Today the New York Times reports that it's not just AI that's finally becoming a reality. It's also robots:
Use of robots by big brands, retailers and movers of goods accelerated significantly after 2019. According to the Association for Advancing Automation, robot orders in North America jumped 42 percent during the pandemic after essentially being flat over the previous five years.
....“People are finally making money,” said Samuel Reeves, chief executive of FORT Robotics, a Philadelphia start-up focused on robot safety. “You’ve got legit work being done by mobile autonomous robots. And that’s only in the past two or three years
....“The pandemic took somewhere between one and a half to three million people out of work,” said Joseph Campbell, senior marketing manager for Universal Robots. “A lot of boomers who were planning to work past 65 said 62 is good enough. It’s scary.”
This is true. As much as we've been focused on how tight the labor market is, it's largely because we simply have fewer workers:
Real GDP keeps going up, but the employment level hasn't kept up. It's 5 million workers below its pre-pandemic trend. And if we zoom in, there's this:
Over the past few months the employment level hasn't increased at all. With so many fewer workers available, it's no wonder that robotics has taken off.
This is why I suspect the concerns about stagnant labor productivity may be misplaced. It's plausible that measures which equate hours paid to hours worked are missing a significant decline in the latter. There is some evidence that many employees have cut back on their unpaid hours worked while paid hours (and output) remain unchanged. Others have reduced their actual work hours while paid hours and output have stayed the same. The happy result is that workers have managed to retain most of the benefits of improved productivity in the form of more leisure time, much no doubt to the disgust of employers.
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I saw one of those automated bus robots in a restaurant a while back. It was kind of neat seeing it bring the food out to the table, but it struck me as rather limited - the kind of robots that can really do tons of work in human-centric service sector businesses are not really here yet.
Maybe.
The article was fairly transparent in that it was being written by/for companies that want you to buy more robots and related services. Felt more like industry advertising than a news piece.
"Over the past few months the employment level hasn't increased at all. With so many fewer workers available, it's no wonder that robotics has taken off."
Maybe, but maybe the employment level hasn't increased because robotics has taken off. It seems unlikely that robots are only doing jobs that humans don't want.
Don't worry KD there's always some child labor employers can exploit:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/30/economy/child-labor-louisiana-texas/index.html
Anyone who thinks it's easy for someone to lie about age to "get work" is nuts
Multiple states are now openly trying to relax child labor laws for the simple reason that they have NO WORKERS available to fill jobs.
… at the wages employers want to pay. So they hope to employ children at wages even lower than the below-living-wage rate they pay adults.
Yup, labor shortages spur innovation. When there's lots of cheap labor, there's no reason to invest in capital to improve productivity. That's what the big shift in the 1980s was about. Cutting labor costs and investing less for the future. Now we have a capital glut driving up housing and other asset prices, and a work force that can't live without government assistance.
Anything definitive on what's accounting for these labor shortages? I've seen a lot of hand waving as to why, but nothing especially convincing. Is everyone out with Long Covid and no one wants to talk about it or something?
Isn't it the aging of America? The boomers are all retiring and even my generation after that is in the window for early retirees. And on the other end the kids were locked out of part time and summer jobs so middle class kids weren't in the workforce either.
Citizen
There's no definitive answer. Rather is a combination of factors.
Yes demographics plays a LARGE roll. We now have more people over the age of 60 then we've ever had. These people still spend money, they still want to maintain a lifestyle but thee;s fewer workers to provide that lifestyle to them
Then there;s lifespan stretch. People are living longer
COVID - a 2 edged sword for sure. Many people who were planning on NOT leaving the work force DID LEAVE. If they knew back then what they know now about the COVID outcome I think many of them may have stayed in the work force or stayed owning their own businesses
Immigration. No one expected back in the 70s/80s the extreme back lash we have against immigration both legal and illegal. Every time a republican shouts close the border, a company in the SW part of the U.S. or one that has terrible jobs throughout the U.S/ shudders with fear that they will NOT be able to find workers. (Which is happening now)
The sad news is that we knew all of this was gonna happen (but not as quickly as it did). Reagans own DOL issued a report saying labor shortages would become "the norm" by 2015. It would primarily affected Nursing and Truck Driving first with other industries to follow later. The anti immigration crowd, the greed of employers, and COVID all contributed to the sheer size of our labor shortage,
It was not supposed to be this bad, this quickly.
It used to be that 4.5% to 5% unemployment was considered normal.
We are for all intents and purposes AT full employment right now with too many people looking for goods and services that they are so used to getting.
HokieAnnie is right. Its the aging of America
China is in worse shape. Africa is where "its at" now.
Kevin seems to be forgetting about normalization again. The employment rate (employed/prime-age population) is probably more informative than raw employed:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=17ghv
This measure goes up and down for various reasons, some which are not fully understood (why so much lower than around 2000?). It has actually recovered to slightly above pre-pandemic level. There is nothing particularly alarming about the current employment level or trend.
Of course robots are taking jobs. Machine looms took the jobs of hand weavers, precipitating one of the previous waves of Luddism. Computers do all kinds of things that humans used to do. This is perfectly natural in the modern industrial economy - all sorts of machines have taken all sorts of jobs, but the unemployment rate is as low as ever for peacetime, and the employment rate (above link), while lower than around 2000, is still higher than any time before 1990.
AI may cause new problems, but Kevin is proving nothing with this kind of economic argument. The arguments of the robots-are-coming people amount to this-time-its-different.
"said Samuel Reeves, chief executive of FORT Robotics"
"said Joseph Campbell, senior marketing manager for Universal Robots"
LOL. Some men who sell robots for a living say that robots are taking over human jobs. And why do we believe this?
More worrying is that Kevin paired this with a graphic on employment numbers. Absolutely NO link is ever demonstrated between these two so-called facts.