If automation destroys jobs then why countries that use automation the most like Germany or Japan have almost no...

This. Until we create "strong" AI, automation will remain incapable of substituting for human labor, and will instead remain indistinguishable from the mere multipliers of a human laborer's productive efficiency that automation originated as at the start of the industrial revolution.

Also dating from that period, was Jevons' Paradox, the observation that increases in efficiency never result in decreases of consumption, but instead in demand increasing until free capacity created by higher efficiency had been eliminated.

In other words, higher efficiency will never lead to post-scarcity unless consumers intentionally limit their demand beneath their means:
epi.org/publication/the-zombie-robot-argument-lurches-on-there-is-no-evidence-that-automation-leads-to-joblessness-or-inequality/

One obvious solution would be to make us all capitalists in the sense that we devote ever larger parts of our income to capital. Cannot fail!

What if automation isn't the only thing that has an effect on unemployment?

what factor could possibly limit consumption…..

A philosophical shift in the zeitgeist away from consumerism

All Communists want automation.

Automation is stopped by Capitalism (Rightists). Humans are cheap labour.

Or perhaps workers that are replaceable (with a reserve army of that kind of labor) would never be paid more than subsistence?

how are cuckdems and porgressives gonna tax the robots to fund nigger programmes now?

WUT?

Why is half japan NEETS and half empty countryside?
Why east germany has Ostalgia?

German here, we do have a lot of unemployment, but the government gets better and better to meddle with the statistics.

I kid you not, the unemployment office here sends people to work for 1€ an hour, they invent completely senseless jobs just so they an scratch off those people from the unemployment statistic.

Don't buy into fake news.

And they say Greece presents fake numbers….

Already tried it in the Gilded Age, didn't work then, won't work now.

Japan is tremendously mountainous. As a result, most of its surface area is unsuited to development or exploitation of any kind, and the overwhelming majority of its population is forced into a few small areas by geology.

The ageing urbanized population doesn't help either.

Because Germany has arranged for the EU to exist in such a way that everyone else is unemployed in the EU but Germans.

Vid always related

I'd honestly say it does. They culturally normalize depressed fertility now, and after they die off, Japan's population will stabilize at something less oppressive. I'd actually say a more significant issue is the extreme elderliness of rural areas, which might cause much of traditional Japanese culture to die with them, as youths are still flocking to the homogeneous megacities even now.

1) Japan has abundance of jobs thanks to its deflation
2) German`s lack of unemployment is largely thanks to their labor laws regarding minimum wages for "temporary" workers.

Yeah no. GDP growth for Finland for example under EU has been higher than priori to it.

The Japanese also aren't very productive for all the hours they work. They mostly just sit there pretending to do something because being perceived as working hard is more important than actual production.

Ye, that's what I meant Urbanized.

It's more about "industrial Nord VS agricultural/service industry south".

statistics wizardry
numbers would be quite different if they counted only full-time employment

but anyway, export oriented economies by consecuence also export unemployment
imagine if German auto industry only worked for their internal market

This vid always puts a smile on my face

export led economy

In Japan's case:
1. Ageing population + low immigration
2. Underemployment.

As for Germany, fuck knows.
Although I'll bet that like most countries they they use the meme definition of "unemployment = unemployed, looking for work and able to start immediately."

Which means that when people give up because there's no hope of employment, they aren't counted as unemployed. In Britain for example even with this statistical fuckery, unemployment still hasn't returned to the low levels of the Pseudo Keynesian (pre-1971) era.

youtube.com/watch?v=WAvmGI4OZ-E
Basically this is what he's getting at iirc.

additionally factory automatisation in Germany isn't as wide as it's in Asian countries

On paper the united States has 'close to full employment.' but if you look at the specifics, a growing portion of the working population is employed in menial, low wage, part time work, because 99 percent of the jobs added back to the economy since 2008 have been those shitty retail jobs. They also cook the numbers by not counting the growing population of people that have just stopped looking for work because there is simply none to be had.

Economics is literally commercial make believe. GDP is a meaningless number and governments can't be believed because if people knew how bad things really are then they'd draw and quarter every last politician and stock holder in their country.

Like people in desert regions stopping investment in water infrastructure that has served them for thousands of years cause water crisis, start blaming global warming.

So dumb people in the west move more and more people into not productive occupations and to state handouts cause investment crisis and then blame automation for shit economy.

You are so stupid there…

Hey, no wonder you all hate Israel. It shows perfectly in both ways how dumb you are…..

AMERICA FUCK YEAH.

AMERICA IS NUMBER 1NE

IF YOU DON'T LOVE AMERICA, YOU CAN GET OUT!!!11

Read Marx:

Like I keep saying, as long as he has capital on hand to invest, Porky will gladly find some sub-employment to generously give to the desperate unemployed prole – more exploitative than a regular, proper job, naturally.

So like others said, an ever-increasing portion of these jobs are part-time crap or some other new legal category that Porky's politicos create in order to circumvent labor laws.

We should be glad the age of imperialism is over, or Porky would be using that surplus population to invade the 3rd world in order to create more consumer and supplier markets.

...

The name of the game is neo-imperialism now. Some similarities, but definitely not the same thing by a long shot.

What happens in 20 years when technology changes us even more but we've already slapped the buzzword new on everything?

It's okay, automation will take all those jobs in 5 years

Germany basically does the industry of half the eu now

Usually those rates are skewed to make it not look as bad. In the US real unemployment is around 8-9%
bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

Also, half of jobs in the US can be automated:
oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

Good question. I had been wondering the same thing about "post-modernism". Maybe divide the noun in Generation 1, Gen2 etc. Maybe drop Greek and Latin for another old language. Some Sumerian might be cool.
Or maybe neo-imperialism and post-modernism just plain will never end. Jesus take the wheel!

Robotics and automation controls engineer here. Automation frees up people to perform other tasks, augmenting human labor productivity by increasing it incrementally. In non-American countries they also have shorted work weeks as well, meaning that more people can be hired to perform the same job, thus reducing unemployment.

you have no idea what you're talking about

not all production processes are as easy to automate as in auto and electronics industry
I'm not even sure that humanoid robots will be ever able to compete with humans in regards to production and reproduction costs

If automation destroys jobs then whats the point of immigration to lower the value of labor?

1. lower the value of labour further
2. short termism + different sectors of the economy
3. immigrants can take on debt with which to consume products, natives are already debt-saturated.

the immigrants are going to need years of training (even a decade+) to even be able to hold any useful job. I mean there are only so many janitors you need.

Also seems pretty wacky to give out loans that will def not get paid back when you could just lower taxes to boost consumption.

Also, packing the electorate with a pocket demographic. I don't think that will work long-term given the history of 1800s-era US immigrants' political alignments in the 1900s, but a lot of shitlibs believe it.

That's banking for you. I forget the nuance of it, but basically they do their best when the level of debt in the economy is increasing
Which means ploughing people with debt is much more important than ascertaining whether that debt will actually be paid back.

I think it's to keep ponzi finance rolling over. ("Do you want a crash now, or a crash indefinitely in the future?")

Also simply ensuring a mass of competition for unskilled jobs is useful in itself.

Because it's a fucking meme parroted by liberals and a bunch of functionally illiterate tards on this board that feels>reals instead analyzing anything

The only thing that will save proles is solidarity against the bourgeois. Not college, trades schools or working hard.

Germany has labor protections built into their constitution to prevent a return of the third Reich.

One of the reasons Hitler was about to militerize Germany so quickly is because there were no labor protections and Nazi German factories ate German workers like they were going out of style, but were the most productive factories in the world.

Which are under constant attack by the "Social Democrats". Just recently the SPD passed a law liberalizing (which is new speak for cutting) employee pensions

Do you have evidence for this?
It seems like something that would be very, very difficult to prove.

make the uk keynesian again?

is it still at 10% tho
i thought people were going back to work now
the recession is over guise

marxist-leaning keynesian

Japan has a VERY small workforce and I know very little about Germany so don't ask me.

Germany exploits the EU to get such a low unemployment rate.

So while its only 5% in Germany its 25% in Spain and 28% in Greece.

ETERNAL KRAUT
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Yeah, I too wonder why a country with a negative birth rate has almost no unemployment.

So why does the rest of the EU bother staying in then?

You guys forgot to take your shitposting flags off.

That is a good question. Some people dont mind being exploited as long as it reduces their own responsibilities.
Plus we do know of one country isnt staying and more will surely follow.

Great rebuttal. Very well thought out and logical talking points.

How does that even work? Do the babies get sucked up their mothers' vaginas?

Death rate exceeds fertility rate.

So I looked up and Japan's population growth rate was -0.2% in 2014 and it's expected to keep getting lower. Jeez.

That's a good thing. Growing populations only help porky.

Thanks to US imposing their everything on them, especially capitalism, they now worry more about working than getting a family.

That's true, but your post is still retarded because this negative population growth is exactly due to porky.

Lucky bastards.

Here in England our public services, schools, roads and infrastructure is being absolutely crushed by the weight of overpopulation.
All because the bigwigs want cheap labour.

It must be awesome to be in Japan and know that in a few years traffic and overcrowding will be less.

1) It used to be primarily a 1st-world trade union to standardize and liberalize commerce, only later did it dedicate itself to engulfing 3rd-world nations for the imposition of offshoring/immigration and the unrelated cultivation of other neolib fetishes like austerity and privatization.
2) Once in the EU, especially for a long time, the economy reorients itself toward being in the EU. This means dominant businesses and politicians benefit from membership, while those which would benefit from leaving are weaker.

No, they're being absolutely crushed by porky. If you want to see overpopulation, look at Bangladesh

I went to London last week and I could have sworn I in Bangladesh already.

I wonder how their country has anyone left since they have all moved here?

Interesting fact: Japan's fertility rate over the last 50 years is about the same as the US or Europe's, minus mass immigration, and yet the scaremongering smear stories about the alleged sexual frigidity of NEETs aren't promulgated about white youth.

Porky is doing everything they can to keep populations high, just like the previous Gilded Age.

\.MFW My 60 year old father calls it the European common market.

It's kind of funny that the most significant way one can harm the capitalist system today is by not reproducing. I expect that sooner or later, some country's Porky will lay down Ceausescu-like period police.

Well that's his point. EU's population would probably be decreasing already if it wasn't for Porky's mass immigration. Cheap labor is just one of the reasons he does it; another is to prop population growth, which is just about the only thing that lets the EU economies grow at the moment. They have pretty much nothing to invest on in their own countries anymore, so they depend on the small concumpstion and cheap labor that migrants generate.

My fear is that they end mass immigration, their populations start to decrease and their economies become stationary (and not stagnant). Capital simply cannot abide lack of growth, especially since a healthy stationary economy implies some degree of socialism, so they'll end up falling back on that old source of consumer and producer markets: old-fashioned imperialism.

Socialism or barbarism.

Read this everybody:
epi.org/publication/the-zombie-robot-argument-lurches-on-there-is-no-evidence-that-automation-leads-to-joblessness-or-inequality/

A month of vacation, yes. 30 hours a week? This isn't really particularly common in Germany. French people have more free time than Germans as far as I know.

Great article because it reinforces all my opinions

I've been saying for a while now that this fearmongering about full automation is bullshit to push for Porky's UBI. Notice how the MSM kicked both into high gear early this year.

YOU are the one who is clueless user, plenty of robots designed to pick up fruit, it is only a matter of time, give or take 10 years.
Plenty of footage on youtube, inform yourself.

Jobs are not guaranteed to be created by automation, the incrreasing said productivity it also decreases the amount of workers needed to fill required company quotas, even if said quotas increase due to higher technology.
In developing countries work hours and wages will actually increase and decrease over time, respectively to be able to compete with robots.

the increase in*

This article is severely underrated. It basically BTFO the automation hysteria gripping all sides of the political spectrum

EPI are one of my go-to thinktanks on the burgerstani economy, along with CBPP, ITEP, & CTJ.

bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/fdb484c8-99a1-32a3-83be-20108374b985
i'm going to go out there and say every single one has political ambitions. (while the article itself notes that ones in the US were actually oriented towards creating ideas rather than propagandising them, I'll bet anything that they propaganda function was backported, particularly with the note of how they've spread at the end.)

Germany has low unemployment because they have labor protections in their constitution.

Japan has low unemployment through a combination of a strong welfare state and cooking the numbers like counting part time and jobs with no security

Just think before you post, man. 1 million erased cashier jobs doesn't translate into 1 million maintenance jobs, more like 1-10 thousand.

What happens if you automate the maintenance?

Hey, nobody's perfect. If you need detailed, high quality information, thinktanks and market researchers are the only people still doing what was once called investigative journalism with any serious professional effort. The fact that they're all bankrolled by special interest groups is just a sad necessity of our age.

Gee gosh golly it's only happened every single other time for the entire history of the industrial age, who's to say this time will turn out the exact same????

The only way to eliminate human labor as a constraint on demand, is to create machines that can wholly substitute for the human mind in every possible task. At which point we'll just end up in political turmoil over the rights of exploited AIs, and start the whole process over again.

Furthermore: Daily reminder that unemployment rates in the UK and many other nations still haven't returned to 1970s levels. I'm inclined to blame government policy for this rather than automation, but the point remains that things haven't been fine during the microcomputer revolution, they've been fucking terrible and we've just blinded ourselves to it.

I'm not talking about eliminating all human labor, just labor that has to do with the production of goods. Things like art, mathematics, and science are things people just do for fun, and would be incredibly difficult for an AI to do as well in these fields as a person.

Also you're forgetting that humans are the ones designing the AIs, and the guidelines they use to modify or replicate. Unless an AI is made for the task of writing a thought-provoking novel about how art and culture influence the human condition, there's no point in giving it the capacity for identity, ego, free will, or unhappiness. Again, there's no point in automating creative work.

According to the EPI at least the majority of manufacturing jobs lost since 1970 are due to automation

Its all about the service industry. In my country 9/10 jobs are service.

Even if we're not all Marxists here, I'm sure everyone can agree with Marx's analysis that "full employment" under capitalism exists minus an intentional "reserve army of labor" to keep the employed proles desperate and pliable. Obviously, in the FDR/Keynes era, unions and socdem politicians had more leverage against businessmen, which resulted in higher employment/wages/job security.

The modern era's unemployment is wholly intentional, aside from temporary fluctuations in the occasional depressionbusiness cycle, and does not represent some inability or unwillingness to employ people.

What exactly are you referring to? The linked article suggests nothing of the kind that I can discern. To the contrary, it not only shows that the effects of offshoring not to mention immigration utterly dwarfed those of automation, it points out automation in fact decreased in the 1970s-1980s as compared with the 1940s-1960s.

Don't tell me about how different today's automation is from yesterday's until it threatens to put Chinamen out of a job.

Literally retarded.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Well spreading an idea is its whole point, isn't it? And political ideas perhaps most of all need to be enacted to have any use, so political ambiion is a must. The problem isn't think tanks themselves, but rather the market surrounding them.

IMO, even if they're partisan, the purpose of thinktanks shouldn't be propaganda (that goes to NGOs & political parties), but to act as researchers, investigators, and analysts.

Back in the pre-internet days, major newspapers for instance operated very much like a miniature mirror image of a government's police/military. They had staff writers to function as bureaucrats, records departments with various levels of secrecy to act as intelligence, beat reporters that worked like police, and freelancers who acted as spies. This was matched with budgets specifically dedicated both to long-term coverage of perpetual targets, and special budgets for big investigations, along with a network of bureaus all around the country or major cities all over the world.

Without some serious establishment like this to act as a parallel check on governments and transnational corporations, the public can't hope to withstand their mechinations.