Are robots hurting job growth?

Originally posted by JS357
" However, like many inventors, Whitney (who died in 1825) could not have foreseen the ways in which his invention would change society for the worse. The most significant of these was the growth of slavery. While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the ...[text shortened]... aspects of Southern life."

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent/

So larger plantations were the result...but at some point there was only so much land to go around. This is where unemployment goes up and wages are slow to rise.

Originally posted by Metal Brain
So larger plantations were the result...but at some point there was only so much land to go around. This is where unemployment goes up and wages are slow to rise.

It all depends on whether we view history as the playing out of ethical interests or the playing out of economic interests. Either way is a "view" we bring to the facts of history.

But unemployment of the enslaved consisted mainly of uncaptured fugitives. This is one end of the spectrum of historical labor policies. I suppose that at the other end, is confiscation of capital by the people, rationalized as restoration of wealth to those who create it. But that doesn't work either, as there will be predators standing up in front of the people. The dynamic continues.

Originally posted by sasquatch672
I agree with you, but the growth of better-paying jobs trails the elimination of current jobs, by years and sometimes decades. So it's small consolation that those better-paying jobs come along.

On a much happier note, the pace of jobs being repatriated in the US is accelerating rapidly.

Thing is that due to human actions, things can never and will never stay the same, without the use of force, which retards both growth in consumer choices, and job skills.

I'm sitting in my living room, typing on one of my two laptops on my kitchen counter, behind me is an obsolete 50 inch plasma flat-screen TV, two Android tablets, a 10" and a 7", an inkjet printer, a carpet steam cleaner, and a room air-purifier. Most of this stuff didn't exist two decades ago. The internet, and this website is relatively new stuff. In another two decades, there will be stuff we can't even imagine, which will be invented by kids here or kids from Japan, India or China depending on who steps up and improves their education system, and keeps capitalist incentives rolling.

The people talking about the good old days of hunter gathering can go that route, without holding the rest of us back. The very things that truly inhibit growth are the attempts to control and limit market activity, to keep everything the same.