Give 'Em Hell, Bernie

[Brakeman]

francismjenkins

Agreed, but factories can be operated without bosses and without absentee owners (plenty of employee owned firms & worker cooperatives operating this way right now), but I suppose factories could be automated to the point where you barely need any workers (so the opposite is also true).

But, if all we have is an automated economy with no workers, who will buy the products? 

I have no problem with innovation making work easier, it is why we now drive modern cars and don't rely on horse and buggies. But every time you take a job and replace it with a machine, someone loses a job. And the more automated a system is you still are going to have humans who need to pay their bills. You cannot simply keep taking humans out of the picture without thinking long term about how a newer labor force will survive. 

Actually, (Economics degree speaking here) with automation you are freeing up a worker and capital to do another job. We wouldn't have Iphones if everyone was digging their potatoes by hand. If automation makes a product cheaper it usually costs the country more to employ the manual laborer than it is worth.  Let's say $100 widget becomes 10 dollars on the market because a robot displaced 100 workers who made $50,000 a year.  Sales were 1,000,000 units/yr Thus it would cost the country $90,000,000 to employ 100 workers for a year. It would be cheaper for the country to pay the old workers $800,000 a year to play canasta for a living.

The pain to the economy is when automation does not lead to drastically better production and in reality doesn't do as well. When a factory displaces workers with robots that contantly break down and make more scrap costs because of it's high speed then it is a lose-lose situation for the country. Poor management costs way more jobs than automation. Too many bad economic decisions are made by people that got their positions by their skill at the golf course or from family connections.