
The rise of robots in the German labour market - hexrcs
http://voxeu.org/article/rise-robots-german-labour-market
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sarabande
It's admirable to me that unions protect low-skilled workers from losing their
job, not by preventing them from getting fired at current wages, but by
accepting wage decreases for their workers while getting them re-trained into
jobs of higher cognitive skill.

That seems like the fair and humane thing to do for workers, while at the same
time not screwing over capital owners or stifling automation.

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wiz21c
It is not admirable at all. It basically means that you're putting a
competition between machines and humans. If machines do become smarter, then
humans will be moved out of the equation (except for the 0.001% who can create
and maintain the machines).

This kind of fight may be good on the short term, but it legitimates the fact
than man are inferior to machine. For example, it may soon legitimates that,
contrary to man, the machine works non stop, doesn't go on strike, doesn't
want a raise, doesn't go to the toilet, whatever...

If machines are to rule, then we have to change the way we redistribute the
worth they produce.

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avar
Men are also inferior to machines when it comes to farm work, but judging from
your comment you'd presumably like to go back to the good old days when over
50% of the population worked on farms.

~~~
richthegeek
Or the really good old days when 97% worked in agriculture...

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usrusr
Only in times of peace.

(To nitpick on myself, it could be argued that war campaigns were also mostly
agricultural work: they were just harvesting other people's fields)

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rndmize
I'm not sure how useful it is to look at the effects of robotics in Germany in
isolation. Germany exports a fair bit more than they import, and I'd expect if
there are people being unemployed as a result of German use of robotics, it'd
be in other parts of the EU that can no longer compete effectively.

~~~
usrusr
Same for service sector automation: in California it is easy to say that
technology will bring new jobs to displace the lost ones, but what is rarely
seen is how every engineer at Google or Facebook is replacing whole offices of
more traditional (and incredibly inefficient, compared to googbook) local ad
media sales and administration all over the world. If progress brings
efficiency, there will be less work. Zero sum competition can eat up those
efficiency gains providing substitute jobs, but then what is the point of
progress?

~~~
sien
The data says that in 2010 there were ~160K jobs in advertising in the US but
in 2015 there were 200K.

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/498424/number-
advertisin...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/498424/number-advertising-
agency-employees-usa/)

However, it's the newspaper jobs that have gone:

[https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/jun/06/alm...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/jun/06/almost-60-of-
us-newspaper-jobs-vanish-in-26-years)

The next thing to look at would be the change in IT jobs.

~~~
thephyber
> The next thing to look at would be the change in IT jobs.

We are already deep in the current cycle of disruption by software. "IT" (if
you include programming, security, data centers, support staff etc) is fairly
large and more diverse than advertising and/or "newspaper".

I don't think it works like a waterfall / Gantt chart; it happens in parallel
and we are currently seeing lots of white collar office jobs changing.
(HR|Finance|Recruiting|Legal Council|Retail) are all getting optimized to the
point that their ranks are thinning quickly. My first job was moving physical
file-folders between a storeroom and an office -- that job is now obsolete as
those files have largely been digitized.

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neilwilson
There's a serious category mistake in this analysis.

Germany is not really a separate country. It is a state in a union called the
Eurozone, and controlled by a constitution called the Treaty of the European
Union.

You cannot compare a currency zone such as the USA to Germany - a state in a
currency zone.

Germany drains demand from the rest of the Eurozone to maintain its employment
level. The unemployment arises in Greece, Spain, et al instead.

If you look at the near fully employed state areas in the USA and draw a line
around them, then compare those with Germany you'll get a better idea.

Within the US there is an 'export boom' from California and New York to the
rest of the union. Similarly in the UK from London to the rest of the country.

It's time for economic analysis to catch up with monetary theory. Floating
rate currency zones matter.

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Animats
Note how small the ratio of robots to workers still is. 2 robots per thousand
workers in the US, 8 per thousand in Germany. Those are still below 1% yet
having an effect on wages. What happens at 10%? 20%? 50%?

Few people thought in 1980 that there would be more computers than people in
their lifetime.

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varjag
Most mid-1980s technology books expected majority of production jobs taken
over by robots any moment soon (and the rest going to ninja-like Japanese
workers).

Of course what happened is the jobs went to China.

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Top19
Lol I appreciate your comment about the Japanese ninja-workers. Reading
business books from the 90’s, it is astounding how many people feared the
Japanese and thought they would be the end all be all. Of course it ended with
them going into a depression much worse than even our Great Recession. Michael
Crichton, who wrote “Jurassic Park”, also wrote a book called “Rising Sun”
right before that about just this topic. In that book, the velociraptors were
the ninja workers you describe.

~~~
Animats
"Rising Sun" was made into a movie.[1] It has some of the early MIT Leg Lab
robots in it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_\(film\))

~~~
Top19
Oh man forget about these / that movie! As another aside, current really David
Halberstam’s “The Next Century”, published in 1991, and his main focus in the
book, after Eastern Europe, is Japan. All of this is laughable now (though
some say Japan will be a superpower due to the military it’s built up to
counter North Korea after NK falls), but makes you wonder, what threat do we
all believe in now that will really turn out to be a paper tiger in the years
ahead?

EDIT: quote from the book...”the Cold War is over, the Japanese won”

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HillaryBriss
they seem to be saying that high skill workers and owners are getting a net
benefit from the additional robots. but, medium skill and low skill workers
are seeing some negative wage impacts, but not necessarily additional
unemployment.

perhaps more interesting is the background info about the global focus of
industrial robotics: it's in Japan (and to a much lesser extent, Germany) --
but not the US.

this reinforces my current belief that robotics startups in the US face a
pretty serious uphill battle from day one.

