(01-11-2017, 08:48 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: [ -> ] (01-11-2017, 04:27 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: [ -> ]Now you're just making things up. The first Unimation robots went out to GE in 1961, and the PUMA was made in 1978. And yet the global number of manufacturing workers has not shrunk, has it? The US numbers peaked in 1979, but plateaued for 20 years, and didn't start to tumble until 2000, which I maintain had much more to do with trade policy than it did automation. It is presently increasing. The global number of manufacturing workers didn't shrink during this period either. In any event, the use of machines to boost human productivity in manufacturing has been going on for at least 200 years, i
Out of curiosity, what policy changes do you think caused the labor market shifts in around 2000?
Politicians set policy. Politicians cannot stop some economic realities.
Capitalism is much more effective in creating opportunity where there are shortages. If multitudes want something new and expensive (like cars in the early part of the 20th century; wristwatches, refrigerators, radios, phonographs, televisions, personal computers, and video-game players at various times, then there are opportunities for capitalists. Once markets are saturated, the high prices and opportunities for both capitalists and manufacturing workers are gone. The economy then goes to replacement which makes a manufactured object a commodity instead of a big-ticket item .
Think of the CRT color television:
Quote:The initial RCA Victor sets cost $1,000 in 1954. ...©onsumers that year also could buy a Chevrolet car for roughly the same price, so color TV sales were at first a tough sell.
http://old.post-gazette.com/tv/20031231c...1231p3.asp
...and those color TVs were expensive to maintain. There was a secondary business just in repairing TVs, typically involving the replacement of costly picture tubes that went out reliably.
Got an old color CRT TV that you bought in the 1980s for $700? Even if it is in good working condition, neither Goodwill nor Salvation Army wants it now. Back in the 1980s, America had a large industry in manufacturing televisions. Magnavox (the American brand for Philips for televisions) was a great company for which to work. Magnavox is largely an importer of televisions now.
Yes, I know -- one can pay about any price for a wristwatch, and whether one buys a Rolex or a cheap watch at Wally World says more about one's character and level of emotional security than about the utility of the watch. If I had a Rolex I would sell it.
To get a boom in manufactures, Americans would have to become hoarders -- something unlikely with the smaller living spaces in which many Americans now live. Maybe people would have to buy again into obsolete technologies with high costs built in.
But just think of the economic transformation of America since the seventeenth century... from hunter-gatherers (what the First Peoples were... and the French trappers and traders operated in such a world in America for sale of pelts to agrarian Europe) to the agrarian order (where America was at the time of the Revolution, the North largely as yeoman farmers and the South in a semi-feudal order), then early industrialism (the order that Karl Marx knew, and saw as capitalism at its purest with its rapacious plutocrats and helpless proletariat), modern industrial capitalism (in which the capitalists spared themselves the danger of Marxist revolutions by transforming the helpless proletariat into a market), and now the service-oriented post-modern capitalist world.
Economic nostalgia makes bad social policy. There are rapacious plutocrats who would do exceedingly well if people were to revert to the profits-first order of early capitalism. Of course that would have a damaging effect: the specter of a proletarian revolution would also return.