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Say Goodbye To Millions Of Jobs As Events Unfold

October 5, 2020

Say Goodbye To Millions Of Jobs As Events Unfold

Society Needs Good Jobs

Many jobs will not be coming back after the covid-19 crisis ends. We can say goodbye to millions of jobs as events unfold and markets evolve. Millions of small businesses being decimated by Fed policies that favor huge companies coupled with a surge in automation bodes poorly for those looking for work. Over the last three decades, robots have become far more common in factories. In many manufacturing facilities, robots do most of the work. A typical factory may contain hundreds of robots working on fully automated production lines, as it rolls by on a conveyor, a product can be welded, glued, painted, and finally assembled at a sequence of robot stations.Robots are rapidly replacing humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks that people prefer not to do or are unable to do due to size limitations. This includes working in places such as in outer space or at the bottom of the sea where humans cannot survive the extreme environments.  Industrial robots are also used extensively for placing products on pallets and packaging of manufactured goods, for example for rapidly taking drink cartons from the end of a conveyor belt and putting them into boxes, or for loading and unloading machines.

Factories Are Now Full Of Robot Workers

The rise in populism and Trump’s trade war has brought front and center how globalization has often put America’s self-interest behind that of corporate profits. In an article written in April of 2013, I claimed that if factories filled with mostly robot workers are the future then we should do all that we can to see that they are located in America. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bain: Collision Of Demographics, Automation, And Inequality Signals Societal Catastrophe

March 27, 2018

Bain: Collision Of Demographics, Automation, And Inequality Signals Societal Catastrophe

Earlier this month, John Mauldin hosted the Strategic Investment Conference 2018, a three-day investor conference with 20 financial experts discussing everything from the global economic outlook for the next 12-months, along with trading strategies to overcome significant geopolitical, economic, and technological risks.

One panel was hosted by Karen Harris, Managing Director of Bain & Company’s Macro Trends Group, who presented a fascinating  keynote tilted: “Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation, and Inequality.”

According to Mauldin Economics, Harris addressed roughly 700 investors who eagerly waited for her speech. Harris started off by saying, “the combination of a demographically shrinking workforce plus increasingly cost-effective automation will aggravate inequality, constrain demand, and put a cap on economic growth.”

She also warned, “this will have all sorts of unpleasant effects in the next decade.”

Similar to  Chris Hamilton via the Econimica blog, Harris indicates there is a significant and ominous shift currently underway in the American economy — originating from the 1980s/1990s and forced upon by a  “supply-constrained world to a demand-constrained one.” The primary drivers of the shift are debt, demographics, and disruption (or automation).

“Automation’s impact will be highly unequal. At least initially, high-wage workers will reap most of the gains and low-wage workers pay most of the cost. This is not beneficial to social order, obviously, but in the end, it’s not helpful even to the businesses that automate. Someone has to buy the goods the robots build and wealthy people have a lower propensity to spend. The results will be “demand-constrained growth.” This isn’t necessarily a contraction, but it will likely cap future GDP growth potential”

About 13-minutes into the keynote, Harris elaborated on “technology’s impact on demographics, i.e. helping people live longer.” She does not foresee lifespans dramatically increasing to reverse or cushion the deceleration in America’s lifespan growth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Automating Ourselves To Unemployment

April 28, 2016

Tatiana Shepeleva/Shutterstock

Automating Ourselves To Unemployment

How shortsighted policies are creating a long-term crisis
Students of Austrian business cycle theory are familiar with the term malinvestment. A malinvestment is any poor use of resources or capital, commonly made in response to bad policy (usually artificially low interest rates and/or unsustainable increases in the monetary supply). The dot-com bubble that popped in 2001? The housing bubble that similarly burst in 2008? Those were classic examples of malinvestment.

With this article, I’d like to introduce a related term: malincentive. While not part of the official economic lexicon, I consider a ‘malincentive’ a useful word to describe any promise of short-term gain whose long-term costs outweigh any immediate benefits enjoyed. The temptation to urinate in one’s pants on a cold winter day to get warm is a (perhaps unnecessarily) graphic example of malincentive. Yes, a momentary relief from the cold can be achieved; but moments later, you’ll have a much larger problem than you did at the outset.

Malincetives and malinvestment go hand-in-hand. In my opinion, the former causes the latter. As humans, we respond remarkably well to incentives. And dumb incentives encourage us to make dumb investments.

In this current era of central planning, malincentives abound. We raced to frack as fast as we could for the quick money, while leaving behind a wake of environmental destruction and creating a supply glut that has killed the economics of shale oil. Our stock exchanges sell unfairly-fast price feeds for great sums to elite Wall Street high-frequency-trading firms, and as a result have destroyed investor trust in our financial markets.  The Federal Reserve keeps interest rates historically low to encourage banks to lend money out, yet instead the banks simply lever up to buy Treasurys thereby pocketing vast amounts of riskless free profit. The list goes on and on.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Charles Hugh Smith: Fixing The Way We Work

November 16, 2015

Charles Hugh Smith: Fixing The Way We Work

Closing the wealth gap with meaningful work

Charles Hugh Smith returns to the podcast this week to discuss the theme of his new book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All.

Automation and artificial intelligence are changing the landscape of work. Tens of millions of jobs are on track to be eliminated over the next decade or so by these advancing technological innovations in the US alone.

The way in which our current economy is constructed, the fruits of those cost savings are likely to go into a very small number of private pockets, while the millions of displaced workers will find themselves with no income and no work to do. It’s a huge looming problem that is not being address in national dialog right now.

But there’s opportunity to course-correct here. To use our new technologies to increase total productivity in a way that empowers rather than diminishes the individual worker.

What if we could hit the reset button on the way we create money, work, commerce and community?

This is not an idle question, for technology now enables us to hit that reset button and organize the creation of money, work, commerce and community in new ways. If we could start from scratch, what would a new system look like?

To answer that, we must understand why the current system is failing. The current system is based on five principles that are assumed to be true:

  • Money created by banks trickles down to create work for all
  • Technology creates more jobs than automation destroys
  • Centralization is the solution to large-scale economic problems
  • Expanding debt and consumption (i.e. growth) is the path to prosperity
  • Maximizing private gain organizes the economy to the benefit of all

All five have proven to be untrue. No wonder inequality is rising and opportunity is declining. Clearly, we need a new system that offers what the current system cannot: meaningful work for all.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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