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Pundits will debate the wellsprings of Donald Trump's election triumph for years. Right now, cultural explanations are in the lead. Multiple researchers and journalists are stressing the role of "racial resentments" and xenophobia as the deepest sources of Trump's appeal. And such explanations cannot be dismissed.
But the decades-long decline of U.S. manufacturing employment and the highly automated nature of the sector's recent revitalization should also be high on the list of explanations. The former is an unmistakable source of the working class rage that helped get Trump elected. The latter is the main reason Trump won't be able to "make America great again" by bringing back production jobs.
The Rust Belt epicenter of the Trump electoral map says a lot about its emotional origins, but so do the facts of employment and productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries. The collapse of labor-intensive commodity manufacturing in recent decades and the expansion in this decade of super-productive advanced manufacturing have left millions of working-class white people feeling abandoned, irrelevant, and angry.
To see this, one has only to look at the stark trend lines of the production data, which show a massive 30-year decline of employment beginning in 1980. That trend led to the liquidation of more than a third of U.S. manufacturing positions. Employment in the sector plunged from 18.9 million jobs to 12.2 million.
[...] In fact, the total inflation-adjusted output of the U.S. manufacturing sector is now higher than it has ever been. That's true even as the sector's employment is growing only slowly, and remains near the lowest it's been. These diverging lines—which reflect the sector's improved productivity—highlight a huge problem with Trump's promises to help workers by reshoring millions of manufacturing jobs. America is already producing a lot. And in any event, the return of more manufacturing won't bring back many jobs because the labor is increasingly being done by robots.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 21 2016, @07:24PM
When you say "robots are useful ... but they can't do everything" you are technically correct, but misunderstanding things terrible. You need to date your facts. Robots today have certain limits that constrain their usefulness. Robots next year will have fewer limits, and the year after that fewer still. To get a feel for what this means look at the robots from 10 years ago. (In the first sentence I engaged in a bit of rhetoric, as the improvements are not smooth, but stepwise, and often there will be several years without much improvement.)
The thing to notice is that unless you are working with an extremely modern factory, or actually engaged in the development of robots, your image of them will be several years, if not several decades, old. A new factory will use state of the art, or even bleeding edge, robots. This will entail startup costs of debugging, but the factory will be in use for a long time, so you need to plan ahead. And jobs are designed to work with the particular robots installed. This allows maximal efficiency of the robots, and puts the places where they are inflexible at minimal disadvantage. But those places keep changing. A factory build next year won't have the same jobs as one built last year. Which minimizes the advantage of experience when moving between factories. Etc.
I don't expect the big loss of jobs to come within the next two years, but I do expect it in less than four years. This will be largely from truck drivers and those who service them. And it won't happen all at once, but it will snowball rapidly as the insurance companies decide that automated trucks deserve a lower cost for insurance. (Or, possibly, more and more companies decide to self-insure for vehicular damage.)
Naturally a lot of this depends on political decisions, but I don't really see this administration as acting in a way that businesses would object to.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:44PM
I'm really not. You're neglecting the fact that large companies will run a specific site into the ground before they shut its doors. There are factories and industrial operations operating now from sites over a hundred years old. Granted they've been updated some but they're nothing near as automated as a site would be if built today with automation first in mind. There's also the fact that buying extremely expensive machines is a very risky investment unless you're absolutely certain you will be able to make your money back on them before they become obsolete. Both of these factors keep automation growth in check.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.