On May 22, 2017, Ben Popken writes on NBC News:
The death of retail is about to become a mass grave.
A new study finds that robots could destroy up to 7.5 million jobs over the next 10 years. That could be a bigger hit for the retail industry than when automation came for manufacturing jobs.
Retail has already suffered massive hits as its overbuilding bubble bursts and shoppers increasingly skip the mall for shopping online.
Just this weekend Sears said it was closing an additional 30 stores this spring on top of those already announced, bringing the total to almost 200.
But that retail downsizing trend is about to go full turbo. Robots will replace workers outright in certain jobs, according to the report, or make workers so efficient you don’t need as many of them.
“Cashiers are considered one of the most easily automatable jobs in the economy,” noted Cornerstone Capital Group, the financial services firm that conducted the study.
Many sales job are also up for the digital axe. More customers will make use of in-store smartphones and computer kiosks, reducing the need for as many salespeople on the floor.
While robots won’t be stocking retail store shelves any time soon, improvements in computerized inventory control means you won’t need as many bodies to do it. Then there’s the robot shopping carts that can return themselves.
Related: Do Shoppers Still Prefer Brick and Mortar Stores?
And, although successful demands for higher wages may have improved the lives of the workers they lifted up, higher pay can be a double-edged sword. With margins squeezed, retailers already under pressure will look even harder for ways to save.
“Companies which use technology to support their workers are likely to benefit from long-term productivity gains,” said the report. “However, technology also has the potential to automate part of the sales process and render a range of jobs redundant.”
While old industries are always being killed off and new ones created, the pace at which workers are being asked to learn new skills and new jobs is happening faster than it ever has in human history.
Can society and government keep up with the bots?
Gary Reber Comments:
This is yet another article whose subject matter should surprise no one who is conscious and who has even causally observed the constant shift to non-human productive inputs in the manufacturing, distribution, and sales of products, as well as the delivery of services, that has been occurring during their lifetime. The first burst of this phenomena was the Industrial Revolution. But now we are in an age of technology sophistication that is permeating every sector of industry and our day-to-day lives.
There’s nothing new about machines replacing people, but the rate of replacement is exponential and the result is that productivity gains lead to more wealth for the OWNERS of the non-human factor of production, but for others who have always been dependent on jobs as their source of income, there has been a steady decline to poverty-level labor incomes as private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.
Thus, we can no longer ignore the necessity to broaden personal ownership of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets simultaneously with the growth of the economy.
What must be understood is that there are two independent factors of production — human or labor workers who contribute manual, intellectual, creative and entrepreneurial work and non-human or physical productive capital (productive land; structures; infrastructure; tools; machines; robotics; computer processing; certain intangibles that have the characteristics of property, such as patents and trade or firm names; and the like which are owned by people individually or in association with others).
Fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions.
Also what needs to be understood is that human productivity has not advanced (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power — and relatively constant), but that the productiveness of the non-human factor of production — productive capital — is the reason that private sector corporations, majority owned by the “1 percent,” are utilizing the non-human factor of production increasingly to create efficiencies and save labor costs. It is the function of technology to save labor from toil and to enable us to do things that otherwise is humanly impossible without non-human input. The critical question becomes who should own productive capital? The issue of OWNERSHIP is unbelievably overlooked by those in academia and politics. Yet we live in country founded upon private property rights.
Today, large streams of data, coupled with statistical analysis and sophisticated algorithms, are rapidly gaining importance in almost every field of science, politics, journalism, and as well as digitalization of the manufacturing and service industries. What does this mean for the future of work?
The pursuit for lower and lower cost production in other countries that relies on slave wage labor and lacking environmental regulations will eventually run out of places to chase. In reality, off-shoring of manufacturing will eventually be replaced by human-intelligent super-robotic automation. Eventually, “rich” countries, whose productive capital capability is owned by its citizens, will be forced to “re-shore” manufacturing capacity, and result in every-cheaper robotic manufacturing.
“The era we’re in is one in which the scope of tasks that can be automated is increasing rapidly, and in areas where we used to think those were our best skills, things that require thinking,” says David Autor, a labor economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Businesses are spending more on technology now because they spent so little during the recession. Yet total capital expenditures are still barely running ahead of replacement costs. “Most of the investment we’re seeing is simply replacing worn-out stuff,” says economist Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics.
Yet, while the problem is one that no one can no longer ignore, the solution also is one starring them in the face but they just can’t see the simplicity of it.
The fundamental challenge to be solved is how do we reinvent and redesign our economic institutions to keep pace with job destroying and labor worth devaluing technological innovation and invention so not all of the benefits of owning FUTURE productive capacity accrues to today’s wealthy 1 percent ownership class, and ownership is broadened so that EVERY American earns income through full-earning stock ownership dividends so they can afford to purchase the products and services produced by the economy.
None of this is new from a macro-economic viewpoint as productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth. The role of physical productive capital is to do ever more of the work of producing more products and services, which produces income to its owners. Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital — which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
People invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention. Binary economist Louis Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Capital, in Kelso’s terms, does not “enhance” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). In fact, the opposite is true. It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Because of this undeniable fact, Kelso asserted that, “free-market forces no longer establish the ‘value’ of labor. Instead, the price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income.”
Furthermore, according to Kelso, productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Kelso postulated that if both labor and capital are interdependent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
The solution is obvious but our leaders, academia, conventional economist and the media are oblivious to the necessity to broaden ownership in the new capital formation of the future simultaneously with the growth of the economy, which then becomes self-propelled as increasingly more Americans accumulate ownership shares and earn a new source of dividend income derived from their capital ownership in the “machines” that are replacing them or devaluing their labor value.
The solution will require the reform of the Federal Reserve Bank to create new owners of future productive capital investment in businesses simultaneously with the growth of the economy. The solution to broadening private, individual ownership of America’s future capital wealth requires that the Federal Reserve stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every man, woman and child to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. Policies need to insert American citizens into the low or no-interest investment money loop to enable non- and undercapitalized Americans, including the working class and poor, to build wealth and become “customers with money.” The proposed Capital Homestead Act would produce this result.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
See the article “Economic Democracy And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=11.
See the article “The Absent Conversation: Who Should Own America?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/who-should-own-america_b_2040592.html and by OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-Absent-Conversation–by-Gary-Reber-130429-498.html
Also see “The Path To Eradicating Poverty In America” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/the-path-to-eradicating-p_b_3017072.html and “The Path To Sustainable Economic Growth” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/sustainable-economic-growth_b_3141721.html. And also “Second Income Plan” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/second-income-plan_b_3625319.html
Also see the article entitled “The Solution To America’s Economic Decline” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/9206/financing-future…economic-decline and “Education Is Critical To Our Future Societal Development” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=9058. And also “Achieving The Green Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=9082.
Also see “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/9206/financing-future…economic-decline and “The Income Solution To Slow Private Sector Job Growth” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/9872/the-income-solut…ector-job-growth.
