70 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

This is an interesting question a lot of good labour economists have been thinking about for a while. There are a few conflicting theories as to what will happen. You could base a whole career on this ...
  • 3,761
46 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

Automation has been happening for a couple of hundred years now and right now we're all still working pretty hard. Although a 40-hour working week is standard, many people exceed this, and many ...
  • 928
27 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

Your question relates to an important research topic on the link between automation and employment. David Autor works on this issue and the topic "Inequality, Technological Change and Globalization". ...
  • 6,855
23 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

Horses were replaced by cars. Clerks were replaced by word-processors and spreadsheets. We have adapted to the technology and changed how we work. Therein lies the answer. Consider if you will a ...
  • 386
19 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

There are already excellent answers, but I would like to add in a different perspective: There will be fewer people. Not just jobs, but actual human beings - if there is less demand for human ...
15 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced? EDIT / UPDATE 5th November 2016: http://mashable.com/2016/11/05/elon-musk-universal-basic-income/ ...
15 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

I'm going to give a less economically rigorous answer, and address your concern about your own situation. Jobs change. Your skillsets will always need to change. If you are young, it's a certainty ...
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10 votes
Accepted

Should we expect more structural technological unemployment if growth becomes more limited by natural resources and less by labour?

I understand that you are asking the following Up to now, we have avoided structural unemployment because we increased production by more than what the technological efficiency gains implied (...
10 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

I am surprised none of the posts above discuss the following paper: Autor, D., and M. Handel. "Putting Tasks to the Test: Human Capital." Job Tasks and Wages" Journal of Labor Economics (2009). This ...
  • 1,631
8 votes

Is 'full employment' synonymous with 'the natural rate of unemployment'?

Full employment is a more general term, which has much less implication than natural rate of employment. My experience reading a lot of economics papers is that careful authors do not mix the two ...
  • 1,276
8 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

The way I see it, there are two possible futures given the increasing state of automation in the world. Future One: A Basic Income We decide as a nation, federal state, or world, that human beings ...
  • 181
8 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

Intentionally unserious answer. Let's just take the individual's possible reactions to "having their job taken over by a machine" and scale them up to the macro level. Find a job in another field. ...
  • 181
8 votes

Minimum Wage effects on Adjacent Cities

A very famous study in this direction is Card and Krueger (1994). They look an increase in the minimum wage in New Jersey in 1992. While New Jersey raised the minimum wage from USD 4.25/h to USD 5.05/...
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7 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

In Progress and Poverty, Henry George claims that the advancement of technology eventually leads to increasing the land value and the land rent. This means that people who own land will have a high ...
7 votes
Accepted

What were the factors that caused the Philips curve to stop working during the 1970s?

The general way people figured the Phillips curve worked was that a shock in aggregate demand or fiscal stimulus would cause labor demand to increase as government spending generated growth, which ...
  • 6,516
7 votes
Accepted

What keeps minimum wage rates in balance?

How is the minimum wage determined? Yes and no. It is a political choice, but with economic reasoning. In the end, that's the case for every economic rule, maybe with the exception of monetary rules, ...
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7 votes

How does an increase in the price of "non-wage-goods" increase employment?

Wage-goods are goods that a worker with wages might buy, perhaps now more commonly called consumption goods Non-wage-goods are goods that a rentier receiving profits or interest might buy, including ...
  • 4,732
6 votes
Accepted

Solving Kaplan and Menzio: Shopping Time

UPDATE After e-mail communication with one of the authors G.W.Kaplan, I recalibrated the value of the vacancy-posting cost parameter $k$ in order to obtain a cross of the two nullclines for $u=0.05$. ...
6 votes

Does working abroad cause less unemployment? Or is it actually harmful (directly or opportunity cost)?

On remittances: It is not unusual to hear about income being sent home by, say, US immigrants. However, the product of their labor and the side effects of their intellectual capital, sometimes called ...
6 votes
Accepted

Why does immigration boost the economy? (or does it not...?)

You’re right, the migration of workers boost the economy. It’s a stylized fact. It may have political consequences, though, but it is not the part of the analysis of economics. Let’s consider $A$ the ...
5 votes

Why are there so many migrants in the modern world?

Are current flows of migration bigger that they were in the past? We tend to forget history because the numbers involved currently are smaller relative to world population. For instance, the 8.8 ...
  • 6,855
4 votes
Accepted

Does the Fed use misinformation as a tool for good monetary policy?

This question as is (October 2, 2015, 15:07 Athens time) should be closed and I voted to that effect. I provide an answer in order to show why it should be closed. As any natural or legal entity, ...
4 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

Keep this in mind. The richest 1% aren't cannibals. What I mean by this is that the richest 1% have become the richest by getting their product(s) to the populous. If the populous can't afford a ...
4 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

Once artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, it will be up to A.I. to determine how we spend our days. On the one hand this already occurs. When you go online, algorithms are constantly ...
4 votes

How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?

On a lighter note,...... Robots do not eat, drink, buy consumer goods or take their date to the movies. Who is going to buy the goods that the robots produce if all the workforce is out of a job. Do ...
4 votes
Accepted

Does immigration help to sustain welfare in rich European countries?

Here is a chart from the OECD, which shows the net fiscal impact of migrants on their recipient country (i.e. by how much to they contribute or withdraw from the welfare state, albeit excluding in-...
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4 votes
Accepted

Why is full employment desired in an economy if competition promotes innovation?

Your question shows quite a lot of misunderstanding about what full employment means so let me first correct this. Full employment does not mean everyone is employed. Even at full employment there ...
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3 votes

DMP: Two Labor Markets

Found my mistake. I guess I'm not allowed to move the thetas to the other side. Define $q^{-1}$ be the inverse of $q$. Then, $$ \theta = q^{-1} \left( \frac{c}{J} \right)$$ $$ \frac{W_1}{W_0} = \...
  • 10.6k
3 votes
Accepted

Data: Vacancies in the US before 2005

JOLTS actually goes back to 2000 (though years before 2005 are only available on a SIC basis). Prior to JOLTS, most people used data on the number of help-wanted ads in newspapers, such as this series ...
3 votes

Do machines reduce labor... or so they redistribute, alter, and globally increase labor?

The only "perpetual motion machine" is life itself. No it is not. We also convert energy to heat as we go through life. We are certainly not immune to the second law of thermodynamics, we increase ...
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