August 03, 2017
The NYT had an article on Amazon’s job fairs which were set up to recruit workers for 50,000 new jobs nationwide. At the end of the piece, the article discusses concerns that robots may soon replace the jobs that Amazon is now hiring for in its warehouses:
“Amazon is more aggressively using robots to help make the operations inside its warehouses more efficient. For now, the company said machines are not replacing people. Instead, they mostly move large shelves of merchandise to stations where orders are manually picked.
“Many academic researchers and start-ups are working on robots that have the dexterity to pick orders automatically. Amazon sponsors a competition to encourage engineers to build more advanced warehouse robots.
“When those technologies are perfected, the employment picture inside Amazon’s warehouses could look very different. That day could be a decade or more away, though.”
It is important to remember that productivity growth has been at record low levels in the last five years, meaning that we are seeing very few workers displaced by robots. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve Board has been raising interest rates over the last year and a half because it is concerned the economy is creating too many jobs. The concern about budget deficits is also a concern about inadequate productivity growth (too much demand and not enough supply).
In other words, in almost every other economic debate our concern is the opposite of having robots replacing workers. The concern is that we won’t have enough goods and services to go around.
If robots create a distributional issue, that is because of policies like patent monopolies that give all the money to owners of robots. These policies can be changed, but not if the media has a policy of never talking about them.
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