It’s interesting to watch the public conversations which take place between entities that desperately try to avoid issues that are central to these conversations.
For instance, the president Obama is in India sez:
“As we look to India today, the United States sees the opportunity to sell our exports in one of the fastest growing markets in the world. For America, this is a jobs strategy,” the president said in a speech to the U.S.-India Business Council. The remarks also were aimed at U.S. voters who punished Democrats in the midterm elections in part over continued high unemployment.
Obama said it should be a “win-win” relationship with India, but in a nod to U.S. sensibilities he also acknowledged concerns in the U.S. about outsourcing.
“There still exists a caricature of India as a land of call centers,” the president said.
He said people in India also are concerned about the impact of U.S. goods coming into their country, but contended that growing trade could only benefit both sides in the long run. He said he sees huge untapped potential in the relationship, noting that India doesn’t even rank among America’s top 10 trading partners.
How can the US have a job strategy when the population growth in Asia and elsewhere – not to mention the US – guarantees there will be more job seekers than ‘growth’ (magic) can ever provide? Leaving population out of employment calculations has countries running ever faster on the final demand treadmill, trying and failing to stay in place. Sweatshop- powered mercantile growth cannot keep up with exploding humanoid growth.
Adding machine growth along with its extraordinary ‘food’ demands accelerates the treadmill even faster …
The low wage population explosion is a factor in US immigration. Demographic shifts in the US population ‘requires’ new young workers to support elderly retirees who are unable to work. How these retirees will be supported by immigrants performing low- wage ‘sweatshop’ jobs paying minimum wages is not clear. Even though immigrants are willing to work longer hours as wages diminish, the effect is a decline in final demand. There isn’t enough margin in the declining wages to support the workers’ families much less an increasing population of retirees.
This is a self- compounding spiral that is largely fed by population increases both here and in countries that are the source of immigration. The US cannot solve the world’s population problems. It certainly cannot do so by importing the excess while at the same time exporting high wage jobs.
US outsourcing preserves the facades of ‘American’ companies while undermining their structures. The paychecks flow to the other countries along with the jobs. The difference in wages between the US and elsewhere is the loss of customer purchasing power. Substituting credit for wages resulted in the credit crisis.
The big complaint about China is that it doesn’t consume enough. It can’t, its workers earn peanuts! Labor in China is so poorly paid that workers cannot afford decent housing but must live in company- provided cubicle housing or dormitories.
The wages saved by ‘American’ companies is diverted toward management and hoarded overseas alongside the jobs. Enough of this sort of free trade and both the US and its trading partners will be ruined. Off-shoring jobs amplifies deflation here in the US while creating capital imbalances and foreign inflation at the same time. Meanwhile, US workers who would buy goods and support the so- called businesses circle the edge of destitution.
Keynes observed this during the 1930’s. Nothing has changed …
Another tilt @ population and employment suggests that an aspect of American- style capitalism is gaining traction in the UK. According to the Financial Times the establishment is considering their own version of Jim Crow:
That headline sez it all, (and it is all that the anal/compulsive FT will allow me to clip.) The article suggests the Brits got the idea from the US. Which part of the US? The Gingrich/Palin ‘Southern Strategy’- ‘hang Negroes from lampposts’ part?
The article also suggests the work will be provided by “”private companies, councils, charities and other voluntary groups.” Reducing the welfare bill will entail a counterbalancing increase in costs billed to the UK government by these along with the gigantic bureaucratic apparatus needed to ‘try’ and ‘convict’ the ‘guilty’ unemployed and press them into work gangs.
Smarmy snobs @ the FT don’t get it, the British deserve modern credit for press gangs and ill treatment: Winston Churchill’s “rum, buggery and the lash”. The Brits pressing of US seamen into the Royal Navy was the cause of the War of 1812.
The costs of the proposed UK program will swamp any savings: you notice I sad ‘will’. The onrush of deflation is turning out the nanny- states’ solicitous public welfare administrators both here and abroad and replacing them with punishment fags.
Hopefully the private companies will think to chain the unemployed together and give them striped jumpsuits so the proper sense of public humiliation and oppression is conveyed.
A better idea would be non- punitive working/hand- skills programs along with policies that lower the barriers to entry to many trades, artisan-crafts and businesses. It is better and cheaper to the public weal to create more work opportunities. than to punish the victims of the opportunities’ absence. Leave the fetishes to those who enjoy that sort of thing …
Meanwhile, Obama- promoter Frank Rich reels from his darling’s collapse @ the polls.
Barack Obama, Phone HomeAFTER his “shellacking,” President Obama had to do something. But who had the bright idea of scheduling his visit to India for right after this election? The Democrats’ failure to create jobs was at the heart of the shellacking. Nothing says “outsourcing” to the American public more succinctly than India. But the White House didn’t figure this out until the eve of Obama’s Friday departure, when it hastily rebranded his trip as a jobs mission. Perhaps the president should visit one of the Indian call centers policing Americans’ credit-card debts to feel our pain.Optics matter. If Washington is tumbling into a political crisis as the recovery continues to lag, maybe the president shouldn’t get out of Dodge. If the White House couldn’t fill a 13,000-seat arena in blue Cleveland the weekend before the midterms, maybe it shouldn’t have sent the president there. If an administration charged with confronting a Great Recession knew that its nominee for secretary of the Treasury serially cut corners on his taxes, maybe it should have considered other options. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Well, here we are.
True, the big things matter more than the optics. Unfortunately, they are a mess too.
Like the lack of an energy policy, the failure to discuss population, permissiveness toward a Wall Street run amok, a non- existent environment/carbon policy, a presidential staff of political cowards/retreads/retards, a general sense of lawlessness and corruption at the top of government, a useless military bent on bankrupting the country and … shall we dance?
Poor Frank Rich never could ‘get it’. Barack Obama, male model …
Artificial intelligence: The robots are coming but are we ready for them?Developments in the field of robotics are accelerating us towards a bio-mechanical future. But if robots are to plug safely into society, we must start thinking about the rules of interaction todayRobots are everyone’s favourite technology story. From robot fish to robot doctors, robot football teams and driverless robot cars, interest in the latest robot-related developments frequently propels them to the top of the popular news agenda.
It’s always about the carz:
… robot pod cars will be put into service next year, transporting business travellers to Heathrow Terminal 5 between the car park and the terminal building.
Noel Sharkey believes more widespread adoption of robot cars is inevitable – and in the not too far distant future either. “I expect to see a lot of autonomous operation in robots. I would expect certainly one thing for sure would be autonomous cars – and that’s been talked about for a long time. But not just autonomous; cars that will fit into a road system with sensors so that we can all hammer up the motorway at hundreds of miles an hour without worry of bumping into each other.”
The University of the West of England’s professor Alan Winfield, who does research at the Bristol Robotics Lab, is also convinced a driverless future is on the horizon. “Probably in 20 years’ time, maybe a bit less, your car will drive itself,” he says. “It’ll actually be a robot that you get in and it carries you around, it takes you to where you want to go and while you’re doing it you’re on the phone or you’re surfing the web or you’re chatting to friends or whatever.”
Right, the ‘fun to drive’ (in a massive jam) muscle car will morph into a kind of transit vehicle or … bus. It will cost more than the regular ‘bus’ which is already being priced into default of both operators and manufacturers by the increasing trickle up costs of fuel. Here’s another take from Marshall Brain:
Autonomous humanoid robots will take disruption to a whole new level. Once fully-autonomous, general-purpose humanoid robots are as easy to buy as an automobile, most people in the economy will not be able to make the labor = money trade anymore. They will have no way to earn money, and that means they end up homeless and on welfare.
With that many people on welfare, cost control becomes a big issue. We are already seeing the first signs of it today. The January 20, 2003 issue of Time magazine notes the trend:
Cities have lost patience, concentrating on getting the homeless out of sight. In New York City, where shelter space can’t be created fast enough, Mayor Mike Bloomberg has proposed using old cruise ships for housing.
This is not science fiction — this is today’s news. What we are talking about here are massive, government-controlled welfare dormitories keeping everyone who is unemployed “out of sight”. Homelessness is increasing because millions of people are living on the edge. Millions of working adults and families are trying to make a living from millions of low-paying jobs at places like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. Most of those low-paying jobs are about to evaporate.
This article from the NYTimes sums up our current situation with this quote:
Jobs have not followed growth, the committee wrote, because of increases in workers’ productivity. In fact, Ms. Reaser said, the unemployment rate is unlikely to fall until the economy expands at an annual rate of 3.5 percent or 4 percent, the sort of pace attained in only two quarters since the recovery supposedly began.
With productivity growing at more than 2 percent a year, and the labor force growing about 1 percent a year, she said, the “hurdle rate” of growth for increasing the share of Americans with jobs cannot be less than 3 percent.
The term “worker productivity” in this quote means “robots”. We are seeing the tip of the iceberg right now, because robotic replacement of human workers in every employment sector is about to accelerate rapidly. Combine that with a powerful trend pushing high-paying IT jobs to India. Combine it with the rapid loss of call-center jobs to India. When the first wave of robots and offshore production cut in to the factory workforce in the 20th century, the slack was picked up by service sector jobs. Now we are about to see the combined loss of massive numbers of service-sector jobs, most of the remaining jobs in factories, and many white collar jobs, all at the same time.
When a significant portion of the normal American population is permanently living in government welfare dormitories because of unemployment, what we will have is a third-world nation. These citizens will be imprisoned by unemployment in their own society. If you are an adult in America and you do not have a job, you are flat out of luck. That is how our economy is structured today — you cannot live your life unless you have a job. Many people — perhaps a majority of Americans — will find themselves out of luck in the coming decades.
The arrival of humanoid robots should be a cause for celebration. With the robots doing most of the work, it should be possible for everyone to go on perpetual vacation. Instead, robots will displace millions of employees, leaving them unable to find work and therefore destitute.
This is where we are right now; much of current unemployment is structural and long- rooted, the outcome of automation. The self- checkout lines noted by Marshall Brain in 2008 are part of the problem alongside increasing automation in all areas of production. This is placed under the cheery economic rubric of ‘increasing worker productivity’. Rather it is swapping human skill for dumb machine ‘output’ along with swapping human food for fossil fuel energy. It is all part of the efficiency scam or the efficient extraction of ‘invisible’ primary capital and shifting any residual towards the ‘Entrepreneur’ who resides at the top of the capital food chain and who – coincidentally – owns all the robots.
The primary capital is invisible because it has to be! If it is not, industrialization is too expensive. Lomas and McBrain miss the obvious! If workers who ‘run’ on food and live in shacks are too expensive, what of the robots? Who is going to pay for the $5 billion robo- chip factory? All the laid off store cashiers?
Excuse me!
The stupidity of capitalists is plain; automation- derived productivity increases are auto- destructive. We are living the consequence of ‘productivity’ and labor replacement. Automation is a cost: it’s not even a lesser cost but a massive increase in cost! It obliterates final demand. It’s one of these numb- nuts business axioms like ‘borrowing your way out of debt’!
The only way to create final demand without workers earning good wages is by finance- derived credit ponzi schemes.
Both intense automation and the ponzi schemes have been tried here and Japan since 1980 on a grand scale. The outcome has been deflation and economic failure. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, automation has created structural production/consumption imbalances, reduced the aggregate skill levels, stripped energy supplies, created excess debt, increased and is still increasing structural unemployment, increased the gap between worker wages and management returns and amplified political corruption in the process. The expense or automation cannot be recovered from automation itself but must be lifted from wages either in the factory or from the entire economy. Automation cannot ‘earn’ anything, any more than a hammer or a saw can!
Automation requires its own particular habitat which is anti- natural and anti- human. Note the freeway and parking lot. Automobiles are forms of automation with much in common with the comic book robot. Most cars the engine starts without hand cranking, the gears shift automatically, the speed control provides an excuse for a speeding citation. None of these things earn money, they are all expenses that must be extracted from earnings elsewhere.
The war between humans and machines is not new, it began centuries ago and the consequences were obvious from the beginning for those with the wit to look. Sez Adam Smith in 1776 describing the infernal pin factory, a precursor to Charles Dickens’ satanic mills:
But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.
One can see the outlines of modernity in the absolutely corrupt and vile form- to- come. The ten or eighteen or some other number of men “indifferently accommodated” to their machines at some large part of the day for six days a week, around the calendar without pause or pity with a holiday @ Christmas. These workers might be children who would otherwise be in school; that these workers would be used up until broken at the machine by some accident or disease or by fatigue as adapting to a particular task would imprison the worker to it for the remainder of his working life.
And if he faltered or objected to the ‘indifferent accommodation’ – that is he desired heat in the winter or a break or if he suggested the possibility of joining with the other workers to improve conditions he would be cast out with little or no hope of finding other work … And working would allow him little in the way of wages, certainly not enough for any savings or retirement. And his job might be lost at any time for any or no cause, he toiled at the pleasure and whim of his overseer, the company might close overnight or be taken by creditors or the industry shipped to a place where labor was cheaper still … And he would never learn or grow or gain knowledge or be a better citizen, instead his wife and children – if he was not a child himself – would endure at the the edge of poverty increasing with the flood of new workers come to the city to take his job away if they could …
And the thousands of apprentices in metalworking trades who would learn at first the making of silver pins – which would become heirlooms to be passed from grandmother to grandchild – were cast out into beggary and crime, the silversmith profession itself was shrunk as its future workforce was diminished; the pin factories themselves and their owners were in turn were rendered insolvent by the cost of the machines on one hand the ruinous competition between the different factories on the other.
All of this misery to reduce the price of pins in shops and fill the pockets of pin factory entrepreneurs. The factories undermining themselves, strip- mining the aggregated wealth of the existing order, aggravating social discord as well as sowing poverty and want. Remember, the prices of goods are dependent upon the economy and its pricing power, not the other way around. Pins and other manufactured goods had to be cheap; the factories themselves added little in the way of final demand but rather concentrated what existed into fewer hands.
Since 1776, nothing has changed …