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Andrew Yang: Yes robots are stealing your job


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2019 Nov 14, 8:39pm   978 views  10 comments

by tovarichpeter   ➕follow (6)   💰tip   ignore  

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/opinion/andrew-yang-jobs.html

“During the last Democratic debate, in Ohio, there was a moment that stood out. Elizabeth Warren and I got into a debate over the impact of automation versus trade on the elimination of manufacturing jobs. Joe Biden also chimed in, agreeing that the fourth industrial revolution is costing jobs, so it’s important to deal with the root causes.

Immediately, fact checkers were quick to point to a study showing that 88 percent of factory job losses from 2000 to 2010 were caused by automation. Yet, in the days following that debate, some prominent media figures asserted that the threat of automation is not real. The Times columnist Paul Krugman even called it “a sort of escapist fantasy for centrists who don’t want to confront truly hard questions.”

It’s easy to cite incomplete statistics that ignore the full picture and the situation on the ground, but I’ve done the math while spending time in struggling communities. Venture for America, the nonprofit I founded, sent me across this country, to Detroit, St. Louis, Birmingham, Ala., and other communities, where we attempted to spur entrepreneurship and create jobs. It was during this time when I spoke with workers who had lost their jobs to automation and couldn’t find more work. My organization was helping to create jobs, but automation was displacing tens of thousands of workers in these states. We were pouring water into a bathtub with a giant hole ripped in the bottom.”

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2   MisdemeanorRebel   2019 Nov 14, 9:49pm  

How can we do anything in a postmodern culture with few shared values?

That being said, the biggest rise in productivity was in the 90s. The rise in the naughties was small, and the rise since the Great Recession minimal.

The real shock drop in employment happened in 2002, the first full year that China ascended to the WTO.

Most of your smartphones, clothes, etc. aren't done by robots in China; they're done by people hunched over a bench with a soldering iron or a sewing machine, just like it was in US factories, be they unionized ones Upstate NY or Ohio, mass produced furniture and gov't contractor textiles in South Carolina, or in fly by night LA Sweatshops full of illegal Chinese women, well into the 90s.
4   Bd6r   2019 Nov 15, 9:55am  

Yang is not wrong, but his solutions are probably wrong.
What can the average flyover-country blue collar worker do these days to earn decent living if he is not in TX (where work in oilfields is lucrative, just returned from W. Texas and was rather impressed)? Forty years age he would work in a coal mine, steel mill, textile plant, but now? Should he just go on popping painkillers, which is what a lot of middle America do?
5   Rin   2019 Nov 15, 10:17am  

HEYYOU says
Just waiting for AI with quantum computer speed to eliminate losers that sit on their asses & get paid to type on a keyboard.


That's a lot of white collar workers these days.
6   MisdemeanorRebel   2019 Nov 15, 12:51pm  

I dispute the automation as the main driver to US job loss.

The simple reason is 95% of the stuff sold retail or to businesses are still labor-intensive manufacturing, like the soldering girls up above.

Yes, there are some high tech highly automated factories being built in China and Mexico.

BUT, the industrial costs of Electricity -required by automation- is higher in China and Mexico than it is in the USA. The US comparative advantage - which will increase over both China and the EU (and eventually Japan if they continue to de-nuclearize) is cheap electricity.



Most of the jobs being exported are in labor intensive industries, like soldiering parts to boards for electronics.
7   SunnyvaleCA   2019 Nov 15, 1:31pm  

Here's two ideas:
(1) Don't allow more immigration of people whose jobs are likely to be lost to automation.
(2) Don't allow more immigration of people whose jobs are likely to be the ones USA citizens will need to take when those citizens lose their jobs to automation.
So, if you follow Andrew Yang's logic, then the best president isn't Andrew Yang, it's Donald Trump.
9   WookieMan   2021 Jan 1, 11:35am  

What happened to Tov Bot? Hasn't been around for quite some time now. Hope all is good. I know some users know each other here. Same thing with Curious and Goran.
10   Patrick   2021 Jan 1, 11:39am  

Good point. I could email them.

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