Monday, January 14, 2013

One reason unemployment remains high . . .

. . . more and more jobs are performed by robots.



60 minutes reports on it. Most other aspects of the economy are doing well. One frightful observation in the story: The tech companies in the US (Facebook, Google, Apple, etc) have a market value of over $1 trillion, but only hire collectively 150,000 people. They don't need that many human workers. That's a bad figure for monthly job growth. Older companies - General Motors for example - hired upwards of half a million.

An unusually high number, and variety, of jobs are performed by robots.

This creates the obvious problem: what to do with the large number of jobless? We are not replacing these jobs very quickly.