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Quite. For 40-odd years whenever I heard “automation means we can make 10x more with the same people”, I always wondered why we don’t just “make 10 times more”. Ok, It’s oversimplified. I suspect the real issue is that automation has been seen as a route to higher quarterly earnings/bonuses: “let’s make the same product with the same crappy after-sales service, same low R&D, but 10% of the labor input and pocket the difference”?. If you can combine it with offshoring, heck, why not?

Well, if that’s what they were saying, it’s utterly reminiscent of the Communist Manifesto and its goal “to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible”. Which was only possible, it also said, by making “despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production”. Looks like a similar pattern in many ways, yes?

If you can combine it with offshoring, heck, why not?

The problem is that the population has to be prosperous enough to actually AFFORD what you are making (selling). For all his faults, Henry Ford understood this pretty well. Sadly, few seem to understand it now.

Industry keeps cranking out stuff, but demand is going down. Partially because:

1. The stuff is better made & lasts longer (cars, TVs, etc)
2. People don’t have the $$
3. Demographics — older people need less stuff than young, growing families

For #2, the Government has moved in to pick up the slack as jobs have disappeared. Hence more clients, government workers and higher deficits.

For #3, that is part of the reason we are importing more people. Especially Third World immigrants who will need everything. Unfortunately, the Government is putting them on the dole vs. making them work. This is not a formula for long term success. But the companies don’t care about the long term—they just care about the next quarter.