But the vast armies of uneducated, second-or-third-generation-jobless people will have their jobs slaughtered by automation. Truck/cab/freight delivery will be automated, freight handling and shipping will be automated, cleaning of public and private areas will be automated.
The only field I can see which will depend on low-skilled worker armies is construction.
And with the refugee crisis we just magnify the problem because the refugees will have to be integrated, they have to learn German and still lots of them will be lower educated than the rest :/
The trend in construction for the past decade has been towards less labour intensity.
So no good news here either.
There are really strong incentives for automation in healthcare.
When talking about the immigrants and refugees working with elders; Unfortunately, even the "human touch" and the social part of the job is sometimes problematic because of cultural and language barriers... (Also applies to the opposite situation, elder immigrants receiving care.)
The new APM automated continer port in Rotterdam [2] is set to handle 4m containers per year using automated vehicles and cranes - with few operators on the dockside (just for the two train cranes and one barge crane) - the other 8 cranes are operated by remote control.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3258829/Driverless-t...
Everybody's missing the really bad thing about these trucks and self-driving cars though. Everything is patent encumbered. So they will transform a bottom up industry (dependant on people to drive the trucks, trucks which can be produced by any of a 1000 companies) into a top-down patent-encumbered capital-intensive industry (because only one company will get self-driving cars thanks to our patent system). There will be one company driving these trucks, not many like today.
This will destroy truck drivers, yes, absolutely. However something it will also do is sink every KMO that has trucks driving, which is a a lot of them here in Germany.
So give it another 10 years and "oh no hell no to self driving trucks/cars" will be one of the few things socialists and capitalists/liberalists agree on, because it will destroy the constituency of both parties. I also seriously doubt they can reliably deliver cargo in the central streets of Germany's cities. The ones built in the 14th century which are about wide enough for a single horse carriage (very tight for a car, and truck drivers actually manage to squeeze in (you -often- have to forgive some damage of course))
I don't think that the construction industry will be immune to automation. Google up "house build robot" or "construction robotics" to see what's already being done.
And how can there be a labor scarcity when productivity has risen to levels where we can overproduce almost everything we can think of, far outstripping our natural resources?
The future is going to be full of complicated thoughts like this - problems to which automation can solve some things but policy and design solves others. We'll have to be really good philosophers to avoid catastrophic error.
The EU already has 23 million unemployed (and a lot more in minimum-wage bullshit jobs nobody wants or needs), a million refugees won't make problems significantly worse than they already are.
Oh yes, they already do. The housing market in German cities is already fucked up beyond limits because our politicians have slept for years, and 1.5m refugees now needing winter-resistant housing (so, no tents) bring the market to its knees.
But I'm thankful for the refugees, because they show our politicians they can't sleep forever.
Awful article that shows from beginning to end its bias with a wishful thinking justification of letting big-business reign over the rest of society.
In my sector, Supply Chain Management, we are facing a skills shortage.
* Warehouse operatives are moving from many low skilled pickers to a few skilled robot sitters and the latter are in short supply.
* Procurement - moving from the soft skills of buying person to person over the phone to electronic exchange and online bidding - again a skills shortage is looming for the non-managerial staff.
* Driving - HGV is facing a short supply as the retiring workfoce is not being replaced by young people and more demand for last mile drivers for the shift to single package delivery.
* Supply chain managers - a relatively new title and one that few young people consider. The Novus Trust in the UK is promoting the career path in a hope to encourage new entrants.
http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply is a real eye opener.
Film at 11.
What surprise me is that they use the capital vs. workers narrative.
That said, I often wish the mainstream left would diversify their own font of knowledge. Especially given most don't read him.
The mounting inequality itself is however not just an opinion.
> They are free to ignore the mounting criticism
But they're not ignoring it as such, and IMHO it's gotten to the point where it would be foolish to do so. So now they're supplying an alternative political position on what to do - i.e. don't worry, markets will sort everything out.
Another observation is some of your jobs are extremely temporary, like becoming a cable TV installation technician, once the metropolis is wired up in the mid 80s, 99.999% of them are permanently unemployed. So you're going to have to offer fat stacks of cash to drive a truck until permanently replaced by an automated truck in a couple years or have this years flavor of the month of robot certified system engineer cert holders or whatever, because in five or ten years they'll be permanently unemployable or at absolute best case be unemployed and retraining. You can't expect to pay people a low career level wage for an extremely short term job.
A final observation is for real long term careers you've listed, when business people say there's a skill shortage, they rarely mean a shortage of people with skills, because the skills are often pretty widespread and trivial, but a shortage of business people and HR personnel who can CYA on hiring decisions via authority like diplomas and govt licenses, or an established hierarchy like "top 100 biz/med/legal school lists". None of those skills listed are weird or rare in your average human population; you're not asking for research grade theoretical physicists; every house that has a roll of toilet paper in the toilet paper holder has some human who at least vaguely understood logistics; you only need to hire the top 0.001% of that enormous proven skilled population. Its just if you make a mistake in the hiring process you can't act all blameless because he had a MBA from Harvard so I'm not responsible for hiring the wrong guy, or he had a license from the state bureau claiming he was qualified, or he held journeyman papers. Or in summary, its a management CYA behavior problem not a real workforce skill problem.
Even if you only work for a year, you will recoup your investment so I don't think it can possibly be people thinking that "I'm not going to be an HGV driver because robots will take my job, I shall stay here in McDonald's on minimum wage"
So it can't be a purely wage issue that keeps millions of people in low pay / unemployment and not behind an HGV steering wheel.
For instance The NOVUS Trust [1] is a Supply Chain / Logistics undergraduate scheme that guarantees a job for those graduating with a 2:1 or over that is sponsored by industry members.
Basically the rumor is that Amazon might have similar problems to Ford did in the UK where Junior supervisors are playing favorites
I'm always pretty curious about why people, even on HN, seem to equate "this needs high precision" with "automated systems won't cope" when it comes to driverless cars. Saying something is really hard for a person because it requires careful, precise control sounds like exactly the sort of thing you want machines for.
So what is it about the task that is complex for a machine to solve?
Urban transport will not be HGV. City limits trans-shipment points will split packages into inner-city deliverables.
Last mile is an active area of research investment e.g. electric cargo bikes [1]
The buzz phrase in the literature is massification to atomisation [2]
[1] https://k4rgo.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/k4rgo-ups-germany....
[2] https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch1en/conc1en/atomiz...
On the other hand the basic concept of labour and capital as market objects with values controlled by supply and demand makes a lot of sense.
A year ago when I was working in construction, I remember for a standard home at least:
Planning (architects), demolition workers, excavation, foundation builders, bricklayers/concrete builders, plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, window workers, fireplace/chimney builders, painters, inner decoration guys, telecom/smarthome engineers. On one single home site. Oh, and add for at least the "big and dirty" parts of building a house at least two or three trucks with drivers.
But, of course, the companies did rarely work at the same time.
If houses were to move to a prefab model with e.g. plastic construction and standardised room sizes and plumbing and electrical connections between the rooms most of these skilled workers would find themselves redundant...
Fortunately the UK insurance industry inadvertently protects the building industry by making it difficult to insure so called 'non-traditional' constructions.
Still, the prefab blocks have to be built by adequately skilled workers - gas, water and electricity at least will always require a certified worker simply due to the inherent risks of fire, explosions, water leaks and electric shocks.
For instance, partial pre-assembly of mechanical/electrical fittings through to modular kitchen/bathrooms with almost everything done before it gets to site.
Of course you'll always need people to put all of these elements together but the numbers needed becomes less and less.
The certified worker who signs everything off used to do almost everything himself, we are now moving to a situation where this is almost all he does.
But how much inequality is a problem is an opinion, I'm afraid.
At least that you are OK with total inequality (or with a systemic collapse) we should start to look at this carefully.
And this is what the article deal with, what is saying is: "the trend is going to reverse because it was born from demographics, nothing to do with the Washington Consensus, the dismantling of worker protections and other small details."
Of course, this is from a right-wing magazine, so they could just be making it up to appease their owners or something.
And it also depends on the definition of poverty. Is it absolute or relative? As soon as you start talking about relative poverty, you are effectively arguing for wealth redistribution.
//EDIT: swapped poverty in for inequality above//
Just to weight in with an alternative view: http://mainlymacro.blogspot.fr/2014/11/redistribution-under-...
Do you think that's a positive recommendation? Because it's not clear and I don't.
I used to follow him on twitter for a while, and I'm not convinced of that.
His first book was a well-thought out contrarian polemic. His tweets struck me as off-the-cuff random contrarian outbursts.
