Automation and its effects on jobs: The Huge Economic Issue that Washington Isn't Talking About

PJ Media ^ | 02/16/2017 | Rick Moran

[bert]

I morn the lost type writer manufacturing jobs. The makers of ribbons alone who lost their jobs makes me weep.

Then there are the millions of underpaid though employed women who beavered everyday creating the reams and reams of memos and invoices and statements and letters. Their jobs are all gone.

Tragedy struck the home of cassandra white when she was laid off from her typist job. She was the sole support of her aging father who suffered from mental illness after he lost his job as buggy whip maker. It's just terrible, terrible, terrible

[central_va]

Free Traitors™ use Alinsky tactics all the time . This is one of them - link off shoring to automation and the say there is nothing we can do. Losing jobs to offshoring is a totally different economic situation as losing jobs to automation.

Globalist traitors try to make protectionists into Luddites. Don't let them.

[bert]

Balderdacious drivel emanating from under a rock

[central_va]

bert bert bert. Nobody is saying that automation is bad per say. What is bad is offshoring. If a factory is automated, overseas and in China it is a threat to national security.

We want our factories back, automated or not, because even an automated factory produces good jobs.

Someone that truly believes in automation would be a staunch protectionist. The higher wages using American labor would hasten the automation process. Moving production to the third world only slows that process down.

[central_va]

Instead of just spewing hate like an immature child try to take apart my argument like an adult.

[central_va]

It is hard to discuss trade, economics and automation with radical Free Traitors™ because like their open border cousins who disingenuously link immigration and illegal aliens they link automation and offshoring together which are totally different things.

[Sirius Lee]

The problem will sort itself out once enough people go broke and/or die off, and once corporations realize that dead people don't buy their products.

There is also the matter of the recent talk about a basic living wage for everyone, and a cashless society. These are hoped for means of preventing the population from revolting while we are culled via engineered plagues, wars, and muzz slime terrorism. Those outside the system will be starved. Agenda 21 - ain't it grand?

In the end it will be a high tech civilization of a half billion people modeled on ancient Egypt, ruled by a small class of self anointed godheads, and a vast underclass of artisans and useful idiots - not different than the current democrat party.

[RipSawyer]

“You are looking a long, long way out...”

Could be but I have seen how quickly things can change. I was born in 1944 and am already well beyond the average life expectancy forecast for me at birth but I may live to see 2044 yet. I live within fifty miles of my birthplace but it is like living on a different planet now. My own life in some respects may be close to my early life but in other ways is like a science fiction story from that period. Just how long is a long, long way out?

[Oatka]

And what happens when the driverless truck has a flat tire?

Everything old is new again. Then they will come out with solid rubber tires, like the ones I saw when I was a kid (During WWII, EVERY kind of vehicle was used. I saw ca 1920s delivery vans in my NYC neighborhood.)

I get your point though.

[bluejean]

“There was a massive inflow of technology, for example, displacing hordes of secretaries and clerks, in the 1980s. But under the Reagan revolution that became Morning in America, with “greed” decried by the left as more and more people became wealthy and saw their middle-class standards of living finally rise again.”

I actually took advantage of this era, when data entry operators were disappearing. I jumped into a system operator job, then became a database administrator. I’ve been in IT for decades. Technology has been my bread and butter.

I am concerned about the unintended consequences. There must be a point of diminishing returns, especially for the people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. They are the target in the beginning, but everything else is too. People need to feel valued, to have meaningful or worthwhile employment, and aoptions to better themselves. Replacing them with robots on a grand scale will have repercussions. The robot visionaries don’t seem to give a damn about that aspect. I’d just like to see them addressing that issue as well.

[dfwgator]

Even a basic wage won’t solve the biggest problem, billions of idle hands.

[9YearLurker]

And for all that change, we didn’t run out of jobs—as long as we didn’t have government holding the country back!

[9YearLurker]

Ha ha!

[9YearLurker]

Higher levels of technology is what has brought us more return on our labor and led to our requiring higher levels of skill, while reducing the number of boringly repetitive positions.

Again, I am worried about technology, but very much more in the big brother surveillance-state sense than in our running out of need for people to fill other jobs — and making us vulnerable to attack or other crisis. That IMO is where the unintended consequences are looking horrific.

Oh, and I am also concerned about the increasing number of low-skill illegals we’ve allowed to come here and now too many are arguing to allow to stay.

Get them out and we’ll have a much better society all around.

[RipSawyer]

I am hoping that a return to a sensible form of government will solve a lot of problems. What we have had for a long, long time and especially for the past eight years is simply a government hell bent on destroying all the best things about this country in the name of saving it.

[9YearLurker]

Bannon and Miller and Trump have King Barack Augeas’s stables to clean out at this point.

Godspeed to them.

[minnesota_bound]

Someone will need to do this job.

[Laser_Ray]

“Unless corporations can find a way to pay robots the $0.50 cents an hour wage they want, and then let the robots buy things, their little pipe dream won’t work.”

QUOTABLE!!!

Not to mention the OTHER little inconvenient facts about the unchecked use of automation that people seem to be missing - like the fact that robots don’t have children or pay taxes. Even putting aside the very real threat of revolution when the masses have their backs to the wall with literally no way to pay rent and get groceries AND the social issues that will come with mass idleness, where the heck are you going to source your taxes from and get the next wave of soldiers if a third of your populace literally cannot get a job and have given up on raising families?

And while you’re thinking about that you should also keep in mind that the native white birthrate (the 1st-rate source of soldiers and innovators, howl ‘racist’ all you damn want) has already been in a screaming nosedive for generations. The situation is already very serious.

[DoughtyOne]

I agree it is.

I wish folks would wake up on their own and start popping them out!

Thanks for the comments.

[21twelve]

My daughter’s idiot math teacher was talking about over-population. Then he started ranting about how most populations in the world are getting older and who is going to support those older people? (Before I could even mention it my daughter pointed out his lousy logic!)

She did say that he said that Africa is having a huge increase in the number of kids. So I came up with the solution: take the kids from Africa and give them to families in other parts of the world. Make it a U.N. mandated thing or something. Hey - if “redistribution” of wealth is okay, we can have redistribution of kids.