Turns out, they didn’t take our jobs!

I have been saying this for a number of years – China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Immigrants didn’t take our jobs.  Robots did.  And now Paul Wiseman agrees:

https://www.pressreader.com/usa/richmond-times-dispatch-weekend/20161106/282969629631569

We make more cars in the US today than in the 1970s, with 1/3 of the labor force, mostly with robots.   We make more steel in the US today that in the heyday of the steel towns of Pittsburgh and Bethlehem because of robots and small scale recycle pug mills.  What’s more, industrial experts think the US, not China, will be the most manufacturing competitive country in the world because the costs to manufacture are cheaper due to automation (a fancy word for robots).

Ok, wait, isn’t unemployment now under 5% and we have had 70+months of continuous job increases?  How is that possible?  Companies want to cut costs.  Labor is easy when that labor can be replaced by robots. The trend will continue.  Automatic driving trains are real.  Automated trucks are coming – billions are being put into truck automation to reduce the 1.4 million truckers to as close to zero as possible, saving 1/3 the cost of transportation.  But automation does not mean less jobs – there are needs for higher tech jobs to maintain the robots.  And the ability to cut costs in one area means more income to spend on others, increasing jobs in other areas. So in reality there are more, higher skill jobs out there.

More to come, but  maybe we are now starting to understand what is meant by the “new” economy and how that might transfer to the water industry..