in the 90's, the automation, the pressure on non-college workers, the need for retraining, everything.
10
The point is that Trump--and the Democrats, and ALL politicians--ignore how automation will impact the workforce.
Low wage jobs, such as those in retail, drivers, check-out people, etc., will be be eliminated.
AI automation, however, will also impact high level professional jobs, such as drawing up basic law contracts, and even some medical procedures.
I don't advocate trying to save these jobs--it's like saying we need still need phone operators or elevator operators: it's the march of technology that ads little benefit--but what happens when the shift happens?
Both parties need to address this, and what happens to their respective voters, such as how will they help displaced working poor?
6
Our company is working with machine learning technologies. I’m firmly convinced that society is completely unprepared for the likely impact of these technologies over the next decade or two.
11
@Eric MillerSome of the academic surveys I have read here in the UK support this. I come from a mining family whose jobs were lost in the Thatcher era. Trump is trying to derregulate ans subsidise coal so that his rich friends can make more money. Any jobs that come out of his actions will be low paid and more dangerous. Trump cares about himself his business and his family all who are using the office of president to get richer.
3
We could always just EMP the world and start over again technologically. Anyone know how to build a steam engine?
2
AI as assisted intelligence can only be useful if the workers who use it are educated themselves. Elon Musk discovered that to roll out his Tesla, he needed fewer robots and more capable line workers. That isn't going to happen in every industry but it does suggest we aren't about to jettison all workers. We do need to anticipate where we will need workers and make sure the education they will need is both available and affordable.
6
We who follow these trends in technology and workforce deployment (or retirement) know that there's a huge deficit among our elected officials. Their knowledge of these developments may not be as empty as I suspect, but they are studiously ignoring the immediate and predictable future effects. That means that the "most technically advanced nation in the world," while it emphasizes STEM education and bemoans the loss of its own leadership, has no policy agenda under focused discussion. Whether it's tax giveaways, incentives to business, or anti-labor practices, politicians routinely vote against ALL of our interests in governing. The likely outcome is under-employment, failure to adequately nurture human resources, and a nation further committed to consumption (even as workers' ability to consume is degraded).
6
We have a government that had been captured by a small number of mostly fairly old billionaires who really don’t care about anything other than feeding their egos though endlessly conniving to increase their already unimaginable wealth. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
4
The implications of an increasingly automated world raise some really difficult questions that few really want to answer: e.g. what do we do with those who have been deskilled or unemployed because of technology?
Retrain is a common refrain but retrain for what? How many jobs are there (or will there be) that both pay well and are the kind that somebody displaced by automation can realistically retrain for?
4
Indeed AI and Robots are taking over many tasks at companies including in manufacturing; but using impact of automation to undermine other factors such as moving out of production to cheaper labor markets is problematic. The problem is that in order to determine how much of the impact on improving productivity is because of AI driven automation and how much is because of other reasons we need transparency in cost accounting data, and there is total lack of transparency. For example, we do not know what are the input cost inputs go into producing I-phone or a drug with accuracy. If labor costs are crumbs then why move to cheap labor markets? All we know is that profit margins are huge. Are margins all because of increased productivity due to AI or cheaper labor markets.
1
The traditional line of work for blue collar labor has been decimated
If you are looking for a rational reason for what seems like political irrationality, then here's your answer.
If we don't thourolly engage in job training that returns dignity to people who don't have the access to the kind of higher education and the inheritance and opportunity that has been given to us, we foment exactly the kind of strife we fear.
Furthermore, we need to put our money where our mouth is. You and I, the rich, need to pay more in taxes. We owe our democracy money. We owe the country our resources and our love. We need to pay more.
Louie
2
Aside from climate change, this is the most important topic going right now...
How does a society built on jobs continue when there literally are no more jobs?
Inside 50 years... it's coming. Automation will be able to do every single human task... all the tech experts agree...
Very glad to see this article. The politician that says they can fix unemployment is lying. The math is irreversible.
We're going to have to look at life after jobs, and soon... or it's going to be food lines, riots, and mass crime... essentially the complete breakdown of society as we know it.
Right now the whole thing feels like a game of musical chairs, where every capitalist is just trying to be the last one with a chair when the music stops. They know it's coming, too...
This isn't tin-foil conspiracy stuff... it's fundamental math.
3
Since we’re not willing to do anything about climate change, Mother Earth will take care of problem for us.
2
History is replete with examples of regions left behind by monumental technology changes. Unfortunately the leadership in the US in many of the most susceptible areas have not educated, communicated or prepared their citizens for the coming changes simply because it has not been in those elites economic benefit. From Appalachia to the Midwest, rural south to upper interior, conservatives have failed. Now the only real opportunity for these areas depends on the limit of resources or cost of living to become so untenable such as to drive younger, well prepared technology workers and entrepreneurs to want to move into the few urban centers, the outcome of which will create “reservations” for those unwilling to fit in with the more diverse nation we will become.
1
Predictions vary as to the percent of jobs that will be lost to automation, offshoring, and gigging, but it’s likely to be between 20 and 60 percent within the next decade or two. The consensus is that much of the remaining decent-paying employment will demand ever more brainpower, technical chops, and communication skills. And with so many applicants available, employers will be able to insist also on people who are likable, reliable, enthusiastic, and healthy.
The Big Question is, what’s going to happen to the many millions of people who don’t get hired for those jobs? I fear that things will be different from previous technological waves in which new technologies, net, created more new jobs. There will likely be a net job loss, in part, because so much of the future economy will be based on digital products, which can be produced by the millions with a push of a button, and on automated services from customer service to legal research.
4
What I'd like to see is automation and AI applied to politics. The government would be a machine and voters would vote quarterly to turn a big dial.
Turning to the right would create legislation that benefits corporations, while turning to the left would benefit the People.
We need to take politics and governance out of the hands of politicians and give it to a machine that cannot be bought.
3
Considering that the people who are most affected by this keep voting Republican, how will letting them vote for right-wing policies via machine change anything?
1
Look they don’t believe Wall Street, big business and robots did it. They cling to the belief that the Mexicans did. There are jobs available, if they want to work in agriculture or in nursing homes for example, but that may be hard to accept, at least initially.
4
"Per capita retail sales, a measure of economic vitality, were $7,550 last year in the county, according to the census, compared with $13,443 nationally."
And therein lies a problem that isn't discussed nearly enough. What happens to consumption when work and wages decline?
There's a story, possibly apocryphal, that Henry Ford was showing Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers some new machines and asked Reuther what was going to happen to his members when their jobs were mechanized. Reuther is supposed to have asked Ford who would buy the cars his machines produced.
1
The answer to that is simple. Huge swaths of our nation will fall into even greater economic disadvantage. The borders will be different but not unlike the 1850s-1880s.
4
We are an outlier among advanced western democracies with our small government, free market concept of what it means to be a nation.
With Milton Friedman, we accept that the only obligation of management is 'to enhance shareholder value'.
With our mindset, the gains from AI will accrue to capital to a greater degree here than social democracies. AI is neither a force for good or bad in and of itself. It depends on how we employ AI and how we distribute its costs and benefits. I expect we will opt to distribute AI benefits to the very wealthiest few and the costs and misery to the greatest number possible. Free market capitalism demands it.
6
I would disagree with you that AI will accrue more in US than social (European style) democracies. In fact, I believe Europeans are better prepared than we to accept the potential positive outcomes AI can offer.
4
This trend is likely to lead to very highly automated robot production, thus lower costs, which will accelerate the layoffs of human production workers. Then will surely come the neo-luddites and political unrest. Unless other work can be found (infrastructure and renewable energy, for example) and workers induced to retrain and also made more willing to move to where the new jobs are, there will simply be an ever-growing population of angry, frustrated, idle people who may well revolt violently.
6
If we had a political class that was interested in the general welfare of our people, they would have devised ways of softening the pain and dislocation caused by globalization. Instead they chose to pander to the investor class, the voters with extra money to invest. A formula for partially offsetting the wage differences in the US and Mexico, for example, might have slowed the rush among American manufacturers to move factories and jobs to Mexico to take advantage of the very low wages there. And generous funding for re-training displaced workers might have gone a long way to give those workers hope. The very same things could and should be done to ease the transition to AI. A return to progressive taxation would help pay for it, a small price to pay to give people hope and preserve the peace.
In the long term however, the solution is the liberation of women to make their own life choices, and free birth control for anyone who wants it. As others have noted, society cannot sustain itself for long if large numbers of people can't find work that pays a living wage, and the numbers of such people is steadily growing.
7
Interesting that the article does not offer any cost analysis
Robots are a capital expense, the cost of which falls with interest rates. That is controlled by the Fed.
Workers are not. Their wages are set by supply and demand. If supply is global (immigration, outsourcing) but demand is domestic, wage cost decreases. If not, wage
cost increase.
Those are the factors that set the US equilibrium between robots and people
The article would have been a lot clearer had it included a cost analysis.
3
I have read that the proponents of robots say that they will free humans from menial labor so that humans can pursue more creative pursuits, like writing, shape-note singing, painting, and pottery among other things. Cheers!
5
@Southern Boy - Or, more precisely, free them from menial labor to obtain the education and skills required to do non-menial work. You know... higher paying jobs in professional services, healthcare, technology, etc. Cheers!
2
@Southern Boy
It's true... for about 20% of the population.
3
When economists say something is going to "help" the economy and increase wages or living standards such as for robotics, offshoring jobs, and importing massive illegal labor, they mean for people like them, people they know, or at best in aggregate. They do not mean the bottom two quintiles, we working class are loathsome deplorable racists.
5
One idea for "sharing the wealth" is clearly understood by corporate executives but is not implemented widely by them regarding workers below the executive level, i.e., making company stock part of employee compensation, not only in 401(k) and other pension programs but in standard compensation packages. In that way, employees will benefit from the increased productivity of the corporation through ownership of what, over time, will be increasing share prices from capital gains, thereby developing wealth, and, in the meantime, gaining added income from dividends. This could be akin to employers in past years providing healthcare to their employees in lieu of higher wages. It reduces current employer costs while providing employees with something that is likely to increase in value over time and which can produce extra income along the way.
Whether this or some other solution(s) is/are forthcoming, it is clear that we need to think outside the box in order to deal with the new realities with which technological and social changes are confronting us. And that "outside the box" thinking is nurtured best by an educational system that encourages the development of a broad range of knowledge in addition to high levels of skill development, while also identifying and encouraging brilliance where it is seen to emerge.
3
Just about every public firm has low cost ways for employees to buy stock, not including use in 401k and pension plans. Most advisors caution employees about having paycheck and anything higher than 5-10% of portfolio tied to same firm.
1
No, thanks. I don't want to put my retirement money in company stock.
1
On HBO is Attack of the real killer robots there are some low level jobs that can be replaced cost effectively for a company in 6 months time for 30k. Dominos is looking into a robot truck that makes the pizza on the way to your house,pickup at the curb.
1
The official numbers for the loss of jobs and the unemployment rate are even worse if you consider the 2 million people locked up behind bars in our nation’s prisons and jails.
4
Other than our destructive partisan division, this is IMHO the number one problem we face and will face. Extrapolate this to the future and you either have masters and slaves or a world with a different paradigm. I can't imagine what it will be. It seems we should address it. Thomas Pickety has outlined consequences of income inequality based on similar data (well, I think, didn't read the book only summaries).
But the question is: Who should address this, who should take the lead? The Government as democratic leader is being destroyed by the foxes guarding he henhouse, and business (pursuing profit as they should) are the foxes and academia is called "elites" and are as trusted as climatologists, (because of the foxes). So if we all here agreed, hmmm, who do you call?
1
@William Trainor
:...who do you call?"
Indian mystics
1
Sometimes, a writer just blows it in their effort to make a point, and Mr. Edsall did this time. His example of Ontonagon County, Michigan, is factually correct, but the town's problems have nothing to do with the editorial's subject. The county population peaked at 12,428 in the 1920 census, and except for a couple periods, has fallen in every decade since. The county's biggest business, a cardboard box factory, closed in 2010, due to bankruptcy, not automation. A little research could certainly have come up with a more appropriate example to make the point.
4
Oh, da UP, eh? I know a little sometin 'bout dat.
Ontonagon county and its neighbors were (sorry, usedtawas) home to serious industry, copper, paper and even a little ship building. Just south, Gogebic county was home to iron mining. East in Houghton and Keweenaw counties, more copper. It's all gone now. Many of the locals stayed, everyone else fled with the jobs. That's whachucall brain drain. Any wonder why the trumpster is so popular in those counties? Now, the only towns doing anything sorta, kinda, well are those with colleges, mainly Houghton with Michigan Tech and Marquette with Northern Michigan. They don't swing quite so red. Interesting tidbit, that; a nanocosm in a microcosm on a pimple on the rump of a giant 30-point buck.
Depressing is what it is. The older folks lament the loss of prestige, good paying jobs, even after decades, and now the flight if their children and grandchildren. Anyone with a modicum of ambition and ability, regardless of a personal desire to stay, leave. Walmart wiped out most of the mom-and-pops, now Myers is moving in to wipe out the local grocers. The UPS guys stay pretty busy, though, delivering Amazon packages. But that's bound to change - I have to believe UPS and its ilk are heavily invested in development of automated vehicles.
This is the story of America, the rise of metropolitan areas and the decay of the rural lifestyle. The end of purpose for a ton of folks, unimaginable wealth for a handful. It's gonna get worse.
8
@Socrates
1) Put labor on the same level and footing as capital. (Germany has done that to a certain extent.)
2) Progressively tax the wealthy and corporations at the same rates as the country did right after WW2. Let them scream bloody murder. Maybe they'll relocate to Russia.
3) Tax estates over $5 Million at 75%.
8
Unionize service industry jobs and teaching so they pay well..
5
If Mr. Edsall wants to keep the public informed as to the state of the economic literature on productivity enhancing automation, perhaps he should also include the work of Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute.
Houseman and her coauthors have shown that most of the evidence in the productivity numbers is almost exclusively confined to one NAICS code (computer and semiconductor industries). And this isn't because of robots. As the study's abstract states:
"Productivity growth in these industries, in turn, largely reflects product and process improvements from research and development, not automation. Although computer-related industries have driven growth in the manufacturing sector, production has shifted to Asia, and the U.S. trade deficit in these products has soared since the 1990s. The outsized effect computer-related industries have on manufacturing statistics also may distort economic relationships in the data and result in perverse research findings."
We didn't automate jobs away. We outsourced them poorer countries with even worse labor protections. We must diagnose the problem properly in order to devise proper solutions.
https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/209/
3
@GT
It's both. Automation and outsourcing jobs. It's both. We all know that.
The point here is that we gave corporations a big giant tax break by allowing them to deduct, not depreciate over time as was the usual case with capital investments in machinery, but to deduct in entirety just this sort of robotic equipment that does nothing but eliminate whatever jobs we happen to have left in this country. The tax break that was to spur these businesses to 'create' jobs did nothing but allow them to write off equipment immediately that put more people out of work. Oh, but I'm sure shareholder value and executive pay has been maximized in this process.
As soon as you read one study that blames our decline on outsourcing, another will show up blaming automation. Don't be fooled. It's both.
7
The accelerated depreciation was to increase jobs, high paying jobs, in the firms that make the robots, not in the firms that use the robots.
3
I appreciate your work and citations to academics. I think that a difference between the disruptions of workers’ lives during the industrial capitalist period and our own time is that laborers had been valued, at least when enslaved. Now there is no pretense and no concern to have those displaced by technological disruption play a further economic role, except as consumers and voters. The pace of the disruptions increases much faster than labor’s ability to reproduce itself and faster than society’s capacity to mediate the constant disruptions. The mobility of finance capital to travel and hide grows while workers find borders closing to them and their every thought pixilated, recorded and sold. These are policy choices that we can and must reverse.
5
I wonder how workers would react if their wages were replaced by pensions providing the same income. I'm all for automation -- the more the merrier -- but it has to be accompanied by compensation to those displaced by it. It's impossible to know for sure, but I would think that most workers would be very happy with that bargain. And automation would proceed far more rapidly and effectively if the workers displaced by it welcomed it because they would not lose economically. In fact, if they were able to find other sources of income without sacrificing the pension, they'd come out ahead.
5
@Paul Abrahams
" but it has to be accompanied by compensation to those displaced by it. It's impossible to know for sure, but I would think that most workers would be very happy with that bargain."
The question arises: How long would the bargain sustain?...5yrs,...10yrs?
Companies would wriggle out of the deal!
It seems that we lack robots that can serve as white collar criminals, and perhaps a variety that can be exclusive members of a country club of robots, lying on a work bench being oiled down by imported foreign models. After 35 years as a physician, I am afraid I will be replaced by Alexa. And what of the safety net, when the workforce is automated?
1
It is the notion that individual effort for the common good will bring personal benefit that forms and then binds societies together.
This fundamental notion is so very clear when our survival is on the line.
We should remember it today as we confront the existential threat of human-induced climate change presents to our civilisation and species.
Jobs represent the primary mechanism by which an individual makes their economic contribution to society and gains the benefits they need in order to support themselves and their dependent others and to hopefully fulfil at least some of their quality of life aspirations.
Business leaders advocating automation through artificial intelligence and robotics must face the harsh reality that workers without jobs generate far less market demand and therefore there will be less aggregate demand for products and services.
Just because we could does not mean we should.
The issues are complex and require careful and intelligent analysis and consideration.
This drives the need for a political system that is inclusive and representative of all stakeholders and which operates with a level of intellectual rigour, respect for the facts and earnest commitment to the common good completely absent from the current swamp.
Big money has corrupted politics.
It needs to be legislated out of its dominant position.
2
@Richard Mitchell-Lowe
Public control of the means of production is the simple, direct, solution.
1
"The demographic group most hindered by the rise of automation, Sachs wrote, “has been the proverbial white male with less than a college degree and living in rural and semirural areas.”
I live among the exact people this article is talking about, and that is why I am always ranting in these comment columns. I am pretty old and I have watched the population go from industrious people making it ok, to people whose homes are falling apart, who can't afford to go to the doctor, whose lives are ruined by rampant drug abuse, and who are getting old in complete squalid poverty. And it is ALL about JOBS. The jobs are GONE. It feels like our own country declared war on its own people.
12
As a former technology stock analyst, I certainly understand the drivers of automation. But I believe that there are two other significant contributors to what is likely to be an unsustainable economy: demographics and the related issue of bizarre investing. The prospect of a 15-25 year retirement after age 65 is still relatively new, and coupled with the size of the boomer cohort creates a monumental economic distortion. Consequently, we have a surplus of savings and enormous capital, which is hard-pressed to find suitable investment opportunities in an increasingly services-oriented economy (which has inherently lower capital needs than manufacturing). When this gets coupled with the bizarre investing driven by slice-of-the-action agent managers (hedge funds, private equity, etc), the result is corporate "investing" that is a sham - the S&P 500 has spent 104% of its earnings over the past 11 years on dividends and share buybacks. The private sector has been eviscerated by those trusted with its stewardship; the public sector has been taken over by a money-based coup and additionally finds itself drowned by debt and unfunded pension liabilities. The Trump voters are, I'm afraid, merely the canaries in the mineshaft.
4
This is one of the best summations of our modern age I have read. It shows the unpleasant future where capitalism, technology and our current politics is taking us. And we continue to accelerate in the wrong direction on just about every front.
3
It's not just low skilled workers. A major electrical contractor recently received a contract to design and build the electrical system for a major hotel in the Los Angeles area. They budgeted 2 man-years (4,160 man-hours) for electrical engineering. They then decided to try out a new AI system to perform this task. The AI system brought the job down to 13 hours of mostly data entry. That's a 320:1 or a 99.7% reduction. Yesterday a friend of mine was speaking with his lawyer and he mentioned rule 404, an environmental rule. The lawyer asked, "What's rule 404?". Alexa overheard this and answered completely, with citations. This is happening faster and faster. What will it be next year? We're headed toward a reckoning sooner than we think.
6
“ ...Frey and Osborne write that high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder, taking on jobs traditionally performed by low-skilled workers, pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some extent, even out of the labor force.”
The last thing our country needs is more low and unskilled workers from Mexico and Central America. In Mexico, the average adult from a rural area has only a 6th grade education. This is more education than the average person in Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. According to an Inter-American Dialogue paper titled "Educational Challenges in Honduras and Consequences for Human Capital and Development",
the average Honduran aged 15 and above, has had only 4 years of education. The illiteracy level in Honduras is exceeded, in Central America, only by the levels in Guatemala and El Salvador.
The U.S. could try to help to help these Central American countries by offering temporary food aid, counseling on family planning, and advice on agriculture and education. What we cannot do is absorb their excess populations.
4
Increasing automation of the kind described here gives more credence to the concept of Universal Basic Income. This idea in America goes back to Thomas Paine. Even Nixon initially supported it. Robot technology has only gotten smarter since then, and will continue to do so. What do we expect those six workers who lose their jobs to automation to do? Universal Basic Income is an approach to the answer.
4
Is it just a coincidence that many of these same states (in the South and Midwest) that weakened the influence of organized labor via right-to-work laws etc. over the past 30+ years are now the same states where there are "far higher ratios of robots to population than other regions of the United States"?
10
Up until relatively recently, mechanization opened up new occupations for displaced workers. We are now at a point where viable jobs for white and blue collar workers will decline exponentially as robots and AI do more and more work. People think it's only blue collar people who get displaced. AI already writes many of the AP articles we read online. Medical technicians will be replaced by computers that can read 500 x-rays and give an extremely accurate diagnosis.
Capitalism in and of itself is not destructive. It's the slavish devotion the the shareholder that is driving the engine of chronic low and underemployment. 275 million people should be underemployed or unemployed so 10 million can clean up on the stock market. This is what's killing employment more than anything. An employee used to be an important component of the labor contract. Now human capital is a drain on profit margin.
4
"In England, workers turned sharply to the left while here they have moved sharply to the right."
Yet it remains to be seen what would (will?) happen when workers are given an actual choice between a true left-wing candidate and Donald Trump. Swinging right when your other choice is a devout centrist is not such a surprise. What might surprise the pundit class is how much support a left-wing candidate just might enjoy even from the white working class.
4
As the onslaught of AI and automation causes productivity increases, wage drops, and massive layoffs, the talk of minimal basic income per citizen will likely get louder. Assuming large businesses will reap the financial rewards of automation, it's only fair to require them to make additional contributions to the social infrastructure (i.e. Universal Basic Income, universal health care). That said, I think it's absolutely critical US maintains the lead in technological innovations, so our businesses, at a minimum, will keep bring back the dough. If our companies lose the technological edge, the future will look bleak, indeed.
5
@Jim: Yes, I completely agree with your concise and well-stated comment. That is exactly what must happen (regarding contributions to the social infrastructure). We also must maintain the lead in technological innovations.
3
Beyond machining, welding, and riveting on the shop floor, consider this: the military's F-4 fighter of the 1960's derived >90% of its capabilities from hardware; today's F-35 derives >90% of its capabilities from hardware.
To paraphrase Jake Guzik, "A smart tech with a computer can fix more airplanes than ten men with wrenches."
1
Choice of Robot working in US factory that requires an army of workers making deliveries, keeping infrastructure working (utilities, waste, data circuits, etc), and managers earning money that trickles into cash at stores, rents, restaurants, etc.
Or, ship the factory to other countries where labor is dirt cheap and infrastructure support benefits other nations.
Hmm, seems like a dilemma of learning new trades to keep manufacture at home or be unemployed because it's cheaper in manufacture in Asia.
1
I remember my first brush with automation visiting a factory in Massachusetts, where electronics were assembled. The factory manager proudly showed our group a new machine that stitched components, fed on belts like machine gun rounds, onto a prefab circuit board and then ran those boards through a solder bath that licked a wave of solder just high enough to solder the components on the underside of the board with out damaging the board or exposing workers to the lead. This was right next to long tables where the same boards were being assembled by hand and individual components soldered by hand. That process employed twenty workers. The assembly machine, one. The assembly line worker has gone the way of the wood carver. Why bother with sentient beings if you can write a program and feed it to a line of machines that can work 24-7-365. Don't need that level of production...? Turn it off. No unemployment insurance, benefits or bad press to worry about. You can't blame the American worker for turning to the right. Even though affirmative action was the right thing to do (for a host of reasons) the fact is it boxed out white American males from positions they wanted and were qualified for. Yes, they have been cutting off their nose to spite their face for a few decades now but resentment is a hard thing to overcome when the future looks as pointless as it does. Not only is your own life screwed, your children's lives appear to be setting up to be WORSE.
2
Just a matter of time before Trump blames this on 'Chuck and Nancy', the democrats, Hillary, immigrants, or Michael Cohen.
I can foresee the thought evolving in Trump and Mitch McConnell's heads; ' How can we get these damn robots to vote republican'? Problem is, they don't have heads to put MAGA beanies on. On the other hand, robots, like Trump supporters, can certainly be trained to appear enthusiastic at Trump rallies.
6
Guaranteed Basic Income
aka
Social Security For All
We have seen historic examples where communism sucks the life out of societies by eliminating incentives.
So how do we spread the wealth of automation among the people it is meant to serve, while maintaining economic incentive for work, achievement and invention?
Many economists suggest a Guaranteed Basic Income, where everybody gets a monthly payment which is guaranteed for all and is not means tested; The payment remains the same no matter how much one earns.
Then all additional income earned above the Guaranteed Basic Income is taxed at progressive rates, with steep increases as one's earnings rise.
Thought the fortunate would have to pay more than they do now, We'd still have millionaires and billionaires, yachts and mansions. But we'd also largely eliminate poverty.
This is the only solution I've read that addresses the rise in robots.
6
My ancestors were pushed out of Moravia by the industrialization of agriculture in the mid-1800’s. Same story then as now. Technology tips the scales in favor of capital over labor.
Fortunately for my family, Lincoln had just signed the Homestead Act and they came to America where they thrived.
We can’t be Luddites and block technological progress. But we need to find a way that all Americans can access the education to be able to make a living. For those who can’t or won’t earn a decent living, we need a robust social safety net and an immigration policy that controls access to our bounty in a way that is just.
Are we gonna do that? Nah!
3
In other words, until it happens to the middle class, it doesn’t matter.
8
Can we now abandon the myth that companies are “ job creators”? They’re not. No CEO gets up in the morning and says “I have to create some jobs”. CEOs get up every morning saying “I have to grow profits”. What is one of the tools a CEO uses to increase profits? Getting rid of workers. Workers are expenses, they hurt the bottom line. CEOs always want to reduce jobs - through automation or through consolidation and layoffs. Cutting employees grows profits, earns bonuses and sends share prices higher. So let’s just stop worshipping at the “job creator” altar. It’s a myth.
14
Robots are the result of the work of the devil and they must be stopped or it is the end of humanity as we know it.
As soon as some mad scientist endows a robot with a wit of artificial intelligence and they are able to replicate themselves, it's doomday for people ... even those who created the intelligent robots.
Pray all who fear for the survival of humans.
1
PT Barnum explained with his gut what Edsall has outlined scholarly with his brain.
The GOP knows that "a sucker is born every minute".
Ever since Lincoln they have frightened working class voters into voting against their economic interests. The Civil War was perhaps the best example of all. A rich man's war and a poor man's fight. Nothing has changed.
This in spite of journalists like Ida Tarbell in her 1904 "History of the Standard Oil Company" on cruelty of unrestrained monopoly power and Edsall et al clearly and simply proving how workers lose with the GOP.
This is not to mention that when Trump admits that he thinks with his gut, he is trying to advise that he has manure for brains. Still the workers believe.
The GOP is, if anything, honest. For 30 years they have promised workers a "trickle" and that is exactly what has been delivered.
Leaders with self proclaimed manure for brains and an economic trickle seems to satisfy for half our population.
6
The paucity of skilled workers needed causing jobs lost along with the drastic reduction in corporate taxes spells disaster for the country. There is no way the tax cut from 35% down to 21% for corporate America was a good thing for anybody else but the big boys.
When one visualizes the loss of 14% in taxes from every business in the land, along with the loopholes left in place, the overseas sheltering of profits left in place, our treasury's coffers will dry up quickly. It is estimated that latter 2019 into 2020 will show the writing on the wall. Then, it will be up to the Dems to fix it, again.
5
I never use self checkout. People need jobs!
149
@Carmen
Do you also wait to pay in the cash toll lanes so those toll collectors can continue to take cash and sit in an exhaust-filled prison cell their entire workday ?
I prefer EZ pass.
Sometimes, automation and technology is a pleasure.
There will be other jobs created from new technologies, but they generally require some initiative and education and perhaps public assistance to make it happen.
Self-checkout is also a pleasure.
Sorry, that's progress.
28
Yes, people need jobs. However, I would argue that checkout clerks are not the jobs people need.
27
@Gusting Your statement is just insensitive and irritating. In some communities a job is a rare thing. Check out clerks are high up on the social scale in those communities. You are right, they are under employed. Also desperate. They are among the many casualties of globalization and computerization and robotization and just plain corporate greed.
22
Capitalism is like fire. Fire can be an extremely useful tool, which in primitive times, thousands of years ago, allowed the caveman to cook food and keep his shelter warm. In modern times, fire is important in manufacturing, industries like steel have to melt metal etc. But as good a thing as fire can be, it can also destroy, by burning down your house, if not properly controlled on your stovetop. The problem with the Republican/Conservative view of capitalism today is that they are totally against any financial regulations, no matter how small. They want a Darwinism type of economic system, survival of the fittest, the weak just die off, no social safety net for the poor, unemployed, elderly, retired or middle class (the vast majority of people). The GOP claims there is no money for infrastructure spending to repair and maintain or roads, bridges and tunnels and power grids, etc, but they just passed a $1.5 Trillion dollar tax cut where 80% of the benefits go to corporations and the richest 1%. Capitalism as a socio-economic system would work much better if it is reasonably regulated and controlled, a more fair and progressive tax system, laws that protect consumers, a strong labor/union movement to counter management and the owners of capital. Forced arbitration clauses, upheld by courts, is the newest thing that is stacking the deck against average people and favors corporations and the rich. Unrestrained capitalism, like uncontrolled fire, is burning everything down now.
12
The Democrats haven't realized the problem of job stability yet or they like the Republicans don't have any good ideas. But when robots take over an industry the only costs will be maintenance of robots, management of the maintenance staff and cost of raw materials, prices should come down. The activists investors will probably not allow this.
Perhaps the idea of half of the board of a company should be from the worker staff will bring the activist investors to heel.
1
takeaways:
should Trump run again in 2020, he should sell his supporters not MAGA caps but red clogs (made in China or Honduras) to throw at the robots forcing them out of a job... meanwhile investing in Erik Prince's new anti-clog business, Pinkertonwater.
those in the vast middle of the country, in exurban and rural precincts, who are statistically older and whiter than average, and the younger people there, especially the men who haven't been able to escape the dead end economy, have every right and reason to pack it in, become drug addicts, and die of hopelessness before they cost us too much money.
there are huge distressed real estate opportunities awaiting those with courage and perseverance who will one day be able to say, "I was 21 years old when I walked into the MidWest, and when I walked out 8 years later, by God, I was RICH."
3
This was entirely predictable by anyone who follows technology and economic trends. (Trump doesn't and likely paid ZERO attention to white, high school-educated blue collar workers until he started his campaign in 2015 and needed their votes).
The trend away from full employment with benefits and a pension to "contractors" with no benefits has been going on for over a decade - in some high-tech industries, for nearly two decades. Labor and benefits are one of the biggest costs for manufacturers and service industries. Anything they can do to automate processes and eliminate jobs, they will. (How long have we had automated voice-guided customer service systems?)
Those with higher education and those will higher-level technology skills (programming, process control and monitoring) will do better in the long run. Those whose sole talent is to provide repetitive physical labor will not.
What should be considered is the declining birth rate among whites in general, which will act as a counter to unemployment due to automation. Eventually, fewer younger people from rural areas and small towns will be competing for fewer jobs. But those rural areas and small towns will age out and eventually empty out, like ghost towns of the old west.
6
@hdtvpete I started my own business in 1997 because I had been tired of being a freelance graphic designer for most of the 1990s. And I was in my late 30s then. The writing has been on the wall for a long, long time. So many factors have converged to make us a nation of unemployed, unemployable people with no benefits or other safety net. The fractures weren't noticeable or dangerous until Trump got elected. Now the finger pointing begins but, rest assured, neither party is going to do anything to jeopardized their place in the pecking order.
2
The entire point of developing automation to increasing levels of sophistication is to eliminate the need for mindless human labor altogether. This was never kept secret, as far as I’m aware, and it’s not exactly new.
How much sympathy can you really have for any group of individuals who repeatedly, and pathologically, vote against the very things which they should recognize as existential concerns?
Sooner or later, all of us reap what we sow.
7
The question is why these robots aren't being used in industries desperate for workers. Many places around the world use robots in dairy farms but in the US we have dairy farms complaining they can't find workers. The factories replacing workers are not those who rely on minimum wage foreign born workers but those workers who are expensive enough to warrant robot replacement. It seems the the best solution is to pressure industries to reverse this trend. Replace those jobs that are the lowest paying and hardest to fill while saving those jobs that skilled blue collar workers most need.
2
that sounds just like a Communistic state run, master planned economy... doesn't it? can't have the evil goverment getting into the weeds of sacrosanct private business, you know, telling entrepreneurs and managers how to run businesses - they might get too nosy and figure out our other supralegal schemes as well, then it's the gulag for us!
MAGA
2
The 2017 Trump tax cut not only boosted incentives for corporations to replace workers with robots,
I disagree with this analysis.
The greatest incentive to replace workers with robots was the ultra low interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve
As a company owner
a) Borrow $ 500 000 at 6 % to buy a robot
OR
b) Higher a worker for $ 60 000 a year (wages + benefits)
Econ 101
In case a) your cost is $ 30 000 interest per year, plus writing off the robot over 10 years, $ 50 000. Total annual cost $ 80 000
In case be, hiring a worker, your annual cost is $ 60 000
You will decide to hire a worker
Now now repeat this calculation with the 1 % interest rate the Fed offered in response to the housing bubble collapse
The annual cost of the robot falls to $ 55 000
The annual cost of the worker stays at $ 60 00
You will then decide to buy a robot.
============================
I pointed this out, 7 years ago, as a comment on a Krugman blog article in praise of low interest rates
11
Simple solution: universal minimum income.
More complicated solution: altering the bedrock tenets of capitalism - as capital (i.e. the means of production) displaces labor, labor gets an 'ownership' (for want of a better word) interest in capital. Example: if a robot or AI application displaces 3.3 workers (or 3.3 million), those displaced workers receive a percentage of the value added of said robot / AI.
Assuming that labor displacements due to automation will fortuitously be made up elsewhere, as the were in the past (not that those displacements weren't without pain and bloodshed), is a big gamble.
Similar to what securities dealers are required to say, "Past returns are no guaranty of future performance".
2
@ woof
So why has Germany, that as you say has way more robots than the US all these manufacturing jobs ?
4
@Mona, Germans value higher education, and for those not bound for university, skilled high-tech education. Germans have for years built very sophisticated machinery for automated process lines. I know, I used to clean one that packaged an artificial sweetener into boxes back in the mid-1970s when I had a summer job.
Also, unions sit at the same table as management in German companies and help to drive higher education and technical education as a counter to jobs lost to automation. We could do the same thing here, but it would require large investments from both corporations and federal/state governments in a cooperative fashion.
13
could it be German workers, who often benefit from vocational training and come in to jobs through formal apprenticeships, are not the same as standard issue American industrial workers, who are often uneducated and have not much more to offer than a pulse and a back that hasn't given out yet, and who stumbled into jobs through dumb luck or family connections?
4
@Mona
Read the long post by woof . Basically German Capitalists respect workers, American capitalists do not.
1
Highly educated economists don't see it. They talk of benefits to society as a whole and when that doesn't work, they fall back on "winners and losers." Republicans call these unfortunate people whiners and losers.
Why is it even necessary to point out that a machine that doing the work of 3 or 4 people and requiring (maybe) one high skilled operator is a job de-creator?
We need to divide up our resources. Half to higher education, to help people stay one step ahead of autiomation, and half to security, to control the unrest of so many idle workers.
4
Would have been nice to include data for Ontonagan and Alger counties for 2016 to compare to current data. Could be the 2018 data is better than 2016. Just saying it is bad in 2018 (which it is) doesn't tell us anything about whether Trump has helped or hurt. Seriously doubt it is much different but doesn't an editor look at this to verify that the data actually supports the arguments the author is making?
1
@Horace, unemployment nationally is historically low, and one could reasonably assume a rising tide lifts all boats. The unemployment rate in both counties is quite high and could reflect a lack of job opportunities (the Upper Peninsula has historically been focused on mining iron ore), particularly in manufacturing.
In some counties, like Jefferson County NY, the unemployment rate is skewed low by the presence of a large military base (Fort Drum) and all its civilian jobs. Take away the fort and the unemployment rate likely isn't much different than Ontonagan and Alger counties.
2
The sad thing is that I actually believe that Trump is so ignorant and devoid of curiosity (in addition to the laundry list of his other failings) that he believes tariffs, trade deals, and subsidies to dying industries like coal are the way to go.
Mind you, I don't think he cares but he does want to appear to be doing something.
This is a complex problem for sure and not a uniquely American problem.
It is sad to see that Trump offers solutions that will not work while also blaming minorities for the problem. His supporters have embraced him but many of them are the ones who will suffer the most as they fight against the solutions that would actually help them.
It is also interesting that the solution for saving our democracy from demagogues like Trump and saving workers is education.
We provide tax cuts for corporations to invest in more capital. And yet we saddle students with trillions in student debt. WOW.
257
@Al Miller Agreed, education - a proper education, not propaganda - can save our democracy. Most unfortunately, our young people are not getting that type of education.
18
"will almost never happen without forceful social policy and tax policy that spreads the gains and buffers the individual losses. Absent those policies (which the U.S. has little of in general, and even less so today than in earlier decades), losses will tend to be highly concentrated among displaced workers and in communities in which legacy employers are located."
This is what is so puzzling. The parenthetical phrase is evidence of voters voting against their own interests. The "forceful" policies that would buffer individual losses have a much greater chance of coming from left-leaning government. (Not guaranteed, but definitely more likely.) The right wing governments of recent decades have been the reason that there are fewer such policies. So displaced workers supporting trump/ the right wing is nonsensical. Of course, there are other reasons for that support, but it is still remarkable to so consistently vote against one's own well-being.
Robots are inevitable. Their purpose is to replace humans. Business works very hard at reducing costs and risks across the board. They will reduce labour costs as, if not more, aggressively, they will seek to reduce costs of copper, water, paper or grain. Those displaced or never hired will not have the skills to design robots, program robots, or insure robots, to name a few.
There is a lesson that the left has to relearn. They need to return to their roots in this area.
3
First it was Walmart capitalism, requiring manufacturers to move to low-wage regions like China, if they wanted distribution through big-box stores. Multitudes of small businesses went away so we could have cheap big-box lives.
Now we can have more of the same with machine-made products and increasingly, services. A few will get rich(er) from this, but there will continue to be a deepening of the "plantation economy," where the royal/upper economic class prospers as the rest struggle, and the royals keep the laws and enforcement slanted to their benefit.
Clearly the GOP has always been the party of the "royals," while casting themselves as loyal to the middle class. What a con job.
I wonder if those hallowed "middle Americans" will ever wake up to the reality of all this? I ain't holding my breath.
8
@MassBear
"First it was Walmart capitalism, requiring manufacturers to move to low-wage regions like China"
The irony is that China is outsourcing low skill labor jobs to places like Viet Nam, Bangladesh, and recently Ethiopia. It is retaining, at least for now, medium skill jobs. It also has a formal program to increase domestic consumption to reduce reliance on exports.
2
What ? Trump's tax cut "increase incentives to replace workers with robots" ? Increased the deficit too !
3
Human workers contribute to social security and medicare. As robots replace humans, those systems will inevitably face tremendous burdens in providing their benefits, as will other types of "safety net" insurance that relies on employer/employee contributions.
It seems to me that employers should still have to pay social security and medicare taxes for the workers that they have replaced with robots, and they should also have to pay the workers' contributions as well for using robots. The same is true of unemployment insurance and similar employment taxes.
If a robot replaces six workers, the employer should be on the hook for the full federal (and state) employment taxes that would be paid by and on behalf of six workers.
This might be very difficult to implement for several generations of robots, but it's something that has to be done unless we are going to completely redo all employment based social programs in the US--or simply let them die of starvation.
4
Without playing up to any Marxism, we must realize that the coming major social disruption by industrial accelerated use of robotics & AI will (should) almost certainly trigger new creative approaches to economic planning at the community and regional levels - a 21th Century adoption of sophisticated forms of "planned economy" (or shall we call it "regulated economy"? It is not just a matter of protecting active workers rights. The overall needs of the future workers must be assessed and integrated in forward looking policies if we are to avoid catastrophic upheavals.
6
Edsall does his homework, when it comes to identifying the problems. But he does zero work on identifying solutions.
There ARE solutions, though now (undoing 40 years of regression) it will not be easy.
Corporate taxes should go up, not down. They should be pegged to things like employment too...adding robots should require payments to support displaced workers.
Unions need to be strengthened. They should sit on the board of every company, with enough votes to give them a veto on issues like executive compensation and siting of new factories.
Universal healthcare should be sold as saving companies a huge expense. Hilary's education compromise...free community college for everyone should also be sold as free job training (they offer many certificates for job skills now, not just degrees).
And of course we need to claw back ideas like the immediate deduction of automation expenses which encourage job shedding.
We need to go back to the days of the last decent Republican President, and adopt his national infrastructure and tax policies. (I mean Eisenhower, if that isn't obvious to everybody.)
7
Robots that produce consumer widgets and soon to be archaic “shiny metal boxes” have their place. A nation-wide project to get them to solve the existential problems like housing, healthcare and energy is not even on the fringe. No profit in it.
2
Technology had been promised as a panacea for the working man, an ease to their burden and in most cases labors have become dramatically eased by technology. However, instead of the financial benefits accruing to labor it inexorably accrued to those with capital resources.
As always, resources, tangible and intangible accrue to the few. Did Bezos invent anything? No. What about Zuckerberg, what about Bill Gates? Were they able to if not make a better mouse trap, tweak one, yes definitely more of the latter, yet they and several others have more of the resources of the bottom fifty percent of this nation. Have these guys singular contributions to society been as great as their rewards?
Tax Cut and Jobs Act is a reflection of the ignorance and lack of recent historical knowledge of many or our electorate. A $1.5 trillion tax cut to the wealthiest and to corporations whom have both experienced exponential growth in wealth since Reagen's presidency.
Trump will make certain that that legacy continues.
2
What this leaves out is the displacement from robots and AI is different than the earlier industrial revolution. The craftsmen who were displaced by factories ended up being able to get jobs in other factories , and it did end up creating more net jobs because producing things in factories led to wider sales of the product (for example, when cars were craft made, they employed relatively few craftsmen to build the cars, they produced relatively few and they were the plaything of the rich; the assembly line factories employed a lot more people because they produced millions of cars that ordinary people could buy. The problem with AI and automation is that the new jobs they create are less in number, and also generally require skills, it doesn't take many people to run or maintain automated factories.
As far as creating jobs in other industries, what kind of jobs? the article mentioned that automation is creating more wealth to people higher up the food chain, but the hotel and hospitality industry jobs it creates are minimum wage jobs, not a replacement for decent paying factory jobs. What happens is that the jobs that are created are lower level, and many of those (retail especially) are being automated. The fundamental issue is that we are getting rid of more and more jobs, which is making a small class of people more and more well off while a large group of people are going backwards, finding jobs that pay little.
4
This is largely nonsense
If robots would be the primary cause of the US factory jobs, Germany that has 309 robots per 10 000 than the US (189 per 10 000) would be full of "causalities of history".
It is not. Indeed , it has a thriving manufacturing sector.
5
Trump says his gut tells him "more" than anybody else's brain can tell him. When his gut tells him "better" than anybody else's brain can tell him, then he might be on to something. As usual, he's confusing quantity with quality.
2
I work in the Telecom industry. You might think this requires highly skilled workers, and this was true. The process of "provisioning" new services is complex, but what I found at every US Telco was that a new service order was handled by multiple technicians, and each one typed a few commands into a terminal for one device. Ten people to do what could be one man's job.
The software our company offers can automate this to just one person entering the order, and ultimately at some point to zero people. The price for provisioning a new service in a traditional Telco goes to a few cents from what is currently $200-$400. For now the CWA (Communication Workers of America) is fighting this automation.
As an engineer I respect the skills that technicians have, but I am disappointed (appalled, really) that they settle for being glorified typists. My argument to them is, that if they didn't have to do these simple, repetitive, easily automated tasks, that they could focus on improving their networks.
They keep their jobs, and their network and phone service improves. Win-win, but for some reason this is not well received. They just want to stay in their comfort zone.
4
@OSS Architect I completely understand what you describe and your view about the technicians' attitude. But keep in mind, when you get home after work and have mouths to feed, time spent on acquiring new skills can easily fall lower down in priority.
I suspect it's also low on the company's priority list to re-invest in its employees and provide on-the-job (or paid off-site) training for the new jobs that could be created. It's easier and more efficient to automate, out-source and/or export the work. And, of course, this path is deemed absolutely necessary when your top priority is returning profits to the shareholders and upper-management.
When labor has no say in the well-being of the company -- and shareholders don't want it to have a say -- then the only outcome is a struggle between the two, which history over the last 40-50 years indicates that labor will ultimately lose.
Hang on to what you've got when you don't see reasonable alternatives.
2
Smart people will keep their jobs, or at least keep them longer. Conclusion: This country needs more smart people.
Solution: Serious investment in better education (preschool to postgraduate) and better nutrition (e.g., no more agricultural subsidies for corn syrup). Help everyone reach his or her full potential.
4
Robot hysteria and misreading of the economic analysis, dressed up as "left" because it quotes E.P. Thompson, while not engaging the issues of corporate power and the collapse of unions and labor market institutions. Technology is neutral. It is being applied, like many other things, to erode workers' power and disadvantage them in the labor market, but that isn't inherent in the tecnhology.
If you want a more balanced and more accurate view, one that is in fact progressive while focusing on employer power and the erosion of labor market institutions, not robots and technology per se, here's what the progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI) had to say last year:
"Yes, automation has led to job displacements in particular occupations and industries in the past, but there is no basis for claiming that automation has led—or will lead—to increased joblessness, unemployment, or wage stagnation overall. We argue that the current excessive media attention to robots and automation destroying the jobs of the past and leaving us jobless in the future is a distraction from the main issues that need to be addressed: the poor wage growth and inequality caused by policies that have shifted economic power away from low- and moderate-wage workers."
Here's the EPI link. Why didn't Edsall report on what they said?
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-zombie-robot-argument-lurches-on-there-is-no-evidence-that-automation-leads-to-joblessness-or-inequality/
4
(Robots x A.I.) + (Uncontrolled Greed x Immorality) = 2018
1
Those that have the capability of maintaining and programming the robots and AI systems will have job security for a time. The skills to do so require specialized training and education. Those in the skilled building trades that require an ability to be creative and think on your feet will be in demand. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Low skilled and repetitive tasks are being automated. A college degree per se is not necessarily the answer if that degree does not provide a marketable skill. Advanced education and training in crafts, trades and services need to be promoted. At one time this country had a robust system of trade schools that prepared people for the job market. We moved away from that as certification in the skills taught did not carry the prestige of a BA or BS degree. To make matters worse young people are going deeply into debt to obtain those degrees. Our country needs to realign its priorities away from more tax breaks and subsidies for the uber rich to preparing our youth to be productive in the future. And, people need to fully understand that the job they are doing today will not be the one they do tomorrow. To thrive one can expect a lifetime of education, training, and self improvement.
4
When a human being becomes dispensable, irrelevant, skills worthless then that can never be good for the working class and society at large. Only those who can afford the $100,000 robot will prosper. I mean the 1%!
2
@NNI: I work in a field connected to robotics. I assure you there are no $100K robots. There aren't even any $500K robots. The bottom range of industrial robots starts at about $1 million and that does not include the software required, which is almost always proprietary and unique to each customer.
The next AI innovation will be the Trump Gut smart speaker. It will sit right next to Siri and Alexis on your counter. When your feeling that what the experts are telling you something you just don't want to hear, Trump Gut will tell you what you want to hear. As an added feature the Trump Gut has a preset number of chants for you to participate in. You can also customize the chants to meet your needs.
6
Big discovery has been that what people believe has no necessary relationship to any reality. We can control peoples beliefs so that they joyously strive to their own destruction. When you lead people with the carrot there's no need to let them have an occasional bite. People are perfectly satisfied with the sizzle and have no need for the steak.
We're still at the dawn of this wondrous new age.
4
This would have been a great article back in 2010, when the cited statistic of 68.7% male participation in the workforce was current. Now it's back up to 89%, with an unemployment rate of 3.8%. It is as Macbeth said, "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Replacing humans doing mind-numbing work with robots is good for the human race. In the near future there will be less work, a good thing. We are accustomed to finding our value and morality in the amount of work we do, and society will have to adapt to a change in mores. Ayn Rand said, "Productive achievement is man's noblest activity". In the future productive achievement won't be synonymous with work.
Glad to finally read an article that point out the stupidity and selfishness of the provision in the tax reform law which permitted 100% expensing in the first year. As soon as I read about that last year, I said this law will encourage automation, including robots, at the expense of human personnel. Of course, Trump has no idea of this as he is not very intelligent and not curious. He thinks only like the donor class and those in the Republican Party who were the only members to support the law just wanted to write a bill that satisfied their donors.
2
Wait, the only reference to Obama is a quote from a former adviser? It's all his fault. It must be a very biased study that did not find this to be all Obama's fault. How do we know? Donald J. Trump told us so. That's why Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania put us in this fix to begin with. They know it's all Obama's fault. It must be Obama's fault, because if it's not, then they're all rubes who fell for a con. Please, oh please, say it's Obama's fault!
5
Anecdotal evidence does not serve this thesis well. First, these two UP Michigan counties with their rapidly declining populations are a pinprick relative to the behemoth USA. These people can retire or relocate. Let nature recover 100%. Or, human beings can gather together and turn these places into 4 month a year tourist meccas. Does anyone realize how uniquely beautiful this area is? Clearly not if poor retail sales are any indicator of tourism levels, which they are. Lastly, the opioid numbers are NOT, I repeat NOT the problem of the American people or our government. This medical emergency is the result of Big Pharma's stranglehold on the USA; the sooner this oligopoly gets regulated and taxed into submission and is forced to take responsibility for all that they have wrought, the better off we will all be. Can the rubes who voted overwhelmingly for trump-- a TV host, a failed casino owner, and a shell of a person who doesn't even own a pet or have a relationship with Melania's son-- rise to any of the 3 options I presented? Move, reinvent the entire region, insist that Big Pharma help their citizens heal? Heck no. They would rather watch fox TV and complain about "coastal elites." Tell me very clearly why I --a hardworking, good citizen of liberal CA --should care about people so at odds with progress or solutions?
Now as to the bigger picture: well, that's an article, that's a topic of discussion, this is a piece of a winning democratic platform.
2
Key enabler, drug test.
1
Trump’s (primarily) under-educated, white male supporters will all find jobs commensurate with their aspirations as soon as the horse, wagon, & buggy-whip make their resurgence.
3
The working class did move left in America just as in Britain during industrialization, forming the basis of FDR's coalition. And in Britain, the left-behinds have moved right at this time of deindustrialization, just as in America. See: Brexit.
2
And it is worse than you say. After several generations of mating by intelligence, the bell curve is flattening, so that ever more people are falling below the ever-increasing level of intelligence necessary to get a good, stable job. All of this was foretold in The Bell Curve.
It will take a much wiser head than mine to see how this ends, other than badly.
1
The military still accepts people with a high school diploma, and they offer training.
2
@James Palmer: my stepson was not much of a student, and had no interest in college.
So he enlisted in the US Navy right after 9/11. They sent him to submarine training school, where he became an nuclear welder on a nuclear submarine -- top grade pay.
He served for about 8 years, then left on a medical disability -- he'd injured his knee on a welding job. Before he even got out, he was besieged with job offers from nuclear power plants.They recruit primarily from the Navy subs.
He got a fabulous job with relocation -- a union job! -- immediately. He's had numerous promotions. Today, at age 37….he earns about $180,000 a year with overtime, or about the same pay as a PEDIATRICIAN.
He has never been to college. Also, all his education and training were 100% free.
2
An insightful description of what the Democrat's primary task is - to bring together the younger educated economically more viable folks with the older less educated economically less viable folks.
We are fellow Americans and we need each other.
Capitalism and tax cuts on their own drive people apart.
Is there really no Democrat available to speak frankly on these matter? Is the Party so beholden to the wealthy mega donors? If so, I think Edsall describes our future.
2
The UP’s industries suffered more from inability to bring competitive resources to global sourced markets than automation. Those mines and wood product producers did not replace people with robots. They closed. Yes, the few operations remaining are heavily automated, but robots did not do the deed. As for wasteland: your biggest attraction is a sand dune and you denigrate the God’s Country of the UP?
1
The stat that says labor's share peaked in the early 1980s correlates snugly with what everyone knows in their gut about right-wing politics. Reagan shifted power away from unions, Bush continued, Clinton helped capital while only pretending to help labor with NAFTA, Bush II hurt labor, states became more and more "right-to-work" anti-union environments, Obama didn't get a lot done, and now we have labor's nemesis in charge.
We don't ordinary people all see this?
1
It's time to add a couple of things to this picture that are not mentioned.
First, and most importantly, is the huge contingent of over-40 workers in the tech industry -- highly educated, highly skilled, paid living wages -- who are being systematically massacred year after year by tech: IBM, Cisco, Apple, Facebook, Google, all of them, really.
They are not only forced into early retirement because they are no longer cheap labor; they are actively discriminated against in hiring, despite their credentials and willingness to be flexible.
This is another of the many absolute tragedies of our current capitalist system: it is run by, and for, white males aged 25-40. No-one else allowed, except for a few tokens to be captured in pictures and trotted out when the statistics are needed to argue otherwise.
The second, huge thing not mentioned here is that robots win over the cheapest of cheap labor -- in China, Southeast Asia, India, or here -- because they're cheaper. That is all.
All corporate enterprises and startups seek labor at the cheapest price possible; this is fundamental to the current economic system. It would fold in days without it.
But it also means demand overall will be driven down extensively for everything except the luxury goods and services offered to a tiny minority that can afford them.
And that way lies total system collapse, as is going to be evident in 2019.
4
@Steven
"The second, huge thing not mentioned here is that robots win over the cheapest of cheap labor -- in China, Southeast Asia, India, or here -- because they're cheaper. "
That would be true were those countries also not using robots in much of their manufacturing. To date robots cannot replace jobs requiring fine motor skills but that day is coming sooner rather than later.
In all likelihood, what many of his supporters during the campaign failed to understand is that what Mr Trump understands about 'doing business' does not translate into a keen understanding of an economy, regardless of his actual intentions.
In a way, it's the same view of the electorate who pilloried GHW Bush who, when faced with domestic economic realities whose implications he did understand, did what was necessary despite his pledge.
The electorate likes stories, not reality.
5
In this excellent report, as elsewhere, a common theme is that, whereas worker productivity (production/man hour) has been increasing steadily, the wages have not. This breakdown of correlation between productivity increase and wages, especially since the early 1980's, is cited as the reason why working class has not done well.
Noteworthy is the fact that it was the 1980's when computerization of machines began gathering momentum leading to increased worker productivity, both because of computerization and fewer man hours needed per unit. The employers diverted investment toward new computers from worker wages as this investment produced more with same or fewer workers.
So the employer's production cost (computer plus wage) remained about the same or decreased, but the profit increased as the wages decreased. This seems like an easier explanation why divergence between wages and productivity occurred.
This article takes this process a step further - to investment in AI, that is, self-programming computers, which will reduce even the number of computer operators required. Unemployment will creep into some technical fields, now thought relatively safe, creating a new class of the unemployed.
Despite wage stagnation (and simultaneous productivity growth) the worker purchasing power has not drastically decreased, evident from the fact the all living standards have risen, though not evenly across the socioeconomic landscape. This trends likely will continue with the new AI.
1
If the worker simply performs the same tasks, but the robot performs the unproductive facets of that worker’s job, resulting in the need for fewer workers and higher human productivity, how does that worker merit a share in the productivity benefits? Capital bought the robot, paid for the software and paid for engineer to fit it into the process. Capital should get the benefits. The worker gets to keep her job.
A still somewhat inaccurate, but better title, would be "the robots have created Trump country."
Still better would be "The robots have created voters for whom neither party has done much or even promised much that's credible, and Trump exploited that failure."
And a third entrant, my favorite, would be something like "Forget Trump; the USA has a big problem, getting bigger, and its various power centers are making it worse while talking platitudes or lies instead of trying to deal with it."
We face global warming on the outside, and a growing gap between a small but growing number of high-productivity jobs and a large and growing number of would-be workers who don't qualify for them, on the inside.
Trump is making it worse, but our failure in dealing with both problems is bigger than him.
2
The United States does not need additional workers. Farm machinery with Artificial Intelligence can plant, weed, fertilized and harvest almost any crop. We don't need migrant workers so that apples can cost 20 cents instead of 25 cents or tomatoes at 1.25 a pound instead of 1.30 a pound. The major need of low skilled foreign born labor is for home health attendants and servants, maids, gardeners or drivers. If rich people can't afford to hire Americans to clean their toilets or drive their Uber, then they can clean them themselves, drive or take a bus. Assembling Smart Phones in the United States would probably add 15 dollars to the cost of the product. If we changed our fashion of clothing, most clothing could be made by machines. For most things, except bananas, we need foreign trade and immigrant labor so that the rich can have more than the working class and poor. Trump is not my friend but the Democrats have made it clear that they hate me and are my enemies. So where should I turn?
View your comment
2
@Mike: bananas?
Dude, if you think apples cost 20 or 25 cents a POUND (or even EACH)....you have not been shopping in a very, very long time.
Try like 10 times that much.
The late Steve Jobs ADMITTED in a TV interview that he could make the iPhone easily in the US, but it would add about $40 to the final cost. $40 added to $700-$1000 on the hottest product IN THE WORLD....would that stop ANYONE from buying it? But he refused to give up that $40 in profit.
2
Said the auto plant manager to the union boss coming to tour the plant:
"Meet my new workers", pointing to the robots on the assembly line. They're efficient, never miss work, don't need benefits and I don't have to pay them".
The union boss to the plant manager:
"True enough, but how many of them are going to buy your cars?"
Robots, AI all contribute in a good way, but where is the discernment of a human eye that can better assess, in many situations the quality of their performance? They're not perfect.
The average car today costs twice as much as my parents first home. If robots reduce the cost of labor so much, why does the resulting product cost continue to rise?
So many of our fellow citizens are being shut out of the work force and by extension participation in our economy. This is bad for all of us, and we all will eventually suffer in one way or another.
Why? One word: greed.
4
@Deb: the point of the robot is that he works 24/7 for no pay (though they do cost money to BUY) and he NEVER EVER EVER asks for a raise, or health insurance, nor can he ever go on strike.
Also, the employer wants to save money on manufacturing, but charge the same for the product -- MORE PROFIT.
Carrier moved their operations to Mexico, to save $16 PER WORKER, PER HOUR -- from $19 in Indiana to $3 in Mexico -- but do you imagine their air conditioners are going to cost a dime less to customers? hahahahaha!
2
Ironically, it's a robot that will lead us out of the mess humans have made of things on this fragile planet. It's not what the ultimate robot will do, but what a robot that actually thinks shows us about ourselves that will finally put an end to a self-imposed human insanity.
In the near future, we will program the human mind in the computer based on a linguistic "survival" algorithm, which will provide irrefutable proof as to how we trick the mind with our ridiculous beliefs about what is supposed to survive - producing minds programmed de facto for destruction and all sorts of mischief. Minds so deceived see the survival of particular beliefs as more important than the survival of all. When we understand the harm in all fixed beliefs, we will begin the long trek back to reason and sanity.
See RevolutionOfReason.com
2
1) Trump's gut is clogged with bad food, just like his brain is clogged with greed.
2) As the article states, we need to develop institutions to manage AI technology's dislocation of American worker: Those institutions already existed, and they are called Labor Unions! Unions ensured that Mechanization (the era of rapid technological change after WWII), saw productivity gains shared by all workers, and not just the very top. Why should automation be different?
3) Automation is supposed to displace workers to produce goods... But in the end, who will have a job to even by those goods?
4) Why are labor Unions given a bad reputation? After all, elites have their own Unions - company A's board of directors (execs from Companies B, C, D, etc) grants the CEO of company A a big pay package; then Company A's CEO returns the favor as a board member for Company B, C, D to return the favor. They are also have collective "bargaining" called lobbying together (Banking, Big Pharma, Defense) where they all benefit. They also enlist junior members to their unions that are carefully screening (campaign donations, attack ads). These junior members are politicians and judges working hard to transform democracy into a plutocracy; if they get voted out, they'll move up the Union ranks (corporate "consultant/lobbyist"). The union also controls all messaging because they own the media, which answers to shareholders (like company A's CEO). It's this union that is hogging all of AI's gains.
2
Dear Progressives (interesting that you call yourselves that): Laissez Faire; leave it alone, let the market decide, it knows more than you do (can). Business cost-cutting is here to stay, why? In a word, China--increased business investment (automation) is how it's done: replacement of obsolete plant, equipment, and skills to increase production and make new products. There will be social displacement; we can't stop the clock, progress will happen; the stream of economic life will find a way, damming and diverting it, however will-intentioned, through social and tax policy, doesn't work, it creates social, economic, and political 'enormities'--dislocations which ultimately only hinder forward progress. What's the answer? Get a skill; get a job, embrace self-responsibility. Stop blaming Donald Trump, stop trying to increase the dependent welfare population which is the only sure-fire outcome of liberal bleeding-heart social caring.
1
The benifits of an economic system must be distributed throughout the system and culture. Faileur to do this will only result in chronic disruption.
You can't sell robot manufactured products to people who have no money.
Man, and you have all these people out there saying, "College is not important. College is not the only option." Sure, college is not for everyone, but as far as options go, well, "vocations" don't look that bright.
Thanks Mr. Edsall for this well thought and deeply researched long view. Contemporary culture is severely handicapped in the long view department. Collective A.D.D. induced by Fox News & NPR alike, unable to look beyond the latest tweet from Someone Or Other (Climate Science, for just one example).
When these robot chickens come home to roost we won't have the Yellow Vests in the streets, rather the MAGA Hats, and they'll be armed to the teeth. By then the Koch Bros, Goldman Sachs, et al, who have lopsidedly benefitted from the Bush/Obama bailouts & McConnell/Ryan/Trump tax breaks, will have their family fortunes well secured elsewhere. Whichever liberal Democrat wins the 2024 election will take the blame.
Thank you for shining such a penetrating little light on the lessons of history.
1
This made me laugh out loud:
"While Trump is clearly attuned to the political power of white working class anger....his campaign rhetoric is also expedient."
That's one way of putting it!
2
"The adverse effects of automation fall disproportionately on the voters who cast most of their ballots for Trump in 2016...."
Good.
2
@george eliot
I wouldn't even wish this on the voters who helped Hillary beat Bernie!
1
America is quickly in need of leaders who understand the future. Not antiquated, dust gathering, career and soul destroying politicians who only know the past. And in Trump's case, the long ago past; like coal mines of the 30s. Listening to some of these fossils speak is akin to some old demented grandad at a Sunday lunch. They talk a lofty talk, trying to be profound, but by all accounts skirt the issue because they know absolutely nothing of it.
Yes all of this info has been available but most is hidden by companies and politicians need to keep dangling the "jobs" to get voters. The Tax cut shows how the Washington-Corporate axis is well connected. Trillions in tax cuts and buy backs to enrich the corps and then incentives to automate. It was well predicted this would happen before the tax cuts. The poor workers with their Trump Red hats shouting and screaming have no clue what they created.
1
We keep thinking that there will always be more than enough jobs for all the people, if only the people got educated enough, and often enough, to do them. What if that’s a false premise? What if technology is taking us to where there simply are not jobs for everyone? The end point of capitalism may be the need to rethink the whole structure of society, towards an enormous leisure class with little or no work but a guaranteed income just to live. Maybe to enjoy themselves. This is such an abhorrent idea to most Americans that it’s unthinkable. And yet...
Thank you for corralling and reporting the evidence that confirms what my gut has been telling me these past 2 years.
Another thing that my gut has been telling me for nearly 20 years: the quality of life for working people could be improved in enormous ways if we would only use technology for that purpose instead of trying to enrich the already wealthy at the expense of blue collar workers. We should be seeing a $20 minimum wage and 30 hours as a full-time job for those who are FLSA protected because their labor is being replaced by automation. That and a shift to a Medicare-for-all (or similar) model of healthcare would instantly buttress the quality of life for those with less education or with talents that are outside of the better compensated professions.
2
Advertisers sell working class Americans images of rough, hands-on work, and over time these images have become values. There are no beer commercials or truck commercials celebrating the man who works in a cubicle at a call center or walking the floor of a warehouse, or helping the elderly in a nursing home, yet these are the jobs that are available. The discontent of these displaced hands-on workers will continue until we collectively change the imagery around "a man's work."
3
Great article. Great comments. Re-education, incentives to move (why support communities that are dying), and perhaps some hope that their government gives a flip for them would be a nice start. Republicans won’t do any of that!
1
Machinery replacing living labor has been a constant since the industrial revolution. The dynamic behind this is to increase profits. The first to introduce a technological innovation can sell its product at an advantage over the competition (as technology cheapens individual products). However, soon others catch up to that and profits even out. The effect besides the cheapening of products is to produce more of the same product with same amount of labor; thereby, the need to expand markets. However, living labor being the only source of value (machinery transmits already fixed value as it depreciates with tear and wear), a tendency is developed: to decrease the rate of profit despite its absolute growth. This deceleration of growth is happening in China which is perhaps the second largest area where value is being created. See for instance iPhone story there and the sales stagnation of latest models in the market. Overproduction is another symptom. GM keeping plants open in Mexico while closing them here is a further confirmation of this tendency. E P Thompson gives a good example of this contradiction which was finally dealt with two world wars in the 20th century. Neither Trump nor Xi have many tools to deal with with this intrinsic contradiction of capitalist development. They are just fighting over the decreasing pie of real profits (not the fictitious ones fabricated in the mystical world of finances).
Trump country phenomenon is only a microcosm of the global market.
"While there are parallels between conditions of workers during industrialization in England and during the deindustrialization of regions of this country now, one big difference stands out from a political vantage point: In England, workers turned sharply to the left while here they have moved sharply to the right."
An even bigger one: the Luddites didn't have access to social media as the most powerful tool in history for organizing a movement to start a revolution.
Also, the Industrial Revolution initially was focused in Great Britain, while deindustrialization has decimated parts of the US, the UK, and Europe, all of which now face the daunting challenges of the Age of Automation in a position of extreme weakness.
When you combine these two realities, a global middle and working class revolution is quite plausible, which could take the meaning of the word "globalization" into a whole new realm.
Also, it should be said: Tom Edsall is consistently outstanding in the topics he selects, and in the analysis he provides.
2
Automation is going to replace more and more workers and rather than shift all the gains to the rich, the government should raise taxes on those rich and provide more benefits to the remainder, in the form of education, healthcare, and stronger social security.
The only party with an interest in (and history of) raising taxes on the rich and expanding benefits for the rest is the Democratic Party.
CBO recently reported that from 1979 to 2015, all income groups saw significant gains in income, adjusted for inflation. For example, income after taxes was up about 46% for the 21st to 80th percentiles, while the lowest quintile was up 79% and the highest quintile was up 103%. Due to the Great Recession and Obama's tax hikes on the rich, the after-tax income of the top 1% actually fell 17% from 2007 to 2015.
Further, we're the richest we've ever been, with total household net worth setting records since 2013. If we split the wealth evenly, each family would have about $800,000, rather than the $100,000 of the median family.
Much room for redistribution, which is only going to more essential as automation displaces more and more jobs.
3
Excellent synopsis of what's been happening to the working and middle class for decades now! Conditions are eerily similar to the Industrial Revolution, and the Robber Barons that accrued wealth that even their descendants cannot run dry.
It's clear that workers must adapt to this new reality. This can happen as it did then, which much suffering and misery, leading to violent upheavals, or it can be managed to lessen its dire impact. Guess which way the wealthy and Wall St. want to to happen? And of course that's the way it is happening.
It's tragic and maddening that with all the knowledge we possess, we aren't freed from the greed and avarice of those in power. We could change the tax laws and other economic mechanisms back to the way they were before Reagan's "trickle down" plague infected us. We could reward investment and job creation in America, providing tax breaks for employer-provided training. We could increase taxes and duties on jobs and goods produced offshore. We could provide free and/or subsidized technical training to workers. We could greatly increase taxes on short term profit taking, and push CEOs away from a focus on quarterly returns and focus on long term growth. We COULD do all of these things, but we won't because the Wall St. and Corporate America own our government, including the Oligarch In Chief, Trump.
When these people finally realize how they've been betrayed, they won't be the only casualties of history.
4
Tom, I wish some Democratic presidential candidate had the ability to take the information in this article and transpose it into a frank, authentic, empathetic campaign presentation for the American people, especially those living through these times in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia & Wisconsin.
If only the Democrats could speak plainly about this process and offer solutions grounded in Democratic beliefs and policies.
What would those policies be?
1. Support for unions. During the 1960s & 70s, as inflation cut into the net worth of the rich, whose wealth was based on paper assets, union households -- with annual cost-of-living raises, healthcare & pension protection, and wealth based on home ownership -- saw wages, savings & net worth climb each year.
2. Tax increases on corporations and the wealthy to redistribute wealth downward. In 1952, corporate taxes contributed 32% of all revenue to the federal budget. This year, after the Trump tax cut, corp. revenue to the US will be nearly zero. Also, privatization of federal departments means at least 40% of tax revenues (~$1BN) flows upward to the rich, who also own 83% of all publicly-traded stock in those corporations. Supply-side tax cuts are killing us.
3. National investment in workers. Free college, job training, increased child care/pre-school education, direct support and investment for new businesses. Also, the return of tax deductions for small real estate investors and for interest on credit cards.
5
Workers have been warned for decades that manufacturing is in decline. Yet many remain obstinate and refuse to face the facts of the situation. Instead of electing leaders who understand how to help them through this transition, they support politicians who promise to reverse time. They elect officials who blame minorities, environmentalists, immigrants, government, etc., etc... In fact they blame nearly everyone instead of the people who are actually taking away their jobs. The greatest irony is that they voted for Trump -- the guy who just gave those people huge incentives to automate and move their jobs overseas.
The fact is; there are major unstoppable forces working against these people. Globalization and advances in technology are not going to reverse themselves. Until they accept this and get on board with the rest of us they will forever be pawns for unscrupulous men like Trump.
5
Are Republicans going to pass a law prohibiting corporations from using robots in manufacturing processes in order to placate their blue-collar supporters? Did they pass laws prohibiting farmers from using giant combines to protect field hands and preserve small-town economies, or outlawing steam shovels so more coal miners could keep their jobs? I didn't think so, but if we're not going there, the alternative is in fact "spreading the gains and buffering the losses" from mechanization and automation through tax and social policy. And which party is adamant that doing this is big-government interference in the economy (gasp) and a dangerous step on the road to "socialism?" So why do the workers disproportionately affected by these trends think that party is going to do anything to help them?
5
@Richard
They don't. They would rather starve and vent their rage on weak or powerless minorities that are carefully curated for them by their masters. The conservative half of the population has made a deal with the wealthy and powerful. If you (the wealthy and powerful) let us (conservative working and middle classes) abuse women and minorities with impunity, we'll give you all our money. The fundamental conservative mindset is that relative status is more important than actual status. In addition, avoiding having to take responsibility for their actions is more important than fixing them. This is why nobody can have nice things.
3
I believe I read an article earlier this week about Companies looking for people who can "make eye contact and small talk." hummmm good luck with your automation. It's too bad the corporate top can't look into the big picture and see the value of human interaction. Makes me sad that there is only a few conscious capitalists in this country.
50 % plus of workers in large corporations have no contact with anyone besides another employee. As you reduce the number of employees via robots you have decreasing need for human relationship tasks within that 50%. Fewer supervisors, managers of supervisors, fewer managers of managers and fewer support persons for the managers. EQ type skills remain paramount. You just need fewer people to exercise them.
“workers with extraordinary social and creative skills will still remain in the work force in 2030.” It is not just them marginally educated who are at risk. According to this article, within a decade, almost all of us will be faced with being replaced by automation. If the continuing march of automation will reduce the role of work in our lives to virtually nothing, what will replace not only the income that work brings but the need for a personal sense of accomplishment that is so important to human beings? On the other hand, how to reconcile the vision of an automated, increasingly virtual world with the coming apocalypse of climate change, which will make old-fashioned survival skills at a premium again?
1
@willow, and on the other hand our social safety net is so weak here that workers are expected to stay in the workforce longer than is normal anywhere else. This prevents younger people from succeeding and advancing. Sigh.
3
Brilliant analysis and solid data! And, a call to action. If we are going to survive without a revolt along the lines of the French Revolution, we are going to have to address the incipient inequality that is a consequence of changing technology. Time to tax capital and unearned income and pass that down to the people who helped the rich acquire so much. We owe this to our less fortunate compatriots.
2
We have to raise the marginal cost of the robots. If the calculation is an easy one - an arbitrage of wages vs a robot or offshoring, it's too easy. Tie the fate of the 1% more closely to the fate of everyone else. A tax system that uses multiples of the median 40 hour week perhaps? With confiscatory rates at a multiple of say 35 (social security years) or 50? Because what do the figures in the tax rate schedule have to do with anything anyway?
1
Robots do play a role, but it is a secondary one compared to economic policy
Let’s start here
Number of installed robots, per 10,000 workers, latest available
Korea 631
Germany 309
US 189
Korea and Germany have thriving manufacturing sector (that btw includes making robots), the US has not
So robots are not the primary cause
Moving on the primary cause, example Syracuse NY (more from Edsall later)
Before NAFTA was signed, the GM Fisher plant on GM circle, New Process Gear works, Carrier Air conditioning, Lenox HVAC, Syracuse China, etc employed tens of thousands.
Once NAFTA was signed , then China admitted to the WTO (2001) was signed all of this production moved to countries were wages were 1/6 or less of Syracuse wages.
All that production would still be in Syracuse, yes, with robots on the German level, had the free trade, free movement of labour, no tariffs economist cited considered the societal impact of liberal macro economic theory
How do I know ? Look at Germany. Wage level higher than in the US, twice the robots, and yet a thriving manufacturing industry.
But it has a culture of protecting workers. By law, labor must have half (yes half) of the seats of the board of any large company.
No, robots did not in Syracuse NY. Once a prosperous city now one where families moving in between 2005 and 2016 had median household incomes of $35,219 — $7,229 less than the median income of the families moving out of the region, $42,448.
17
The worst thing that too many high school students and young workers are learning is to be prepared for jobs that will never come back--jobs that require strong backs and little education. Anyone who has ever spent time in a working class high school regardless of the ethnicity of its students knows that a goodly % of the students are just marking time--some to quit school at 16, some to finish with a worthless diploma. (I don't mean that all high schools issue worthless diplomas but an awful lot are so focused on their numbers of dropouts versus diplomas that they have taken the easy route of handing out diplomas to students who know very little and have few skills. Ironically the skills most important for those students are not chemical formulas and calculus though these are important for some of us, but the skills most important to adult life: reliability, curiosity, adaptability, and a desire to do what it take to live what used to considered a normal adult life. Those old jobs are not coming back and the students without the basic skills to adapt to changing conditions and to learn the skills of working with robots and on robots will be forever lost to working and middle class life. Right now the carnage is most clear in the working class, but it will soon be facing people higher up as well.
1
I find it somewhat amazing that everyone is talking about machines doing more and more of the work that humans do and how that will lower prices while eliminating jobs; however, no one seems to be asking the question of how GROWTH can continue if fewer humans have the capital (read money) to purchase the cheaper products. Yes, the higher ups (a small portion of the economy) will have the funds to buy whatever they want but to a great extent growth depends on mass distribution which relates to the great mass of people being able to afford to purchase an item. The robot takeover means we are either going to have to redefine "work" so that people have income or look to become Venezuela. This is the simple fact behind all those brave new world slogans.
4
Robots were in the factory I worked from the 70's. The million sq ft best worker was always the robot waste train. It followed a buried wire and drove all over the walkways. Stopping automatically at intersections and had safeties to prevent any human injury. And workers did try to get hurt. Nobody on my watch. I was also on the emergency squad.
Early 90's there was constant experiment in assembly line robots.
Since the 60's we have known one day we will need far fewer worker bees.
When will we wake up...
1
Inevitable, under capitalism. Robots, and artificial intelligence, will progressively replace anyone whose work cannot be done more cheaply by hardware or software machines, as long as the replacement costs less over time than retaining human workers. The replacement happens sooner for those who cannot, or will not, educate themselves to achieve skills that are not replicable by machines.
The ultimate end under capitalism, then, assuming technology can continue to advance until machines can do any necessary work cheaper than humans, is that all jobs will be done by machine. Perhaps there will be a few left where humans are so uncomfortable with a machine doing the task that they will not accept a nonhuman doing it, but successive generations will grow more and more comfortable with the machines so that the number of such tasks will dwindle to zero. That is, without some counter, non-capitalist, social force.
The weaknesses of capitalism, in terms of what is beneficial for humans, can always be seen when you think through the effects of unrestrained capitalism taken to logical conclusions.
It would be a mistake, I think, to assume that human brains are so mysteriously wonderful that machines will never be able to equal or even outdo them. Talk of love, conscience, spirituality, etc. are moot; machines will inevitably be able to be programmed (or program themselves) to supply those things to the extent that businesses require. Stemming the tide requires limits to capitalism.
6
@Barry Williams
Nice ... there's an old description of the factory of the future ... all robots except for one person and a dog. The person is there to sound an alarm if the robots break down; the dog is there to keep the person awake. :-)
it should be pretty clear by now that both our corporations and our governments have abandoned us. And robots aren't just welding cars, and frying hamburgers--there are also software robots (AI) ready to take pretty much everyone's jobs, or at least turn them into part time jobs.
9
It's becoming ever more obvious that a mandatory living stipend for all will have to be implemented in the future. On a long enough timeline, with the advance of AI and machine learning, automation, and remote services, the vast majority of careers will become obsolete. This is true even for the professions of law and medicine. Sure, they'll still be a group of people programming and overseeing the machines, but the pool of workers needed to do that will continue to shrink until there is minimal human staff.
All of this will mean massive new profits for the corporations, and we know the mega wealthy will be benevolent and support tax changes that support the living stipend. Haha. Who am I kidding. They'll horde it all, like they always do, until the masses rip it from them by any means necessary.
8
What a good piece of work. highly informative. integrates expert quantitative research. And the EP Thompson reference is so apt. But note this critical fact: people are leaving those Michigan counties. That's how adaptation occurs: people leave. Think about the depopulation of the Plains States as agriculture became mechanized. There are plenty of jobs, service jobs, mostly in cities, bigger cities. Transitions are difficult. Policy needs to facilitate.
1
It's really hard to empathize with people who voted for a guy touting birtherism.
13
All nice information. You're out of a manufacturing job because of poor sales or the company is not doing well?
You would have lost your job anyway because of automation!
Americans should buy what they want. If one wants to look out for their economic self interest and purchase an imported vehicle or one assembled in a right to work state by non-union labor then more power to them. Hondas are very reliable vehicles and have been for decades. A lot of folks are crazy about their Teslas. By the way, purchasing goods from Amazon also falls into this category - points of origin notwithstanding.
Unionized burger flippers or a resurrected Word Projects Administration will not bring back that middle class wealth the US has been steadily losing.
But stop pretending that your purchasing decisions don't impact the labor employment picture or levels of union manufacturing jobs in this country. We've collectively destroyed the middle class wealth engine by our own personal decisions. There's no racism, xenophobia, PATCO firings, deplorables or dog whistles to it.
2
Displaced workers don’t just disappear, without an occupation they go to drugs or worse. Making goods and services faster, cheaper and more available isn’t always such a good thing, people need a purpose.
4
Context for declining life expectancy, opiod addiction, and suicide rates in the U.S.
Not a coincidence that the statistics driving these trends are geographically located in areas that support Trump, and the number of displaced workers this article describes.
12
This decades-long road to deindustrialization and low wages could be gradually reversed by a Congress and President who were willing to change corporate taxation and governance. This could begin to return some high value manufacturing to the US. Senator Warren has some ideas along these lines, but unfortunately she would have a difficult time selling them to a mysogynistic national electorate.
Even more daunting is the corporate campaign money that continues to successfully concentrate earnings at the top as it destroys unions. If the marginalized workers on the left and right could unite in common cause, then change would be possible. This would require an extraordinary leader.
8
Without some form of strong redistributive force for displaced jobs, we're going to end up with a lot of displaced humans. We aren't ready for that.
As for Trump, who claims his gut is so good: I want to see how he'd do in a predictive position, like forecasting for the Good Judgment Project. Let's see how he does in a real competition of analysis.
3
Thomas Edsall's opinion pieces stand out from others because of his reference to data and studies. This essay is no different, and the food for thought that it engenders is substantial. Although it's interesting that Trump's tax cuts make it more likely that manufacturers will invest in robotizing their workforce, such a trend is almost inevitable, tax cuts or not. Two things stand out to me, from the article: First, is that job loss is partially job shift from manufacturing to selling and customer service and new jobs created by a growing economy and more efficient manufacturing. Second is that the skills needed in the robot, AI-assisted economy are technical in a different way than running a lathe or machine-press. These new jobs require not programming skills (so not a degree in computer science), but software literacy (my son, with a GED, at 34 years old, took an intensive one-year course in computer software systems and switched from welding to IT and instantly quadrupled his salary and had his choice of jobs). These modifications of the work environment require that we teach different skills to our non-college students and that we adjust the salaries upward in the service and retail industries where many more people will be employed. Those older, less amenable to new learning or living away from large retail hubs will still be negatively affected, but there are changes that can mitigate job displacement.
1
Clearly the hypothetical Trump voter referenced has some visceral awareness of all this going on. Unfortunately they are mainlining Fox News and right-wing internet which insulates from any information transfer and just promotes doubling down. Underneath, as for all humans, can only be a terrible layer of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
If GOP voters wished they could pressure their Congressperson or legislature for change. (One would guess, for example, that if the Wisconsin GOP- led legislature feared losing office for blocking administrative power to further healthcare, things would change quickly).
Otherwise, to borrow from Oprah: "You get a robot...and you get a robot."
1
Dire, dire warnings from the very good Edsall, who writes about the Luddites and the disruption in the lives of many who suffered from the effects of the industrialization in England. Of course, robots and AI are creating disturbances, whether they can be linked to opiod abuse and deaths or just plain misery in other places. Yet we're like children waiting for Santa Claus as we continue to observe the advent of driverless cars! What?! Why? How about fast trains where we, as humans, could sit in cars that would safely and w/o pollution take us where we wanted to go. At this crucial time, as in other moments in history, we have as our POTUS an ignorant and unconcerned man at the helm. Jobs for those w/o college degrees? Who cares? Climate change from carbon emissions. Who cares? The situation has been outlined. C'mon voters. We need someone who has a good head on his/her shoulders along with other qualities.
4
Perhaps someday these folk will start voting for people that might help them out of this morass. Until then, they can reap what they have sown.
5
Mr. Edsall,
Unfortunately, your columns preach only to the choir.
The people who really need to be warned - and to heed that warning - don't read the Times, do not understand the effects of technology on their disappearing jobs, and instead rely on the steady drumbeat of spoon-fed lies and other-ism coming from outlets like Fox News.
So, I predict that support for the astoundingly corrupt GOP, and its standard-bearers, like Trump, will only cease once this demographic is completely decimated by time and decay.
That's sad. But as a wise man once said: it is what it is.
2
Mr Edsall's columns are so well researched, documented, and artfully strewn together that every week, I'm convinced he has a team of very smart robots working for him.
3
Ontonagon county is adjacent to Gogebic county where we have had lake cabin for over thirty years and I had patients from Ontonogan county.
The main employer back in the day was a copper mine and smelter that eventually closed. The price of copper decreased, needed environmental regulations were put in place, the copper was more difficult to extract and the ripple effect was felt throughout the county.
Robots did not have a role. There are really no jobs excepting in serving tourists, summer residents and cutting trees for pulp wood and lumber.The paper mills that use the pulp wood have been closing at a steady pace. A nearby lumber mill has been closed for a decade
It is a beautiful place but winters are severe and there are few reasons for young people to stay.
But I do not think automation or robots had any effect on the bleak picture described in this essay.
If I wrote an article about automation displacing jobs, and then gave you an example of economic decline in clear-cutting logging country, you should ask: What the heck does automation have to do with loss of logging jobs? Where's the automation?
Edsall's ending example is a head scratcher for the same reason. The Upper Penninsula of Michigan, unlike the Lower Penninsula, was never an industrial zone, and has been economically depressed since the 70s. Its towns are far, far away from any cultural centers, its potential products far away from any potential customers, and its soil not suited to crops. In its heyday it was a logging and iron mining zone. With the economics of those industries in the tank, it doesn't have much else to offer.
Because there are already many other sound explanations for the UP's economic problems, and because Edsall gives us no reason to think automation has anything to do with them, it is quite odd to cite it as evidence of Trump's policies toward robotics harming American workers.
Try looking south a few hundred miles.
1
@M Peirce Have you ever watched an automated tree feller/ buncher in action? One machine fells, limbs, cuts up a tree and loads it with one operator in an enclosed cab. It is the personification of automation. Additionally pulp from slow growth northern forests cannot compete with fast growing southern forests managed with a high degree of automation.
5
@M Peirce
Where's the automation in lumbering and mining? Are you kidding? You need to visit a mine, or a large scale logging operation in order to gawk at the increasingly very sophisticated machinery. (on in Agriculture for that matter). Of course there's always tourism, if you like wandering around in a wasteland. Or there's Marquette or Houghton; educational centers.
3
So Trump, through his tax cut, is exacerbating the social and economic conditions that most harm his core constituency, because the more alienated they feel from the economy the more vociferously they support him.
If he was thinking this through, that might be brilliant. Diabolical, but brilliant.
However, he's just acting in his own naked interest, trusting his gut. Sad!
6
and yet, don the con and the GOP keep saying job loss is due to illegal aliens, bad trade deals, and over regulation.
if they had a few synapses firing they would realize the future is to improve manufacturing efficiency with new technologies, more technological solutions, and support all of it with better education, better training and apprentice programs, and pushing hard to make the US a leader in new technologies
but the troglodites will continue to push for coal instead of solar .... gas guzzlers instead of electrics ... and poor training/education
1
Excellent article, thanks.
1
To me, the most asinine concept the GOP have created and sold to their base is the idea that somehow brown people from down south have taken their jobs away and are continuing to do so now and will so in the future.
Then the Trump Tax Scam removes incentives to hire people instead of robots! The GOP have absolutely no shame in taking money from big business in order to further erode the distance between the 1% and the rest of us. The GOP live in a sparkly bubble surrounded by fairies and a few gnomes like trump.
To what end Mitch and Don-con? Is this all just a play to get the US into a situation where there are 10,000 families who control 99% of the GNP? And the scraps (like that tax "cut" totaling $100 per Paul Ryan is a great thing!) get tossed to all the peons struggling to pay their bills.
End this misery! 2018 was just the start. 2020 is just around the corner. And if the Dems don't deliver for the 99%, I say sack them too.
2
seems like we always see the rust belt described as giving "President Trump the crucial edge" resulting in his electoral college victory. Let's begin to elaborate with "provided Vladimir Putin and his pathetic puppet a crucial edge". Or, more accurately, add voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, citizen united polluters, and other anti-democratic fascists ...
10
We have to address our main economic policies - growth, continued growth year after year making stuff and more stuff that lands in the dumps after a year or two maybe even five where before it was 20 years. Since WWII ending endless dump items have been created thru our policies. Endless items that create more harm by production that creates illness immediate and later in life. WE NEVER address these problems as part of the production cost and us taxpayers pick up the clean up costs and health costs.
And we call that progress? The rich get richer and the middle class is diminishing and living shorter lifes.
I don't buy all that stuff which is now cheaper but our necessities of life prices keeping going up. Think food, energy, travel on roads within the cities that aren't maintained so you have more car repairs needed, drugs i.e. which I now take 3 have increased 50% in the last 2 to 5 years. Yearly or every 10 years immune shots are way to expensive just because drugs companies can increase the price nilly willy. This is by design and policies that industry lobbies to get bills passed that will not hindered their insane profits.
We need an economy of sustainability and policies that do not transfer the wealth to a few.
6
In the mid 90s my brother I and noticed a tiny (maybe 6-line) article in the local newspaper (remember holding the daily paper in your hands, sharing info, and talking about it casually?). A prognosticator predicted in the future the vast majority of humans would never in their lives be employed. I thought perhaps that would work to a good future where people who spent their lives not toiling would spend them in goodness, making for better kinder people, a better kinder world, a smarter kinder use of resources, greater harmony with all of creation. After all, leaving those without an employment function in this new world to misery could not be what humanity would choose. My brother saw only darkness in those few lines. The non-employed would live lives of absolute desperation. We're clearly on track...
7
This is a story as old as the first levers, pulleys, and grain silos. Historically, workers have adapted: they've moved to new areas, developed new skills, settled for lower standards of living while ensuring their children have the education and the opportunity to do better.
So what's different this time around? Propaganda. For years, and spanning every locale in this country, there has been a concerted effort not to tell these people what's actually happening, or to put it in proper context, or to induce them to follow the jobs - both geographically and educationally - but rather to provide a consistent scapegoat, to validate their frustrations and their prejudices.
5
Businesses and industries exist to provide goods or services in order to make money. It's only common sense to assume that the most efficient way to provide those goods or services makes the most sense to those businesses and industries. The fact that both automation and AI replace the people who used to perform those tasks is irrelevant to those businesses and industries, per se. What would we have them do, stick with less efficient, and therefore more costly, ways of providing their goods and services, just so more people will have employment? I am purposely ignoring the "social costs" of this argument for the moment, concentrating, instead, on the reason these businesses and industries exist in the first place.
My Dad was a Stationary Fireman, a boiler operator in laymen's terms. When I was a boy, his job required a lot of labor to operate a coal-fired steam boiler. The powerhouse where he worked required a Stationary Engineer, a Stationary Fireman, and two helpers per shift, three shifts a day, seven days a week. By the time I was in high school, the helpers were gone, and his "job" was reduced to watching a handful of gauges and only if necessary, turning some knobs. He was then paid only for what he knew, barely for what he did. It was both more efficient, and less costly to the company, a major manufacturer everyone reading this would recognize. If it is not the "job" of business and industry, the GOP's "job creators", to solve society's employment woes, then whom?
3
In 20 years or less farm equipment will be completely autonomous run by guys at terminals hundreds or thousands of miles away in a metro area. Long haul trucking will be in the process of becoming autonomous, most likely being organized like small trains running 5-7 trailers in a line under the supervision, not control, of a couple of modestly paid conductors between highly automated freight terminals. Employment in both of these systems will be 20% of what it was. Sure, there will be highly skilled engineers, computer scientists, data analysts, etc employed upstream, but they will be relatively few and they won’t be drawn from the 80% of the workers displaced. We are staring into the abyss and doing nothing about it.
6
I do hear loud and clear how skilled workers are forced down-chain bumping low-skilled workers out of employment altogether. This creates antipathy towards new arrival/immigrants. This antipathy because immigrants are willing to move where the new jobs are. The new economy we need to build needs all these workers in some capacity, they in turn need money redistributed by a progressive tax structure to keep them in play and productive.
4
“Job losses at brick-and mortar department stores were more than made up for by new opportunities at fulfillment and call centers.”
Move a department store worker off the floor and into a cube, and no harm, no foul? Is that what we mean to suggest here: that a job is a job is a job?
1
New "suffragette" movement - one robot, one vote? After all, if money = free speech, it's the next logical step. All robots heed their master's voice, so no gerrymandering would be required, just programming.
2
Given the poor grasp of economic conditions by Trump supporters and rather irrational sentiments and conspiracy theories they share we could expect Fox News to cast robots with liberal snow flakes, "the deep state" and of course Soros, who are taking over the country...
Trump's modern day Luddites might just start destroying the (liberal) robots (bought with Trump's handouts to corporations), will see to continuing the gerrymandering or rural states and otherwise retreat to coal and ancient technics...
If only they would learn from the Amish...!
Couldn't an economic paradigm shift to total sustainability provide design / installation/maintenance jobs for humans?
@Tim Scott
Are you and your colleagues in the Senate going to find funding for retraining in the areas hardest hit by automation related unemployment? Perhaps by raising taxes on corporate profits, especially those benefiting the most from automation? Donors will never return another phone call.
3
The industrial revolution marked the beginning of the decline of the working class. Plus ca change; plus c'est la meme chose.
Kurt Vonnegut foretold this in 1952 with his satirical novel "Player Piano". A must read for anyone involved in Public Policy. Also just another great book by Vonnegut.
2
It will be a long time before robotics replace renewable energy production in part, and installation and maintenance certainly (see John Kerry's essay today). I live in New Mexico, but in a predominantly Republican neighborhood, and only the Democrats have installed rooftop solar, and this in a state with 310 days of sunshine a year. There is a link there. It's an attitude among Republicans, especially the well off: "Let 'those people' eat cake".
13
Take note: 2022 will be the year when capital investments will fall off the cliff because the capital wite offs will have to be calculated over the life time of the capital investment --> Recession!
If Democrats win the White House in 2020 they will loose it again in 2024 becasue of the economic downturn in 2023. Though nobody will rememeber that it was the Trump tax legislation that shall be the root cause.
5
Amazingly thoughtful article as per your usual, Mr. Edsall.
We couldn't stop the "progress" if we wanted to, and I'm not so sure we would want to. Let's not forget the disease, famine, extraordinarily bleak early industrialization jobs and so forth. There were problems, different problems.
Disruption it is. Painful overhaul in the way things work economically. If we could see our fellow citizens as people, not just cogs in a wheel of economic output, there may be hope.
People create, love, enjoy, care for one another, pray, and work. This can happen regardless of the disruption when - like Maslow would say- basic needs are met. If we could keep this in mind through the disruption we could maybe reduce the likelihood or revolution and provide hope and security for all.
It's amazing how the GOP has managed to convince the hardest hit sectors that the GOP can offer them hope. Sad and terrifying, actually.
2
The industrialization of agriculture has made the countryside a less fit place to live. So, in addition to all the job losses and hollowing out of rural economies, society and culture, we have the added impact of environmental and ecological degradation. Not just impoverishment but lower environmental quality. While the wealthy come in and buy up wooded land and push the locals from their traditional hunting haunts. The modern form of enclosure.
If this was not the case, why is there so much effort by the ag industry to rescind the Waters of the US? To keep the rural populace in the dark on what agriculture releases into the air and water? To have no means of monitoring and enforcement? And to have the government abdicate its responsibility, driving conflicts between those who foul and those who stand by their rights against toxic trespass, calling fouls on their neighbors.
People still have their natural senses to see, smell and taste something ain't right out here in the hinterlands. And a sense to know that none of this is sustainable.
Meanwhile, in another part of the NY Times, reporters are interviewing factory owners about their desperate search for qualified blue-collar workers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/business/economy/hiring-slowdown-job-market.html
It's a big world out there! Yes, things may change in the future, but probably not in the way anyone expects.
1
Yet again, a masterful analysis by Thomas Edsall. Clearly, his op-ed essays are a cut above virtually all other essays by columnists because of his rigorous summoning of the latest social science research and his querying of top scientists. Clearly, AI is a real, practical and immediate threat to blue collar and ultimately white collar employment in our society, and others around the world.
The only think I would quibble with is that Edsall points an accusatory finger at Donald Trump and his policies. This ongoing technological revolution is structural and global, and goes far beyond Trump. The robots we have today will most likely pale with those being produced and operational in ten to twenty years time. No doubt, a reckoning will come irrespective of who is in the Oval Office. Humans clearly have an edge in many occupational categories because robots as of yet can't do many things as well as we can. That is likely to the change. The consequences will be mixed. It will create a very new world not only of work but of human life in general. At the same time, it begs the question of how to support a labor force with increasingly smaller returns on its resources.
Unfortunately, those most affected by the impact of technology chose the charlatan who promised to bring jobs back. Understandable, but sad.
But in all fairness no politician today is addressing this issue head on. They wouldn't get elected.
I have hope that the millenials will be able to correct this when they take over. That is, if we don't destroy the political infrastructure and the environment before that happens.
These technological advancements could be a fabulous opportunity to elevate humankind. Imagine.
Imagine a country with "forceful social policy and tax policy that spreads the gains (from automation) and buffers the individual losses (from automation)." Think Germany, Japan, Korea, Sweden.
Next imagine a country where such policies barely exist and market forces are allow to run unregulated. Think US.
Now in which of these two cases are AI, robots & automation likely to trigger huge resistance, political turmoil and higher risk premium?
For the first time the US now stands at a disadvantage to other industrialized nations precisely because it continues to espouse ideologies that may have served it in another era but will now drag it down.
4
I watch a lot of home improvement shows, and one recent episode really drove home the job-shrinking effects of automation.
A contractor needed to create 50 replicas of an ornate porch baluster. He took the original to a local woodworking shop, where the shop owner used a computer-laser system to scan and cut the needed pieces. He and the contractor were excited that the job took only a few hours, noting that it would have taken two men several days to do the job on a jigsaw.
No doubt jobs were lost in that shop, and in hundreds of similar shops and businesses across the country. And the automation didn't come from a big corporation.
8
The stats make sense because, when a manufacture either built or moved a factory, they usually went where they got the best tax incentives, and where labor and Union influence wasn't a factor. If one notices, all new so called cube /small car plants, both by foreigners and domestic manufactures, were built in the southern US. Manufactures who held on in the US midwest, ares slowly being shut down. Big states like Illinois, and Pennsylvania as example have tax issues. States like NJ and New York are to be avoided .
As in any Disaster, Natural OR Manmade, the phrase “ Move, or Die “ is apt. This is NOT ye olde Pioneer Days, when farming and raising a large brood Of “ help “ was the norm. Trump Country would already be hollowed out, if not for Federal Subsistence, Of MANY varieties. Survival of the fittest ? No. Extinction of the most gullible. Sad.
6
John Henry told his captain,
"A man ain't nothin' but a man,
But before I let your steam drill beat me
Down,
I'd die with a hammer in my hand. Lord,
Lord.
I'd dies with a hammer in my hand."
3
As the Trump base watches their jobs disappear, their lives spiral even more rapidly downward, and hear or read, on the rare occasions they happen to be in front of a TV or find a national newspaper lying next to where they sit down, from "fake news" providers, all they need in turn is to hear from Trump some version of "Who are you gonna believe? Me or your lyin' eyes?" and all is right again in their world. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
5
It does not take a genius to realize that technological change has a strong impact on the labor market. Capitalism prevailing ideology is that market forces will produce new jobs that replaces lost jobs and there is no need for government intervention. The present situation in the US is a strong demonstration that the prevailing ideology is profoundly misguided. Trump won the votes of displaced workers by campaigning against the prevailing capitalist ideology but his proposed solution of restoring old jobs by bluster will never work and can only result in even more alienation from workers searching for a living wage. It is time to recognize that the US needs a government that invests in creating jobs by embracing new technologies that will make the US competitive with other industrial nations. One must also recognize that manufacturing is going the way of agriculture, where few people are needed to produce all the goods that everybody needs. It is thus important to review how people are to be given the means to acquire those goods. Either salaries in non-manufacturing jobs are high enough to afford the manufactured goods or the price of goods have to fall to match the salaries.
3
“Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated,” Elon Musk added later.
It doesn't help that we have an administration that is defined by an erratic leaders's tweets and indiscretions. It's shameful but not too surprising that next to no actual work is getting done for the country.
1
Since the robots don't have brown skin, Trump and his supporters don't care.
1
Why do American voters turn to the right when faced with this situation?
4
The toxin to value-add labor isn’t automation, it’s commoditization
The antidote to commoditization is artisanal innovation and differentiation
Whether electric cars or craft breweries or burger joints or custom clothing, possibilities are – conceptually – limitless
Some go viral – like iPhones – commoditizing their artisanship, but spawning whole new areas of software and entertainment job opportunity
Fully autonomous cars – not in wide use for at least a decade
But increased assist vastly improves safety – and let people continue to drive for longer
If NYC spent a hundredth of what’s spent on autonomy – to improve traffic flow using AI – they could likely reduce average transit time by a third
This is real – just not in NYC
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/nvidia-picks-up-alibaba-and-huawei-as-partners-for-smart-city-platform/
Instead, we have manual subway switchpoints, using 100 year old tech
Last, jobs themselves can be commoditized – designed as unskilled non-productive make-work that lessens quality of life for all
Compare:
> Security procedure for an Uber ride vs a plane ride
> Signing up for Amazon Prime vs Medicare or Obamacare
Ultimate misread by economist elites – one job is good as another, and can be coerced to pay the same
Doesn’t revitalize our Main Streets – it Potemkinizes them
As far as your nihilist outlook – if automation were that automatic, we should have no problem onshoring every industry that ever left
Y’know – like China’s doing
We have to start thinking seriously about how many people will be required to design, build and run the machines and what will be done with those who are increasingly economically redundant. My guess is that an order of magnitude reduction is about right and fortunately that is probably about the number of humans the Earth can support at a universal middle class standard of living. Obviously we should have started on population control at least fifty years ago, but limiting couples to one child could get us where we need to be in three or so generations. Alternatively, given the negative externality of bringing another child into an already crowded world, a strong case can be made for a tax surcharge (not a credit) that increases exponentially on offspring beyond one child per family for those who prefer a less heavy-handed approach.
2
@Earl W.
I read into your last comment that only the rich would be able to afford more than one child?
@mariamsaunders No, anyone who values an additional child more than the tax surcharge will be able to have as many as they can afford. It's a matter of personal preference just like any other use of personal income. I don't expect you to subsidize my purchase of gasoline or other carbon-based fuels, so why should you expect me to subsidize your choice to have more than one child?
2
@Earl W.
No kids, so your comment is lost on me. However, everyone pays for gasoline costs, so in effect you are asking everyone to pay for your purchase of gasoline. I won't make the assumption that you have one of those gas guzzling vehicles.
This article is riddled with facts!
7
I have family in Peoria, IL home of Caterpillar. They asked me to invest in property there. I told them, 'your parents house is worth $100,000. It was worth $100,000 ten years ago, it will be worth $100,000 in ten years. Why do I want to invest in that?'
They are Trump voters. They are good, hard working honest people. 6 months ago they thought he was doing a good job. They don't feel that way now.
The more the press keeps exposing the dichotomy of what is good for Trump and the Rich, vs. what Trump is doing to the working class, the less people of good hearts will be conned by him.
They now say they don't think he will be re-elected.
Democrats, don't screw this up.
25
Automation and AI will continue to push wealth upward, as billionaires, billion-dollar corporations and multi-millionaires have Congress in their grip. That cohort also learned a lesson from their Industrial Age counterparts: How to appear to be helping the people they're crushing while depicting those who might help them as evil. And this will continue until there is another significant historical event: A bloody insurrection and/or revolution.
The de-education of the west is finally beginning to show flaws. These blue collar workers assumed they would always be needed to perform the type of work which has been around for hundreds of years. AI is beginning to show us where the cracks are, and don't expect AI to slow down. It will continue to work it's way through the more educated work force until all humans will see that that they will be able to be replaced. I used to think that I would never live long enough to see this happen, but now I am thinking that I just might.
Earth to Trump Country, USA: your lifetime gigs are over. It's time to stop ridiculing "that other side" (everyone else but your sect) and start embracing infrastructure bills and solar farms. Where, gee, you can actually find new lifetime gigs!
8
Don't worry, we will Socially build a Wall of many forms, politically, culturally, all Social to prevent us from having empathy for the 'losers'.
As the population of the earth grows from 7.6 billion to over 9 billion by year 2150 and automation reduces world wide jobs from about 4 billion to 2 billion, climate disruption will also drastically decrease historically arable land and fresh water, and populations will migrate to survive.
The severity of the looming consequences of over population, coupled with the disruption caused by a changing earth climate, will depend on how much of the wealth generated by technology, (robotics), is shared and how well human reproduction is reduced.
Six billion starving and out of work humans will not remain docile and immobile while their children die and a walled off one millionth of one percent own the world.
The politics, borders, gated communities and armies of the past will not work in the new world that is fast approaching, nor should it.
A plan for the 1%?
Is this the beginnings of the imagined utopia where mankind is freed from drudging labor to free his/her mind to thought. The world of the Jetsons? Or just as the population swells to the greatest numbers ever there won't be anything for billions and billions of people to do but starve to death and die in poverty? Will they do so lightly and willingly?
And then who will buy all the output if there is no money to buy as since everyone is replaced by robots. And if we just give people money to spend to keep the robots going then how will we be different from ant colonies where we exist just to exist?
1
@Marie
Robot consumers?
1
Be Explicit. It means people are not being paid what they are worth and business is using the stolen cash to buy robots.
The result is that half of the supposed positive effects of automation: 3, higher incomes increase demand for jobs throughout the economy & 4, technology may replace specific tasks rather than entire jobs
Those entertainment jobs sited, are not jobs you can raise a family on. Take even a skilled job at Disneyworld in costumes.
The are low paid contract temp jobs that do not provide those workers with funding to enjoy what they themselves provide.
Ditto restaurants. Extrordinary creatives? How extrortinary does one have to be to earn a living wage If Disney isn't good enough?
My job is a partial job left that cannot be replaced by a robot. I alter expensive clothing that despite it's cost does not meet the wearer's needs — to fit. While it pays double what the sales people earn, still, it only pays what we all know should be today's minimum wage of $15 and are thought of as those lowly toadish ignorants who do things with their hands, helping management to not pay us well.
Call it out like it is. This is a political problem, not an economic one. It's not populist to say business lies cheats and steals all workers who add value that mysteriously appears only in the C-suite. It's just the truth.
1
The ultimate goal of corporations is to zero out their labor force and to replace them with robots, A.I., and apps. For a robot doesn't need paid sick leave, a pension, or time off to rest. For those who voted for Trump fearing they may lose their job to an illegal immigrant, I pray for you. For your replacement will be Robby the robot wearing a red MAGA hat. For robots at a Trump rally can clap on cue, not ask tough questions, and chant "Lock Her up!" in unison. The perfect political fan base for Trump. Of course this could never happen here, right?
5
Did you mention all the ROBOTS that will be making robo-calls to spew falsehoods to his base, again ?
All the BOTS Russia will deploy again, to saturate '(anti)Social Media' with misinformation ?
Robots may do the work, but they STILL do it at the direction of humans.....
And the right humans can make the transition to a robo-economy more humane…. and that's where the Democrats need to enter the room.
3
It is not a mystery why people displaced and reduced by capitalism turn to capitalist. They want jobs not hand outs and who is going to provide the jobs? But capitalism is greedy and will take and take until the discord is so great they are hung and put in prison and their wealth is taken from them and they will cry what did we do to deserve this? Ah, let them eat cake all over again.
1
This might be the first time that a brilliant write up by you is triggering a mix of schadenfreude and rage.
Trump cannot stop automation (AI, robots, et al). Yes, his tax policy is accelerating the process, and yes it is destroying the socioeconomic viability of his most ardent supporters.
Was your analysis moved by evidence that the same segment drank deeply from the tub of Kool Aid? Of xenophobia and bigotry? Then gave full vent to their nascent and dormant religious-ethnic nationalism? That it triggered hostility and violence toward immigrants and "others" throughout the country?
And what are you proposing now? An affirmative action plan for white males without college degrees hurt by automation? Enlightened government intervention to help people who hate the government? I suppose paid for by the likes of me?
I vote: Nah.
Just nah.
Translation: Trump supporters can be replaced by robots!
4
Trump voters were right; they're losing their jobs to non-English speakers. They just didn't realize their language would be C++, not Spanish.
13
Wow, there is a lot of short-sighted gloating here. Let me clue the highly-educated in on how this advancement of robotics and AI is going to work. Yesterday, the farm jobs. Today, the factory jobs. Tomorrow, retail jobs. The day after that, taxi drivers and truck drivers. The day after that, paralegals. Then accountants, then lawyers, then engineers, then surgeons... Are you bilingual? Who cares, we have Google Translate. Are you a musical composer or writer? Who cares; instead of the proverbial one thousand monkeys on typewriters writing a novel we have a billion monkeys working the speed of light... and they WILL be capable of producing your work.
2
@Jim most highly educated people believe that they will always have a job. No matter what happens, until they are affected, they think it's the other person who failed to think of the future. Therefore these people will not support any program that gives money to people in need, allows for someone who graduated high school (or not) to be retrained without paying for it, and will support punitive social policies. I've listened to plenty of people say that anyone who can't find a job isn't trying hard enough. They have no idea what it's like to search and search and get no response.
3
50% of any job, except maybe the highest execs, is routine. Complicated, but still routine. Robots will take those tasks from almost every position resulting in situation where we need fewer people in that position. I would bet my 401k that robots will eliminate very few job descriptions in large firms. They will slash the number of humans that have each job description. Laugh now at factory workers. Inside of twenty years, you had better be the very best or you will not be there. Most firms will be similar to law, consulting or investment firms. Entry jobs will go to people that have the talent to soar in the organization. Then the firm winnows away people over a career. If a firm does not think you might succeed to a level 2-3 above your entry point, why should they invest the time?
1
Propaganda works on people who don't have time to read this article, don't have time to sift truth from fiction, are targeted by Facebook chatbots, and go home every night to watch the most attractive telecasters, Fox News and Foxnews affiliate, who offer the easy answer to the problems of their day, in 10 second sound bytes.
1
What we need in this country is a national conversation about work, pay, and what is going to become of people when the number of decent jobs falls well below the number of people needing employment. It's happening now but we keep on hearing our politicians (and others) telling us that if we really, really want to work we can find jobs.
I really really want to work. But I'm 60. I have worked in IT and in biological research. I switched(retrained) for IT when jobs in research dried up. Why? I had over 15 years experience in research and even then, in the 90s, no one wanted to pay for that. I started over and had some good jobs in IT. Then I was "downsized" 3 months before my 55th birthday. Since then I've existed on contract jobs, one permanent job that was eliminated thanks to Trump, and one temporary job that I found after 14 months of unemployment. I'm far from the only person with this experience.
This country is going to experience more severe social problems if it continues to allow corporations to send jobs overseas, deprive people of the right to unionize to protect themselves against what management does, and refuse to pay people decent salaries while overpaying CEOs. There are reasons countries have revolutions. Keeping people in poverty, refusing to acknowledge real needs, and not enough decent jobs are just a few.
People want to work and support themselves. It's the companies that don't want to hire, train, or pay.
2
This is one of those politicized articles that help make NYT readers feel like they know what's best for Trump supporters (and, of course, it is all things that Trump isn't). It's hard to evaluate the issues when there's an outside motive.
What really helps the educated/professional class and hurts the working class here are not robots, but sweatshops overseas (which are treated as secondary here.) The verdict is still out whether Trump can diminish off-shoring, out-sourcing, etc. through his trade negotiations. (I hope he can; but I'm not betting on it.) It would be interesting to know if there are new tax or other incentives for companies to specifically hire, as opposed to automate. I wish there was an objective evaluation of Trump's "opportunity zones" initiative here. Even in non-opinion articles, it's hard to get reliable information these days.
2
Wonderful column, as usual. I suggest, however, that the call for more education is based on a mistaken diagnosis. People are by nature highly adaptable, and we are all born learning machines. But very few jobs require advanced education. Most can provide all the necessary education with a few weeks of training, at least for people who can read, write, do arithmetic and show up on time. Although many people have those basic skiils, too many in the impoverished rural communities with their impoverished schools, declining churches, and desperate hopes for divine intervention have lost their capacity to learn, and be flexible.They have been socialized to dislike and distrust education, discouraged in their natural curiosity, and undercut in their ability to solve personal problems. So their ability to learn has diminished or disappeared, and their adaptability has become frozen. So I would say jobs, yes, but first let’s revitalize the rural villages and towns with the measures Iowa’s former governor Tom Vilsack and others have proposed. Create a learning environment for everyone, and everyone will be able to adapt to the new AI era.
@Keithofrpi " Create a learning environment for everyone"
Yeah, good luck with that. I can't see that happening among the 'the earth is only 6000 years old' crowd that makes up most of rural 'Murica.
1
Trump appears to be a “linear thinker” which means that he does not anticipate secondary consequences. This may be a useful quality in real estate deals but is a handicap in strategic thinking and planning.
He’s been lucky so far; the country hasn’t faced a major national crisis. There have been local one’s, but local governments have managed them reasonably well.
Without a strong management team, I wonder how Trump will handle a national crisis.
Saving some of the 59000 mining jobs while, as predicted a few years ago, retail workers numbering 250,000 will be discarded along with their time cards. I fear for my kids in their early 20's who choose not to get $100,000 in debt followed by 15 years of loan payments.
1
"Overall, according to Autor,
'employment is growing steadily, and its growth in terms of number of jobs has not been discernibly dented by technological progress.'"
It might be wise to consider where the employment growth of recent decades has come from. It occurs to me that the bulk of it has not come from "the creation of new wants" as the neoliberals would have it but from the monetization of activities that we used to perform for one another out of dedication or delight. Take the case of youth sports. Not all that long ago , youth sports were organized at the community level and taken care of by volunteers. In the past 40 years, we have watched this system change into an eleven figure "industry" (not including the dollars spent on youth sports travel.) Whether the development is good or bad can be debated at another time; the point is that this once voluntary activity has already been fully "professionalized." The question as we look forward is whether most such activities -from caring for relatives to caring for our own homes - have already been turned into industries that have already become saturated. If most conceivable services are already for sale, the prospects for continued employment growth, even low or modest paying employment, may be unable to match that of recent decades. If technology continues to replace workers and we have already turned most human services into paid work, it is time to begin thinking about new ways of organizing ourselves as a society.
4
Reagan said that people should vote with their feet by moving to where the jobs were, implicitly, in the 1980s, to non-union, low wage sunbelt states. In this way, the safety net would be undermined as would collective bargaining. Call it neo-Reaganism if you want, but of course young people should leave dying areas of the country for places where there are jobs. However, it is up to both government and corporations to train young people for what awaits. There has to be a three-way bargain: Government and the private sector have to share the training duties and young people have to get off their behinds and stop listening to their elders who sit around in coffee shops talking about illlegal immigrants and Trump bernging coal back.
1
One of the best suggestions I’ve heard is for robot owners to pay social security taxes. This recognizes the externality cost to society of displacing human beings.
7
Once jobs have been sufficiently decimated people will no longer have the ability to buy much except bare necessities. Rich people can only consume so much. Then what happens to all those products?
This article concentrates on blue collar jobs. Most white-collar jobs that don't involve call centers and reception desks are similarly destined to be automated. We already know the pain and frustration of automated phone systems, so it's obvious many of those jobs can also be automated out of existence. IT, Finance, retail, custodians, you name it - the jobs will be gone within a decade.
We are fast regressing to feudal times.
3
About 2 years ago, I toured the Harley-Davidson motorcycle plant in York, Pa. It is a unionized plant that used to employ about 6,000 workers. Now it employs about 2,800 workers. Many of the people taking the tour were men wearing Harley t-shirts from their local dealerships -- committed Harley riders.
The tour guide -- who was British, by the way -- started out his talk, before we stepped onto the plant floor, with these words: "Straight away, I want to tell you that these motorcycles are essentially made by robots."
A lot of the t-shirt wearers looked a little crestfallen at that statement, but as we toured the plant, it became obvious that this was the case. Most of the human workers tended the computers that powered the robots. We found out toward the end of the tour that the only jobs in the plant that were strictly done by humans were custom-paint jobs (regular paint jobs were robotized) and the final test driving of the bikes.
There was a period in the 1970s when Harley-Davidson motorcycles were not very reliable or well-made. Now they are reliable and well made -- but they are made by robots.
Times change.
7
The International Institute for Sustainable Development in Winnipeg, Canada, estimates that the mining industry will lose more than half its jobs to automation in the next decade. That is based not on future technologies but robotics already deployed today in the form of automated drilling and tunnel boring systems, self-driving trucks and automated loaders. Now being tested and soon to come are fully autonomous trains which can carry materials from the mine to a port. Most affected will be miners in the lesser-skilled trades, including heavy-equipment operators, drivers and maintainers. This will increase demand for people with IT skills who can set up and operate the automation systems -- but at far smaller numbers than the people automation displaces. Local communities, dependent on mining employment, will be hard hit.
4
My father grew up on a subsistence farm in rural upstate New York. When I went back to visit the cousins in 2000 the small town, about five blocks long with one traffic light, was largely populated by people on welfare or Social Security. Farming was done by corporations and small landholdings had been sold to pay for living expenses. The farm he and his nine siblings grew up on had been sold to someone who was using the property for hunting, building a new chalet style home.
To some extent small farms are surviving by converting to specialty products (kiwi fruit, long haired goats) and some people are focusing on artisan food and/or crafts. Community colleges provide some jobs and training.
In other countries, the state supports certain activities. Many countries provide pay, education benefits and jobs to athletes. This is one model where the state itself provides the "work" and a path to a meaningful career. Here, sports teams are privately owned and the owners are the wealthy.
In a world where pay is no longer measured by the amount produced, but may be supported by the uniqueness of an individual's skills, there will be room for those with limited formal education to make a decent living. But we do need to change the education structure and the definition of personal success, and certainly the government support systems.
2
These Trump voters think they're losing jobs to non-English speakers. But will this Wall keep the robots out?
11
Capitalism means that if you can figure out a way to get rich, you can get rich. But it also means that if your skills become irrelevant you will be replaced unless you adapt.
5
Mckinsey Global Institute has a nice report (September 2018), Notes from the AI-Frontier: Modeling the impact of AI on the world economy.
Computer control makes things better, safer. Elimination of physical distribution (DVDs --> Streaming, Hard copy--> E-text) is better, but concentrates the profit.
How to help with the displaced workers (Truckers, Lawyers, Fastfood workers etc) is a value judgement. If we value people, then we will distribute the rewards of automation and AI to the benefit of all. If we don't value people, we will use the rewards to control/reduce the population.
In the spirit of the season, "Are there no prisons, .... and the Union workhouses?"
1
Democrats won't prevail until this article is rewritten in language the workers most affected by automation can understand. (This isn't intended as a slur against their intelligence; only an acknowledgement that the lack of education that put them in this predicament also makes it harder for them to understand it.)
6
Syntels need not be conscious to wreak havoc: MIT suggests 90% of careers could be 'syntellized' by 2075-80. Symbolic & judgmental functions [e.g., poesy, dramaturgy, policy] will remain ours til 22nd-C. Guaranteed annual incomes of 50K+ will be essential to stoke demand [basis of prosperity]. Denizens of Neander-Vale: make ready!
1
It's the same every time finance or industry writes new tax cuts or new deregulation for itself. The only new profits spent on workers will be spent on the media and politicians and think tanks that tell them that enriching the rich is good for the middle class, and that their suffering is the fault of the greedy poor and undeserving immigrants. They've got the con down pat.
4
That the Reality Show Con Artist is a liar, a grifter and a fraud has never really been the problem.
The problem is the US public that elected him President and our lack of understanding of who we need to help lead us in the future.
Much was made of the fact that we needed "new blood", someone who was "outside of the beltway" who was "not a politician".
So we elected a businessman who declared bankruptcy six times over a "professional" politician who had experience dealing with the issues of trade, jobs and the economy.
Overlooking the fact that the grifter in chief's only real success seems to be in self promotion, this ideology is the exact opposite of what we need. I hire professional roofers, mechanics and tax accountants. Why would I want a schlep representing me in Congress or the Presidency?
According to the logic of the times, my New York Knicks problem in the disastrous hiring of Phil Jackson wasn't that the successful coach had no idea of how to be a General Manager. It was that they should have hired someone who had no experience in Basketball at all.
4
"We need to build a wall to keep out the people who're stealing our jobs."
- I didn't know that Mexico has been sending robots into the US.
"We need to bring manufacturing back into nthe US."
- Except all thos "jobs" are going to be given to robots.
"Communities with high unemployment are the ones hit hardest by the opiod crisis."
- Who cares; the factories can still run with robots, because robots don't get addicted to opiods.
See, Trump's making America great (grait?) again!
Love,
C3PO and R2D2
6
I have a serious allergy to “pitchforks and torches” which is where we are headed unless Americans wake up and begin to elect thoughtful, servant leadership at all levels of government. That leadership must both understand these powerful disruptive and dislocating forces and have a plan for economic and social policies that gradually move toward fair, ethical and balanced sharing of the productivity gains of technological advances. Donald J Trump and apparently the entire GOP are the antithesis of thoughtful, servant leaders.
7
It is very easy to handicap the next two years. Trump is uniquely self-absorbed with essentially no genuine feelings for anyone or anything else. Trump will pursue that which preserves and increases his wealth, fame, and power. Nothing else is of interest to him - oh, and he is also the laziest person ever to occupy the Oval Office.
3
@Jason Shapiro
Nobody else has ever watched TV, stuffed his face and played golf all day.
Yes, let's elect people who recognize that they are servants of the people and NOT special for having been elected.
2
Well of course, it's all the fault of automation. The solution is to teach a machinist how to make a buggy whip.
3
It appears that "bots" were and continue to be the most significant supporters of Trump. Whether working for the FSB, GRU or Cambridge Analytica, let's face it, bots swung the election, especially in the square states and rust belt to Trump.
Next BFF and consistent supporter of Trump, the 1% of the 1% that benefited most from the $1.5 Trillion giveaway, otherwise known as the Trump Tax Cut: FOX OWNER & Friends in Big Oil & Gas.
4
Bleak. Where is Dickens?
IA, and machinery replacing the human touch are a boon to mankind if... if we set up the taxing structures, rules, regulations to ensure all share in the wealth. Minimum stipends, healthcare, education and housing as a start. Socialism? No. Ownership remains as do the profits with the corporation-you know corporations are people. However, corporations need to pay their share to avoid tearing apart of our country in a war zone of the few haves against an army of the nots.
And those who think the well-educated are immune look at medical science and treatment. Is it beyond reason to imagine AI examining a biopsy and concluding the type of cancer,outlook and treatment? Dr. McCoys' tricorder effectiveness raised to the tenth power. Fantasy? Who'd have thought toll collectors, cashiers, warehouse workers and job after job would be eliminated? And not just repetitive, sorting, counting occupations but like McCoy too where art and science merge into AI replacing a human. To far into futurism? How about blood sampling? Maybe not today or tomorrow but eventually.
A responsible response from government-us- is needed if the reaction to AI is not more porridge, please.
230
@Alan Schleifer
I agree with Alan entirely but I want more decisive evidence that the tax change from amortizing over the life of the capital investment to deducting the whole value now leads to robots and not job-creating capital investments (as it was designed to do). Doesn't such a deduction also spur investment in new capital projects entirely? Even if those would in the past have had no robots and now do have robots, they create jobs. If we go back to the capital investments in the original factories of the 20th century, they were huge labor-savers, too, ending many jobs through efficiency, but the capital investment made the society richer. As Alan has argued, then as now, the wealth just wasn't shared.
4
@Alan Schleifer I don't hear anyone making the obvious point: is there someone forcing us to adopt technologies that eliminate jobs? No, there is not. It is an economic choice, and a political one. If we make different choices, the results will be different.
Our choices as a society depend on what we make our priorities. To date we have made economic growth and productivity our priorities. Problem is, they do not necessarily translate to better lives for most Americans. Industrial robots allow the production of goods at a lower cost. Is that actually beneficial to everyone in society? Not to the people whose factory jobs are eliminated. It's all very well to talk about government programs to help those people. Such programs often don't work. Retraining only helps those who have the ability to learn and do something else - not everyone does. Income support measures may keep displaced workers from starving, but don't keep them from alienation and all of the social ills that proceed from alienation. So why not simply decide that these priorities are not the ones we ought to have? If they don't produce good results for the entire community, discard them.
9
@Alan Schleifer Fully agree. We are in an intermediate phase where robots are built to perform working class jobs only.
The next decade will be the A.I. era where machines will learn how to perform college educated, highly skilled, middle class jobs.
Robots create unemployment in red districts, A.I. will create unemployment in blue districts.
20
Automation and AI are important labor saving technologies and in the long run make life better for all. Just look at the Bobcat, a small tracked vehicle used to dig and move material. It is better at scooping up and carrying than digging. Every ton of dirt dug, scooped up or carried by a Bobcat could be dug, scooped up or carried by workers using picks, shovels and wheelbarrows. The Bobcat is operated by one worker. The Bobcat can dig, scoop and carry more dirt in one day than 10 workers can dig, scoop and carry in several days. Do we want to get rid of Bobcats and go back to picks, shovels and wheelbarrows?
I realize that automation at the Bobcat level is primitive by the standards of today's factory automation. It is an example of automation that most people have observed. That is no so with today's factory automation that few have actually observed and even fewer understand.
Automation is successful when it both produces a better product and saves labor.
Automation doesn't just happen. It is the product of creative, skilled workers and capital investment.
If you want to understand how and why automation is expanding, look at government policies that reward the formation of capital and ever larger corporate entities.
79
@OldBoatMan
Well, this is not going to be a popular topic for discussion, but population control needs to be considered here as well.
Sure, some people want to have millions of children, but with AI, what kind of future will they have? What jobs are going to be available?
I'm not suggesting the old 1 child per family model, but people need to realize the world is changing quickly and families need to understand and prepare for this very different future.
41
@Butterfly - We don't have to use the force of law to reduce births, we can use market incentive. We can start by eliminating the child tax credit and by widely distributing birth control free of charge. But keep in mind the unintended consequences; a small number of young to care for (and subsidize) a large number of elderly. This is a crisis in Japan today.
26
@Butterfly If, as has been predicted, AI begins to replace the "creative class" by teaching itself and learning through experience it begs the question, "What are people for?".
13
This is not a Trump issue though he and Congress simply are fighting the last war. Both parties spent 1/2 the rhetoric they spend on China trade wars in fixing the real threat to employment - Automation, we'd be much further along
10-20 years from now:
4.6M retail sales people and 3.5M cashiers - Retail stores without people
3.5M truck drivers - automated trucks/cars
3.5M Food preparation - Robotic systems already in the field
3M - Office Clerks - in the 1960's 1:20 worker were secretaries - this categories is already in sharp decline
2.75M registered nurses - we will need more of them
2.5 Customer service reps - gone to automation
2.25M accountants and bookkeepers - 1/2 gone to automation
It keeps going into skilled labor - Dermatologists and Radiologists - AI driven pattern recognition.
Without a fundamental doubling down on education, we face real labor displacement. Our real concern with the Chinese and Asian countries is their focus on education
247
@Chris. Hard to understand your numbers. I was educated (BS in Forestry including much science and math) to understand the abbreviation M =1000. I believe you are abbreviating a million, (yes, no?) which would be= MM.
If I am wrong, would someone please update my understanding? I have sen M used as an abbreviation for a million in a local paper and wondered if it was proper.
2
@LaPine - M used to be 1000 (back in the day when I was a EE/Computer science person), but today people have moved to indicating M as Million. Look at most company financial statements. Only a few people adhere to the MM (thousand, thousand) format. That said, these are the largest job categories from the BLS. Simply put, the largest job categories are subject to fundamental disruption.
9
@Chris
The problem is hardly AI and automation. The problem is - what of the unskilled, uneducated Trumpites that are now hurt? AI and automation is here to stay, displacement of unskilled workforce will occur abruptly and in massive scale.
What could congress or Trump, or anyone, possibly do? Try to stop it? Try to slow it? It would certainly help out a lot of countries trying to compete with us.
If congress touches this, they will tax automation, and create a welfare-like, dependence-triggering, affirmative action for unemployed Trumpites. The government will take the money from people engaged in the civic process and are productive to feed the dependency of people who are making poor choices and hate the government. Why would any thinking person support such a move, if such a move is offered as a remedy?
4
My entire adult working life, it has felt like there's been a target on my back. Robots are just the latest manifestation of how those targets get painted on the backs of workers. Somehow, by hook or by crook, the executive suite was going to figure out a way to get rid of them, their health insurance and their FICA payments.
By contrast, when my dad had his career, his company flew him to training seminars in computing, moved him around in jobs so he'd learn the big picture, allowed him to be a manager, treated him like he was worth investing in.
Maybe having a target on their backs makes working class whites feel discriminated against, which makes them lash out at minorities for claiming they do not have the right to claim discrimination. Too bad, it could actually be a method for uniting all of them against those who are painting the targets - but now I will be accused of class warfare. Globalization has removed the ruling class' need for community or acknowledgement of others' lives outside their numerous gated communities across the globe they dominate.
426
@Marguerite Sirrine Thank you for your comment. I agree, but I think the problem is also a culture that praises individuality and unfettered capitalism - a lack of regulation and low taxes. Those tax breaks are going to the bosses, not to workers. I wish the working class would realize that unions and higher taxes would benefit them. The real travesty here is that they vote Republican. Democrats need to embrace the working class, not shy away from putting regulations on big business, and not be so beholden to Wall Street.
157
@Marguerite Sirrine - The (R)egressive's decades-long campaign against any form of regulation means Capital Wins.
47
@Marguerite Sirrine It is class warfare and the middle and lower classes are losing. Big Time. Those with targets painted on them, and I'm one of them too, need to realized that the wealthy are waging class warfare on the rest of us.
101
A story that qualifies for inclusion in a Kafka work. Workers have heard the false promise of retraining for "new and better jobs" for many years from different administrations only to discover hot air. Higher education beyond high school is shockingly expensive, requiring aspiring students to go into the dark hole of deep debt as they cross into adulthood. Defaults on repayment potentially ruins them for life.
One can only wonder if members of congress who allowed this were aware of the law of unintended consequences? Or, did they even care who was hurt as long as the hands that butter their bread were kept warm?
349
@Doc
Clearly the latter. When has congress ever thought beyond their own welfare.
19
@Doc
Just read any Thomas Friedman column. The onus is on the worker to retrain, at their expense, for the "jobs of tomorrow". What are those jobs we are gambling our savings on? "Well, it's really too early to say." replies the corporate stooge, but the upshot is, if you fail, its your fault.
53
Dear @Doc
you say:
"Workers have heard the false promise of retraining for "new and better jobs" for many years from different administrations only to discover hot air."
With one exception real air generating wind electricity. Wind farms displacing dirty fossil fuels from Iowa to Germany, from California to the Greek Island, and from Sweden to Australia have created tens of thousands of well paying jobs in the new emerging economy.
3
The warnings come every day and from all angles, but that is not why I am writing in response to this fascinating article that could be a successful strategy to engaging and educating the working class. Although the cultural complexities go beyond a letter to the editor, it is not "illegals" that are invading and infesting our country, resulting in loss of jobs while they abuse social services - it is end stage capitalism without regard for its societal and cultural responsibilities, and beholden only to its investors, that is to blame for much of what ails the "flyover" states. The loss of an informed labor class is a loss that we will all feel fairly soon.
765
@Chris Clark How do you reign-in capitalism?
2
@Chris Clark It is a loss felt presently. Many of the working class whites who have been displaced by machinery voted for Trump and his irrational empty promises to return them to jobs that had become obsolete. Adding to the unemployment rolls, and those who do find other work, do so at a fraction of their wages and benefits. This decreases demand, increases supply, and results in a spiral of layoffs (note: the 14,000 GM workers). Decreased demand is showing on Wall St with the pre recession wild fluctuations of the Dow, which will eventually spiral downwards .
36
@JiMcL How do you reign in capitalism?
With democracy.
53
First, it was the undocumented immigrants stealing our jobs. Then it was China -- not to mention Bangladesh. Now it's the robots. None of them votes in our elections. For workers disinterested in or incapable of learning new job skills -- like Walmart greeter? -- there was no remedy. But now comes the Savior Trump, promising restoration of traditional industrial jobs. To accompany his absolute monarchy, so boisterously supported by the jobless, the patient if hapless unemployed worker now encounters new requirements to qualify for government assistance while waiting for the promised job opportunities to emerge: Work! Ye who have caused the emergence of our modern monarchy must work before the favors of the Crown will be bestowed. There's plenty to do. Walmart greeter? Or tending to the needs of the Monarch at his Palm Beach Winter Palace or other palatial properties. For minimum wages. Which won't be increased by the King's Courtiers. Otherwise known as congressional Republicans -- so inaptly denominated.
9
@Richard What is your problem with Walmart greeters? Most of them are elderly, retired, and trying to supplement their Social Security and meager (if any) pensions.
2
@Richard
The real reason was that Trump promised fake help while the Democrats showed no interest in the problem. They were too pre-occupied with identity politics.
3
@Richard: There won't be many jobs at the Monarch's Palm Beach Winter Palace (or his other Monarch Brand properties) if the Monarch keeps hiring those non-voting undocumented immigrants, so scratch those jobs from your list.
6
Let them Stink or Swim - they sorely harm the current puny effort to tackle income inequality, literacy, and climate change.
By the way, how much effort at the Times is made to cover Income Inequality?
I'm not blaming it per se - most media have been controlled by the Corporate State for 40 years.
2
[We are] in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and evil. The automatic factory and the assembly line without human agents are only so far ahead of us as is limited by our willingness to put such a degree of effort into their engineering […]
There is no rate of pay at which a United states pick and shovel laborer can live which is low enough to compete with the work of a steam shovel as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions. […]
[T]aking the second revolution as accomplished, the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money to buy. The answer, of course, is to have a society based on human values other than buying or selling. [...]
I write this is in 1947, and I am compelled to say that is a very slight hope.
Quoted from _Cybernetics_. 2nd. Edition by Norbert Wiener. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1961. Pages 27-29.
2
Some economists tell us not to worry because the elimination of jobs is "creative destruction".
The economy would probably benefit from the "creative destruction" of a few economics professors' jobs.
4
The jobs of the mid-21st century? Renewable energy. Smart grids. Developing, and building, resilient infrastructure. The future economy is one of adapting to climate change, the sooner we figure that out, the better we'll ALL be.
9
Robots also improve the quality of manufactured goods. The basic key to quality improvement is to settle on a formula and keep doing the same thing over and over. Remove the human factor and statistical quality control specifications will tighten. As we seek longer lifetimes in our vehicles this will tend to our keeping them longer and thus will, with other factors such as AI, depress the car market. For most electronic goods nowadays quality is such that the great majority of discarded items (TVs, phones, VCRs, computers) are in perfect working order: they are just outdated.
7
@Andrew - I think you are conflating causes. People aren't throwing away more working things because things are made better. People are throwing away working things because planned obsolescence has accelerated. In 1990 you probably had the same telephone on your kitchen wall that you bought in 1980. Now people buy a new iPhone every 2 years just because.
2
@Andrew Actually, I work in the electronics industry as a reliability engineer. As our electronics are getting increasingly sophisticated, we are getting to the point where electronics really do "wearout"; the solder joints eventually crack from changing temperatures, the memory chips lose the ability to retain memory, the processors slow down, LEDs displays lose their brightness and power connectors wear thin.
I am not sure that Ontonagon County is "at an extreme".
Much of the woes documented here can be found in probably half of Maine's 16 counties, mutatis mutandis.
For example, large-scale timber harvesting is now done by huge machines displacing who knows how many workers.
These machines aren't robots -- yet.
5
The idea that you will replace humans in service jobs is silly. Those very industries are utilized because of the human factor. I work in Analytics and I spend my days with machines. I don't want my off time to focus on them too.
That said, I feel for these people, but I also know the reality on the ground is a bit different. Many of these white males have been entitled to jobs for generations. If they chose not to finish High School someone took care of them and made sure they had work. If they made poor decisions they were entitled to extra help because they were white men. Things came to them without huge effort while everyone not in their tribe was held down.
Welcome to the world most of the rest of us live in. We've been fighting and scraping for hundreds of years. All of this whining and complaining sometimes rubs me quite the wrong way. Whatever happened to "pull yourself up and do what you have to do to survive"? I spent some time trying to help a white man get a job when he lost his. The criteria around what he would and wouldn't do was amazing. It made me not want to bother because it made me wonder why he thought he was so special that no compromise was required.
19
@mj Not everyone can pull themselves up as you suggest. This is one of the biggest flaws in the arguments of many conservatives.
Did you know the Army no longer will induct those with an IQ of 83 or below? There aren't jobs for them, and/or the training costs exceed any benefit. Eighty three is just a tad more than one standard deviation from the norm. It's an IQ of 117 on the flip side, barely enough to get into a low end college. (I'm not saying that they test, just that's the effective mode of success.)
Some people don't have boots, let alone straps.
15
@Jus' Me, NYT good point. And so we are all clear, one out of every six people is at least one standard deviation below the norm.
1
"In England, workers turned sharply to the left while here they have moved sharply to the right."
This statement is blatantly false. For roughly 100 years, say, from 1870 to 1970 (ball-parking here) the labor unions fought for better wages, better working conditions, and members. They were fought bitterly, with guns, thugs, the Pinkertons (thugs), false arrests, and frame-ups. Cleveland sent the military to bloodily break up a strike in Illinois over the governor's objections (it cost Cleveland the 1896 nomination). By the end of WWII, the unions were a major political power, mostly behind Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans. But it was Ronald Reagan who lead the attack on unions, both physically, and metaphysically, and creating this pseudo-masculine image that "REAL men only vote Republican!"
Laborers have always fought mechanization. Let's not forget that "sabotage" comes from French weavers, wearing "sabots", disrupting production as early as 1808. Parry & Blake's "Dark, Satanic Mills" perpetrated the idea.
Yet without automation, and robotics, our world would be very different. I remember my dad's machine shop, and skilled men making metal shapes, and then measuring progress on each piece with calipers and micrometers. By the early 80's CNC machining allowed the man at the machine to make far more parts, with more precision, in far less time, lowering the cost of per/unit production exponentially. People need to re-train and GO WHERE THE JOBS ARE!
5
@Dadof2 And how does one go where the jobs are when there aren't any jobs? Other than perhaps engineering, programming, and AI? How many Americans have the intelligence and education for those skills?
We are moving towards a jobless economy that will take massive policy changes to give people the basics and a life of quality. No, I don't know how.
2
@Jus' Me, NYT
I'm confused: how can there be fewer jobs when one of the few (if not only) good things under Trump is the lowest unemployment rate in decades, when we NEED the 11 million undocumented to fill jobs there aren't enough Americans to fill (or they are unwilling to fill)?
I see helping Americans retrain and relocate as a CRITICAL part of our safety net, one we haven't implemented.
Remember: There are no lousy (honest) jobs, only people unwilling to fill them. I have far more respect for migrant workers than dishonest "business leaders" like the Trumps, the Koch, the Mercers, or slime like Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.
1
@Jus' Me, NYT
There are jobs ... just not the same as those lost and not in the same place. It does take retraining but most retraining is not "rocket science" but does require a desire to be retrained and willingness to relocate to where the jobs are.
". . . one big difference stands out from a political vantage point: In England, workers turned sharply to the left while here they have moved sharply to the right."
Just goes to show you that the workers in England were a lot brighter than those in the United States. The U.S. middle class was at its strongest after the Second World War when union membership was at its highest.
Of course, if you get your news from Fox and don't read decent history books, you don't know any of this.
8
Let's be clear that the workers being displaced have some responsibility here, too. Some point to increasing automation as the cause and evil. However, automation has been increasing rapidly for decades. There has been PLENTY of opportunity for workers to prepare - to re-train. But many of them have chosen to sit on the sidelines and draw their blue collar welfare unemployment payments. And spend their weekends watching pointless sports games on television. Many blue collar workers have chosen the easy way and prefer to vote for mafia led nationalism, racism, and zenophobia rather than help themselves.
5
Your headline, pure Ludditetry, is contradicted by your statement halfway through this piece that robots destroy some jobs but create more new ones than they destroy by opening new opportunities. You are correct, though, that the losses and the gains don't necessarily occur in the same places, and that many heartland deep red communities will suffer losses while many of the gains will accrue to cities along the coasts.
Clearly we MUST have redistributive policies to alleviate the unfair distribution of capitalism's creative destruction.
But more importantly, we need to worry less about robots and more about out-sourcing, which creates far fewer new jobs than automation does (automated plants are still operating in place, providing jobs for administrators, maintenance and repair workers, sales reps and etc), and make sure our tax system punishes rather than rewards it.
6
If robots are taking over, where is the gain in productivity? These claims are belied by the fact that productivity has been unusually low lately.
@skeptonomist: I believe that your premise is open to question. From the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased 2.3 percent during the third quarter of 2018, the
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, as output increased 4.1 percent and hours worked
increased 1.8 percent." So productivity has actually been rising lately. U. S. non-farm productivity is actually at an all-time high.
3
The benefits of "reducing the prices of tradable goods now produced using robots" will seem fanciful when ever-larger swaths of the consumer population become too poor to purchase the "goods" output of automated manufacturing at any price.
9
@John lebaron Viz. Guaranteed Nat'l Income.
2
The real tragedy here is not the problem of job and opportunity loss to automation, its the fact that we offer no solution to this loss by the workers impacted, nor to the "commuter zones" that have their wealth appropriated by the large corporation and their shareholders.
Job loss on the individual level, and the populism that breeds, and the continued wealth appropriation by the 1%, and the disempowerment and inequality that breeds, are the problems we need to be addressing.
So NYT, for every article like this presenting these wicked societal problems, please add real, actionable, doable solutions.
Understanding the problem is important, however finding a real solution and implementing it is more so.
Thank you,
MB
9
@Michael Bain
This is 100% about the consumer economy. Always remember that you aid and abet this economy by engaging it.
First things first:
Close your social media accounts.
Stop shopping online 100%.
Only shop at smaller stores, that are local to you.
Do without rather than demand "the best" or "the latest".
Rekindle the concept of "layaway."
Get the paper copy of the New York Times instead.
Next, become a massive reader. Read philosophy, science, politics, arts, fiction, non-fiction. Allow reading to be your dominant solo entertainment. In terms of bang-for-your-buck, it's one of the best. For family fun and entertainment, learn board games or card games. One expenditure leads to many hours of enjoyment and social activity, and it is actually the most cost-effective form of entertainment. Bring friends and family over and make "game night" a thing. When you do that, you improve your problem solving skills and have fun with a creative environment envisioned by others.
To continue, limit your driving as much as possible. Walk, bike, get a scooter or scooters for your family.
Focus on your health. Exercise an hour a day. Eat better. Lose weight. If you have a large BMI or anything, then you will never have the energy to deal with the coming storms to your employment world.
This is your foundation. While doing these things, your creative potential will be released, and jobs concepts and opportunities will arise that will support that lifestyle.
6
@Michael Bain
Looking at possible solutions is not the purpose of this article.
It always amazes me when readers complain that a story didn't address some pet issue.
There are only so many words permitted.
1
I wonder if all these workers who have had their jobs replaced by robots are winning so much that they've gotten tired of it yet.
13
"The growing use of work robots and the deployment of artificial intelligence have been most disruptive"
Disruption is not the same as wiping out. Robots also create good jobs: designing, making and maintaining robots, and keeping them supplied and running, and marketing what they produce.
Many of those jobs require higher education, but many don't. I did janitorial type work in my college years, cleaning up and keeping going the big machines that made moldings. There is a lot of stuff that just has to be done to keep the machinery going. Even more to ship the product, the input, adjust volumes, and a lot more.
The robots increase productivity. Do we produce more and share it out? Or do we produce the same with fewer workers, then let the rest go without? Those are policy choices, economics, not the inevitable result of machinery.
We saw that at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when it was done badly at first.
Let's not make all the same old mistakes.
4
@Mark Thomason - Don't be too optimistic. First we figure out how to make work robots. Then we start using manufacturing robots to make the work robots. Then we start making maintenance robots to maintain the manufacturing and work robots. There is only one direction this is all headed.
15
@Jim -- No matter how much greater the productivity of people, they'll always be in the mix, somewhere behind all those machines.
If total hours of labor can be cut, that should be done equitably to give leisure time for all, and to give a fair share of income for their labor even if it is fewer hours. It does not all go to a few capitalists who own the machinery, and if somehow it did there would be no demand left for any machinery either.
Is there not a better time to broaden educational opportunities and lower birth rates? The two are well correlated. Leverage technology for what could be the pathway to the highest quality of life in the history of mankind. Capitalism, at some point, will run out of runway room for growth and simply crash. So, why wait for such pain? Unfortunately, the rich like greed and the less rich are willing to be poor to belong as serfs to the rich. Rational longterm planning has a meager following. Drives me bonkers. I want to belong to something, but nothing much out there as a real choice. Not yet. Some day, soon, I hope.
84
@william phillips
You mentioned something no one else seems to want mention, the elephant in the room - lower birth rates and population planning. Nothing else will matter if we go from 300 million people to 600 million by the middle of the century. How many poor will we have then, how many on welfare, how man disenfranchised and unemployed. The mind reels.
151
@Dave, you seem to have missed William's point: Increasing education and enabling women to be active in the workforce reduces the # of children born considerably. You need not worry about over-population if you let people control their lives and family sizes. [That is not to say everything would be magically peachy. Look at the places where crashing birth rates result in other problems...]
14
@Dave The US population growth rate is 0.7% and declining. Even with immigration, I very seriously doubt we will get anywhere close to 600 million by 2050. Population is a real issue, but it has become seriously fetishized as "the big issue" and "the only issue."
3
Robots?
The theory and natural trajectory of development of robots seems to fit in rather well with politics and economics which reduces natural cultural developments, the formation of tribes, the formation of nations such as France, Germany, and England, reduces religion, the organic development of societies in other words, by gradually replacing, displacing, etc. people from the bottom up, meaning all handcraft, including arts such as music, and even cooking, everything really prior to machine not only gets replaced by machine but machine continues to encroach and in Burgess's immortal words man comes to be considered a Clockwork Orange, something so violent, unruly and ungovernable that not only must he be checked even if it means Beethoven (passion, artistic invention, imagination) must die, he must be replaced until no tribes, nations, etc. exist at all and instead we have a humanity of perhaps pure technology creating sort (think our bloodless, sterile bureaucrats coupled with our engineers of various type) running their bloodless machines, a nexus perhaps of capitalism and communist utopia finally achieved by a united and elite humanity running their political economy of enslaved yet everybody equal robots, the robots and not the type of humanity of today achieving and composing the bulk of this utopia, and really it makes you wonder if the last of humanity will be in constant battle against being replaced by a machine, super intelligent AI come to save at last.
1
"Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut has increased incentives to replace workers with robots, contradicting his campaign promise to restore well-paying manufacturing jobs in the nation’s heartland."
Without sneering at the core group of MAGA Nation, the less-educated, opioid-addicted white workers (mostly-male) whose faith in the populism of Donald Trump propelled him to victory, one actually wonders if they are aware that they gifted him and his class with precisely the leverage to enrich themselves at their expense?
Do they "get" that they were open--emotionally, psychologically, socially and historically--to the divisions that were the engine of the Trump candidacy? To his empty arguments that he--and he alone--could recover for them what the arc of labor history in both America and Europe has been demonstrably taking from the labor class since the Industrial Revolution?
Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act--a bait and switch of the most murderous proportions imaginable to a stagnant wage population--was specifically designed to benefit one class of society--and it wasn't those who are spinning their wheels; those, it might be added, who still have some traction in the labor force.
The opioid crisis, examined in the two Upper Peninsula counties of Michigan, will slowly find its equals in other rural counties, particularly in the South.
When Donald Trump is no longer in office, who will MAGA Nation's foot soldiers blame? Not the departed grifter, that's for certain.
8
Opponents of Trump are quick to point out that Trump's policies are not the solution. I didn't vote for Trump because I liked, trusted, or respected him. I voted for Trump because the Democrats were openly hostile to my economic and social interests exemplified by some going so far as to call people like me "Deplorables." What this article does show is that the United States does not need additional workers. Farm machinery with Artificial Intelligence can plant, weed, fertilized and harvest almost any crop. We don't need migrant workers so that apples can cost 20 cents instead of 25 cents or tomatoes at 1.25 a pound instead of 1.30 a pound. The major need of low skilled foreign born labor is for home health attendants and servants, maids, gardeners or drivers. If rich people can't afford to hire Americans to clean their toilets or drive their Uber, then they can clean them themselves or take a bus. Assembling Smart Phones in the United States would probably add 15 dollars to the cost of the product. If we changed our fashion of clothing, most clothing could be made by machines. For most things, except bananas, we need foreign trade and immigrant labor so that the rich can have more than the working class and poor. Trump is not my friend but the Democrats have made it clear that they hate me and are my enemies. So where should I turn?
2
@Mike - We try to give you higher wages, worker safety protection, and affordable health care. If you can't appreciate those things then go ahead and vote for the failed casino owner. We're not going to beg.
28
@Mike, So true! I don't know who will listen to you, though. Even Elizabeth Warren's policy is about burrowing into corporate boardrooms in the name of helping workers and communities.
You use a few photos in the article, but leave out the iconic one of the BMW plant in South Carolina. It shows an assembly line with a plant full of robots on either side, building the cars.
To add insult to injury, the robots are all manufactured by ABB, A Swedish-Swill conglomerate. All of the hoses and connecting hardware are manufactured by Leoni, a German-Italian conglomerate.
South Carolina paid BMW the equivalent of $2,000,000,000 to bring the factory there.
Dan Kravitz
51
Allowing corporations to take investment deductions like robots all in one year is another death blow to long-term thinking in corporate America and in government for that matter. Long-term thinking and planning by business and government are becoming obsolete, like workers. And it does not bode well for workers or the country--and eventually the corporations.
3
The job loss will continue at an ever accelerating pace. It is in the very nature of industrialization to find lower cost, more efficient ways to produce. A paradigm shift must occur from the capitalist model to a more holistic social model, where wealth and is shared and opportunity available for people to find purpose and meaning without exploiting their follow human beings.
12
The solution, as Canada, Scandanavia, Northern Europe and Japan have known for many decades is to balance a generous welfare state with capitalism, as opposed to America's Robber Baron winner-take-all parasitic vulture capitalism that puts Americans out on the street due to poverty, debt, unaffordable healthcare, weak infrastructure, suspect education, and general abandonment by American public policy.
The three richest people in the US – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett – own as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population, or 160 million people.
That's not sustainable math.
The solution is higher taxes on the rich, the corporate and on 'capital', who happen to have all the money and who have benefited disproportionately from America's roads, bridges, tunnels, highways, justice system and political system.
Education, technology and human training budgets must be expanded with tax increases on the winner-take-all-class.
Real universal healthcare must be implemented and publicly funded.
Representative government must be implemented to replace the current Russian-Republican-Reverse-Robin-Hood government and its rigged elections.
There's plenty that can be done to improve the situation and it will involve 'redistribution', which will not be the end of the world unless one has been programmed by Grand Old Propaganda and the Fake News channel to believe so.
There are solutions, and greedy Republicans will resist them every selfish waking second of the day.
524
@Socrates Elegantly summed up. Your recommendations are exactly those stated in Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
27
@Socrates
Socrates 2020!
17
@Socrates
I would add massive investment in infrastructure development including alternative energy, bringing high-speed internet and cell coverage coast-to-coast, building high-speed rail systems, upgrading the power grid and water mains, replacing crumbling bridges, and otherwise bringing the USA into the 21st century. This investment would be a jobs program in and of itself.
24
Thank you, Mr. Edsall, for another incisive, informative column. One implication of the situation you describe is that low-skill workers who have been displaced by robotics or AI form yet another surplus population to go along with the incarcerated, the elderly, and the medically incapacitated (including the addicted). If current trends continue, these populations -- and, of course, they overlap to some extent -- will grow larger, leaving us with the question of what to do about them.
Perhaps under an all-Democrat government, the idea of providing an annual stipend to the financially displaced to cover subsistence needs will gain some traction. But that would only solve part of the problem, and as long as the Republicans have a say, it won't happen at all, because for them redistribution is a dirty word, unless it is directed upward
Another difficulty is that these surplus populations are growing within the context of the emerging extreme effects of climate change. These will produce, both intra- and internationally, yet another -- and world-wide -- surplus population, a huge one, comprising climate refugees seeking to escape the planet's ever-enlarging fire zones, drought areas, and coastal floods.
I don't know the answer to all this, but it surely won't be found in hunkering down behind border walls or in joining a cult of an authoritarian strongman. Maybe the kids, so many of whom are smart and energetic, will have an answer. For their sake, I certainly hope so.
37
Robotics and AI are here and will be replacing all of us with or without Trump. The question is if we are defined by our work, how do we redefine ourselves? If the use of Computers and AI make us so much more productive how do we distribute that created wealth?
Politically we can either look at the future as some dystopian nightmare to be defeated by pitting ourselves against each other or we can view it as potentially a fantastic unlimited future where we all prosper in these potentially great wealth producing technologies.
11
@HL - EXACTLY! If we reach a point where machines are doing all of the necessary work, then why should we even need to work 40-60 hours a week?
1
This article compares automation to the Industrial Revolution, but the most important fact about the Industrial Revolution is that it created the largest and arguably only permanent improvement in human living standards in history. Luddism turned out to be wrong then, and it is wrong today. Automation can only displace human labor if it can produce all the things we need, and if that’s the case, we have no need for labor in the first place. And If people still have unmet economic needs or desires, then there will still be demand for human labor to meet those desires.
1
Flyover country just flew over itself. These reports indicate that automation is a double edged sword, slicing their livelihoods to bits.
First, many of the jobs that automation produces are lower paying. We see that all over the place as high wage factory jobs disappear and are replaced with low wage service jobs.
Second, we also see a net decrease in total jobs as the robots come on-line. Another hit.
The only types of jobs that are in high demand are the knowledge based jobs which require significant post secondary school training.
The net result is that more and more people are making less and less. In the past, this has pushed the political spectrum to the left, but the Republicans have shifted it to the right which has just made the problem much, much worse.
The term, "redistribution" was used many times in this analysis. This is the only way out and the GOP wants redistribution like it wants the bubonic plague. Redistribution means taxing profits to generate the funds for retraining and societal support (like healthcare) that society needs.
Trump country has totally shot itself in the foot on this one. When they advocate for tariffs, they are advocating for government interference in the marketplace, which is socialism. These people think socialism is as un American as it gets. But socialism is what will save them. They don't know what socialism is. They are against taxing big profits which leaves them nowhere. That's flyover country.
77
A nice compendium of studies and viewpoints reviewed here by Edsall, but the bottom line is pretty simple: automation and AI will tend over time to destroy more jobs than it will create, starting with the lower skilled and most vulnerable but eventually reaching into the middle skilled/white collar workers. And assuming we survive climate change (some replacement jobs could be in green energy) over time there is no definable upper limit of job destruction as AI advances (even those green jobs may be roboticized fairly quickly).
The real sociopolitical question is how is a stable society maintained as this progresses. In my estimation, we will have to consider universal basic income, job sharing/jog guarantees (a sort of technological "featherbedding"), probably incentives to birth control, and a whole lot of other steps that seem beyond discussion now. (Never mind simple things like universal health care.) The concentration of wealth and control in fewer and fewer hands and the expansion of poverty to greater and greater numbers is simply unsustainable in the long term; the peasants may be suppressed a while, but eventually they rise up violently if steps are not taken to bring them into the possibility of a decent life.
Of course, as hinted before, superstorms and extended droughts come for everyone eventually and may nip all this in the bud.
8
Automation, coupled with off-shoring have decimated labor employment. Most of the automotive factories that were moved to Mexico have not seen an increase in automation. On the contrary, the corporations take advantage of lower overall compensation (wages+benefits) and slack regulations in Mexico.
China has lower labor costs in comparison to the US; however, it is facing stiff competition from lower wage countries such as Vietnam. The Chinese government (yes, the govt) is making deep investments in building robots and automation to stay competitive. The biggest robot manufacturer in the US is dwarfed by Japanese and Chinese robotics companies.
Artificial intelligence will make much of white collar employment redundant. If left to "market forces", the despair that we see around the countryside and smaller cities will spread to larger population centers.
Policies that provide people the skills for entrepreneurship, and in future technologies (computer languages [algorithm], bio technology, AI etc) will provide some limited relief from chronic under / unemployment. Prevent illegal immigration - no point in adding more to the population of existing and likely growing population of deplorables. Bring back manufacturing, and associated supply chain. Automate where it makes economic sense. It is better to get some employment (despite automation) rather than losing all of it to off-shoring. Start working on universal income, and taxing machines to pay for it.
2
This phenomenon started in the 18th century. First, skilled trades were replaced by water and steam powered looms and workshops.
Then farm mechanization going back to Cyrus McCormick began to kick in, and the nation that had about 85% of the population engaged in agriculture is now growing vastly greater amounts of food with less than 3% of the population.
Factory automation was next, and assembly lines are made for robots instead of people; factories that did not go overseas are automated with robots- as are the factories around the world.
AI and self-driving cars and trucks are just around the corner. More jobs lost and more concentration of wealth will be the result.
There isn't a direct political solution to this phenomenon, but there is considerable distress ahead of our country as the ongoing waves of technological change consume the concept of ourselves as a country.
The final nail in the coffin is that worldwide economic growth in the long run is driven by demographics, and with less than 5% of the world's population, we are growing much more slowly in both per capita wealth and population total. Unless we work toward integrating our economy with the rest of the world, we are going over a cliff.
5
In 'Brave New World' the gov't dispensed the drug 'Soma' to keep the downtrodden content (or at least quiet). While our government talks about controlling opioid abuse, it does little to curb it (other than arresting the victims - which, indeed, does little). Life emulating fiction. (Also, in '1984' ,the World's 3 governments maintained perpetual war to keep everybody -including the unemployed - under control. Again, life might soon emulate fiction. )
5
Many employers are desperately seeking employees. A little assistance with moving where the jobs are would help many who are unemployed or underemployed.
2
@Katrin: well, they are desperately seeking computer software engineers and financial analysts and physicians, yes.
And they also need hordes of $8-$9 an hour retail clerks, home health aides and fast food workers. (No benefits, naturally.)
But there are no good paying jobs with health insurance for many millions of workers -- even quite a few with degrees and experience are now discarded routinely.
The idea that EVERYONE can move to a Big Blue City is irrational -- they are already vastly overcrowded, expensive and have housing shortages.
San Francisco ALONE has tens of thousands of people living homeless on the streets -- and they are an epicenter of high paying jobs.
1
To fully understand the long-term impact of automation, we must focus on what seems like a throw-away line that is critically important. The advance of AI right now mostly affects white men without a college degree. That little factoid (without a college degree) plays an outsized role in explaining why so many people chose Trump, and continue to support him. His campaign was aimed directly at energizing low-information voters, and he did so with inflammatory rhetoric that acted like a hot poker being inserted into a festering chest wound.
But as Edsall's column clearly points out, Trump, as President, and the Party he leads lied through their teeth to the low-information audience. The obscene tax bill was a slap in the face to those who voted for Trump in the belief that he would recognize their plight and implement plans to address their needs. He had NO INTENTION whatsoever to do that, as we now know. Instead, he championed a tax bill that benefited himself and his family while making it more efficient for corporations to accelerate investment in AI and other labor-saving actions.
Given the inadequacies of public education in the U.S., the question becomes whether we now have an entire cohort of the population that will forever be uninformed and angry with their plight, and choose right-wing authoritarians over common sense.
33
It seems clear that the losing class with low education and low skill sets must be supported by social programs like guaranteed income, free health care, and free education. That the displaced class can't figure this out in spite of low education and misinformation is a situation that can't last.
The lifestyles and communtities of those classes will continue to change in spite of their efforts to turn back the clock. Some Democrat should point out the unpleasant facts to them and appeal to their common sense.
How these classes will survive opiods and living on the dole will have to be worked out in Congress. So far, the discussions in Congress do not reflect the facts mentioned in this article. The techies have revolutionized the workplace. Where is their voice, where are they in Congress?
8
@Michael Simon
We also need to help people re-locate to where the jobs are. One can't stay in one's Kentucky or West Virginia "holler" and expect the coal-mining jobs to come back. Immigrants and migrant workers know this, which is why you find immigrant communities from Asia, Africa and south of the border from Minneapolis and Sheboygan, to Baltimore, Denver, St. Louis and Biloxi. They go where there is opportunity, whether as legal immigrants, or undocumented workers (like the Guatemalan woman at Trump's Bedminster club, who cleaned his toilet and ironed his skivvies.)
When the Depression ruined my grandfather's business, he went off to work and sent money home, just as the derided and dissed immigrants do today.
The message in this is that location and training elasticity needs to be encouraged and even subsidized. No, you can't stay in your hollow when there's no work just because 4, 5, 6, or 10 generations have been there. Migration is ALWAYS how humans have dealt with such economic pressure--by moving. From the early humans who crept out of Africa across the world, to the "caravan" of the last few weeks, people migrate for a better life.
7
There was a time in this country when capital owned people outright. It owned both the person and the output that person generated. We fought a civil war to end that practice.
Capital can no longer own people, but it can own the robots outright and the output those robots produce. Whether we call it slavery or automation, the end result is the same in terms of economics: more of the nation's income going to capital, and less going to labor.
19
The mystery remains why the workers who are being displaced continue to turn to the ones who mislead them and prevent the policies that mitigate their problems. If England had Fox in the 19th century, would the displaced have still turned left?
39
@br The revenue that England derived from its colonies in the 19th century was also a large mitigating factor in limiting the impact of industrialization. The colonies also provided employment opportunities for men from all strata of society, benefitting not only themselves but their families in England. Once in the colonies their income was not limited to their salaries, since there were plenty of opportunities, often at the expense of the natives, to make more money.
Obviously, that outlet is not available to the US white male without a college degree and neither is it available no in the UK, perhaps contributing to the rightward shift evidenced by Brexit.
4
At our grocery store, the self checkout lanes are part of a movement to replace older fulltime salaried employees with younger temporary workers. On addition, butchers have been replaced by packaged meat.
20
@Fair is Fair
Packaged meat has to be cut somewhere. We are flying meat to China and then flying it back to the US. A Chinese company now owns Smithfield Farms. They ship meat to China for processing and then return it to the US to be sold.
7
@Nb Snopes says that's not true
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/high-on-the-hog/
3
Doesn’t the shift toward on-line shopping also increase jobs in the shipping transportation sector?
2
@Grey Until self-driving vehicles replace them also. Another decade perhaps?
5
As usual Edsall's analysis is informed, balanced and depressing. But he doesn't attempt to answer a key question: why did Britain's wrenching industrialization shift workers leftward (ultimately successfully, e.g. the NHS) while in the US automation is shifting them rightward (guns, bibles, anti-immigrant)?
111
@Paul Adams
Guns abortion. The Brits also had a long history of the rich exploiting workers. Guns and abortion blind US workers from this connection.
28
@Paul Adams
I am certain at least part of the explanation is in the Calvinist/Social Darwinist underpinnings of the American ethos, which never got anywhere near as stringent a hold in Britain (in fact, Britian tended to oppress such religious fundamentalists; many came here).
The Calvinist view locates the problem of the poor in their own skin, as being due to their own unworthiness in God's eyes--never in anything as esoteric as a disadvantaging socioeconomic system. In this view, if you are rich, obviously you have been favored, and if not, not only are you not favored, but there should be no societal attempts to help you (charity, organized programs) as they wouldn't do any good anyway.
While many have forgotten the religious origins of this, the attitude come out in our treatment of poverty, our "if you were smart, you'd be rich" mentality, and our antipathy towards any safety net, which is considered undeserved and wasteful. Unfortunately, even those who might benefit from the net tend to have this view, so effective is the propaganda machine. And it helps, obviously, that in a racially/ethnically diverse population, tribalism and "the undeserving" can be exploited to divide and conquer--which, by the way, may explain why Britian's working class turned left politically in the early 20th century but doesn't necessarily anymore--lots more ethnic diversity there now.
83
@Paul Adams
The British reference appears to be to 19th century England's industrialization...not to 2018 England.
If you compare 2016 England (Brexit vote) to 2016 USA (Trump vote), you get comparable levels of stupidity, xenophobia, white spite and national self-harm in both countries due bamboozled, misinformed, desperate voters having trouble adapting to modernity.
Both countries need to educate their populace better if they want to maintain functional representative governments before their respective right-wing wackos destroy everything.
87
"During mechanization of agriculture, we have also experienced rapid creation of new jobs and tasks in industry, both for production workers and for clerical workers. If it weren’t for these other changes, many of them technological and social in nature, mechanization of agriculture would have created much more hardship (and today we tend to forget how much hardship it did create in the first place)."
This is not a correct characterization of the impact of mechanization in agriculture. The investment in mechanization in agriculture, at least in the US in the 20th Century, directly tracked the flight of labor from agriculture to cities. The investments were made because the labor simply wasn't available, not because the mechanization was more productive (it was, but it was also expensive!).
I don't have the reference hendy, but the spread of mechanized agriculture in the US accelerated at two key points in the 20th century, directly tracking the movement of soldiers into WWI and WWII. And when these soldiers returned home, many did not return to the fields.
So labor availability to perform some (often unpleasant) tasks can be as much of a driver for the mechanization/automation displacement of labor as the increase in productivity.
6
@Jeff
If you look at the decline of manufacturing in the US, it is a mostly steady decrease from the war - automation. The flip side, your argument, about the same phenomenon in agriculture, is that people left for better jobs or just because they didn't want to stick around at all. I think that's less likely, but plausible.
Fact is, people leave for lack of earnings, too. The employers, even the farmers, are not powerless to hire people. I also wonder about the trend of corporate owned farming and farm industries.
4
@Jeff "flight of labor from agriculture to cities"
Most of the WW2 generation grew up on farms and for many they were family farms.
Some farms were absorbed by cities that eventually grew out and engulfed them.
Other farms became too small to be profitable after being divided among the offspring for generation after generation.
3
@Jeff "...when these soldiers returned home, many did not return to the fields" As my wife and I learned from a docent at Billings Farm in Woodstock, VT, the reason the state of Vermont is so forested now is in large part because the young Vermont men who survived the Civil War, which was largely fought in the South, either didn't return home or quickly relocated to those more temperate locales. The result was that, absent enough men to work all the farms, many of the fields and pastures reverted to woodland.
1
Something I wonder about is how automation of low skill jobs (delivery truck driver, cashier, etc.) will interact with the push for a $15 minimum wage. I worry a large increase in the minimum wage (more than doubling it from the current national level) - even if phased in over a few years - risks accelerating and exacerbating these employment disruptions in the low skill labor market. Employers may look much more seriously at options for automation if the cost of low-wage workers doubles. That’s something we liberals need to think carefully about - with our heads and not just our hearts or our guts. We could end up harming the very people we are trying to help.
9
@Rob W
The idea that we can't have a pay floor because of employers never works out - why have rules at all? The higher minimum wage works out over all, by creating more quality jobs, even if there are fewer of them in the short term. Since every employer pays the same rate, it resembles a tax, and the effect is similar - no real difference in business activity, just a shuffling around, classic economic redistribution.
Small businesses actually benefit the most long term, as more money flowing to the workers means more local business activity (less money hoarded, less money overseas). Of course, for someone trying to cover wages this month, I understand that is cold comfort. And what they really need is a fixed health care system.
But it's much more likely to pay off, than, say, the blanket illegal tariffs on American businesses. And I'd like to think some owners want to do better by their employees, but can't without a nudge.
12
@Rob W - That phony argument is the one Republicans use to torpedo the minimum wage every time. If the MW had been tied to inflation, or cost of living, or some other marker, or had just been increased regularly as a matter of course, you wouldn't have the scary gap you see now. Like so much else the republicans don't do, by letting the MW lapse they can now say we can't afford to fix it. Some disruption might occur, but not moving for a big increase now only rewards the recalcitrant. In 2008 the first thing Nancy Pelosi did was raise the MW. It has not changed since then, while CEO pay, eg, has jumped.
13
@wcdevins
Don’t get me wrong. I support the concept of a minimum wage, as well as an increase in it. I just think an increase of this magnitude could lead to labor market disruptions that could harm low wage workers in ways that have not fully thought through.
1
Most of this country is Trump Country and we on the coasts are diligently analyzing and writing about the reasons why his base should not be voting for him. But a short trip outside of New York city, and a free breakfast in front of the television in the Holiday Inn reveals exactly why they voted and will vote again, misinformation. How on earth can we get stories like these to the people who need to hear them?
384
@Matt Sure the robots are coming, and they are and will be having the effects described. The question is are we going to do anything to mitigate the economic impacts or will we let inequality grow?
91
@Jason Sypher: If you stay at a HI, or any hotel chain for that matter, or an auto dealership, or a doctor's office, chances are very good that the TV in the waiting rooms or restaurants are tuned to Fox News. I don't frequent bars these days, but those I have been to are always locked on Fox News.
Last week, I had my car in for service at a local dealership. Sure enough, the TV in the customer lounge was tuned to Fox. About 30 minutes after I arrived, and older woman came to the lounge, glanced at the TV, and left. She came back with the dealer manager and had him change the channel to CNBC. I and several other customers gave her our thumbs up.
329
@Jason Sypher
The TVs in those Holiday Inns and diners are invariably tuned to Fox.
18
In rural Upstate NY, the economy is not booming. Unemployment is down, but how much of that decrease is because young people have moved away?
Agriculture, especially dairy, used to be the backbone of local economies. Our towns and villages were built around small farms and services to the dairy industry. That has changed.
There are a few big dairy farms limping along. If anyone thinks that forcing Canada to buy more milk products from the USA will improve the outlook for those farms, I think there is a disappointment coming.
When I was growing up, it was possible for a farmer to support a family on 100 acres with about 30 cows. My father did that with the help of the whole family. His farm is no longer operating and the fields are moving along succession back to forests.
The town two miles away used to have a milk plant, a farm implement dealer, a feed store, a bank, a couple of grocery stores and three churches. The churches are still there, although the congregations are decimated. The rest of the services are gone. Unless someone finds a way to reinvent the economy in this region, the towns will continue to shrink and become places where only the poor and broken will live.
Manufacturing in this region has suffered similar decline. That is not likely to be the answer.
People here sense that something is very wrong. That makes them susceptible to appeals to hate and fear. It's tragic that those appeals seem to be so prevalent in our politics.
450
@Betsy S This also describes western New York state. Add to this an accelerated decline due to having bad commercial train service to the NYC markets, poor fiber optic telecommunications, and local voters voting against themselves. Toronto across the border is booming with tech jobs, vibrant educated immigrant communities, and investment not to mention Canada's single payer medical system. Buffalo should have been on Amazon's list if only it had fiber optic communications but it doesn't.
57
@Betsy S - the "jobs" that often have been "created" for upstate, former dairy communities, such as you describe, tragically, have been "jails & prisons." Though they provide employment, corrections and detention facilities are creating unsustainable debt because they are built by debtor bonds that and they are consistently overbuilt because State guidelines were systemically designed to avert another "Attica" - and therefore overbuild such facilities.
Consequently, there is gross overcapacity, and poor, debt ridden, upstate counties compete for prisoners, and now are "branching out" to house "illegal immigrant populations," same as in Texas. This is the true evil (or more true evil) that the Trump Administration has rushed to fill, and also explains their crime rhetoric along with "illegals" rhetoric. The big job creation plan of the Fascist Fraud who is our unindicted Traitor President is jailing minorities and immigrants using poor, white male victims of robots and technology primary job replacement.
53
@poslug
Toronto's model is the successful future, but WE have politicians intent on grabbing as much as possible for themselves today which robs us of a successful future too.
The USA used to be the model of success throughout the whole world. That's why so many people have wanted to come here for centuries.
Toronto is beautiful. Maybe I should move there. I would if i thought I could get used to so much cold weather. :-)
26
What many people on the right seem to not understand is that the need for unskilled labor provided an for a natural redistribution of wealth. Sure the super rich guy in the 1900's could build a factory and reap the profits, but he had no choice but to share some of those riches with the workers he needed to run the factory.
Automation eliminates that systemic mechanism for sharing wealth. While there it is the opinion of many that the displaced non-skilled workers will can simply be retrained the question remains - retrained for what? As farming was and continues to be increasingly automated, the demand for unskilled farm workers has been greatly reduced. We should expect this to happen in all areas of employment. Even the person and the checkout stand at the grocery store is being eliminated. The question is, what do we do about it.
94
@Glenn We have to change the way our economy works if automation is to benefit everyone and no just a very few.
14
@Glenn
And, one step further, how long will democracy survive if they don't even need us for their armies? For their security forces?
13
@Glenn
You are forgetting the labour laws that helped unions flourish. There was no sharing with factory workers in the first half of the 20th century. In a sense, the period after World War II was an aberration which came to an end in the 1980s. Due to perhaps wishful thinking or nostalgia, too many people think of this relatively short period as the standard state of an economy rather than an aberration.
28
As an AI developer my experience is that for some classification tasks there is no way to replace the human in the loop. As an aging 70 plus year old, I am also not convinced that the healing arts of TLC will ever be replaced by AI.
18
@jonathan berger As a physician, I hope you are right. Unfortunately, I am not sure you are, as I see patients abandon long held relationships with physicians for the episodic care in walk-in clinics and the almost robotic care of telemedicine. Convenience beats TLC all too often, and while not quite the same point as made by Mr. Edsall, these changes do reflect a shift towards “automation” at the expense of workers.
18
@jonathan berger
Sure. As long as TLC workers do it for free.
2
@Dr. J
At a certain point medicine divorced from TLC will mean a shorter life span- it won't work and people will die when they could have lived. I understand the convenience argument - it is easier to go to the local easy care acute care walk in but after a few trips i was not satisfied with the care i got. I have debated this question of machine learning for diagnosis versus a hands on method mixed with a machine learning approach. For some things doctors will enter the wrong data from say a urine sample and thus their over all score will be lower than a program that extracts the data; however I can't see given our tool set how the intuition of a highly trained medical pro when mixed with database derived insights can be beaten by lower skilled folks or just a computer system.