Matt Vidal’s recent posting raised a number of important issues. One he did discuss is the role of gender—namely the way it patterns where you work—in manufacturing employment.
Women in Manufacturing: Watch out for Mr. Roboto
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Tag Archives: robots
A Luddite, An Economist and a Marxist Walk Into a Modern Factory …
The Luddite sees industrial robots everywhere and, fearing negative effects on employment, begins to rage against the machines.
Seeing the same robots, the (liberal) economist exclaims, “What marvelous labor-saving technology. This will maximize productivity, and jobs that are lost in this factory will be replaced with high-tech jobs elsewhere in the economy!”
The Marxist sighs, and responds, “Is this some sort of joke? In the US today, seventeen percent of the American workforce – 27 million individual workers – is unemployed or underemployed.”
I imagined this scenario as I read the most recent entry in the New York Times’ consistently excellent series on the iEconomy, which focused on a new generation of robots being deployed in manufacturing.
Work in Progress 