Engrs/MBAs /Managers are being fed on lot of ideas, which
they accept unhesitatingly and uncritically. One such idea that has gained
prominence , is about mechanization ie
use of machines ,in all walks of our life.
Are machinery beneficial to mankind in the long-run? How is it going to
affect self, children and other family members and society ?The widespread use of heavy machinery like
JCB’s and tipper lorries have laid to waste large tracts of fertile land in
Kerala, S.India. Overnight hills were erased
& cultivable paddy lands were turned into real-estate plots. This is
one of the conspicuous effect of machinery, acting destructively on our
environment.
Consider Paul Krugman’s , who became famous due to winning
Nobel Prize in 2008, quote from his OP-ED column ‘ROBOTS and ROBBER BARONS’ which appeared in
The Hindu a year ago. (Dec 11, 2012) . Quote “can innovation and progress
really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often
encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can.” Link http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and-robber-barons.html?_r=0.
Krugman notifies us that , extensive use of machinery leads to concentration of
wealth, low wages for workers and loss
of jobs even for high-skill workers. The net-effect of the use of machinery is negative for
society and man-kind. Here I am not at all considering other chain effects of power driven machinery on climate
leading to global warming.
Back in 1924,
Gandhiji had cautioned about man’s slavishness towards machinery . Quote “
Men go on ‘saving labour’, till
thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation.
I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all; I
want the concentration of wealth , not in the hands of a few, but in the hands
of all. Today machinery merely helps a
few to ride on the back of millions. The impetus behind it all is not the
philanthropy to save labour, but GREED.
It is against this constitution of
things that I am fighting with all my might”. –Young India, 13-11-24, p.378
Western countries, especially Europe, the pioneer of
Industrial Revolution is experiencing the baneful effect of machinery in the 21st century. Unemployment
is chronic there. And state is unable to
support the unemployed. Does Indian Engr’s desire a repetition of such a grim
situation for our country ? Repetition
because Manchester mill cloth paved the way for starvation of our weavers. All this and our Engineering education makes
me think about that Pink Floyid song ‘Another brick in the Wall’.
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Robots
and Robber Barons
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 9, 2012 1301 Comments
The American
economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are
at a record high. How is that possible? It’s simple: profits have surged as a
share of national income, while wages
and other labor compensation are down. The pie
isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an
ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.
Wait — are we really back to talking about capital versus
labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of
date in our modern information economy? Well, that’s what many people thought;
for the past generation discussions of inequality have focused overwhelmingly
not on capital versus labor but on distributional issues between workers,
either on the gap between more- and less-educated workers or on the soaring
incomes of a handful of superstars in finance and other fields. But that may be
yesterday’s story.
More specifically, while it’s true that the finance guys
are still making out like bandits — in part because, as we now know, some of
them actually are bandits — the wage gap between
workers with a college education and those without, which grew a lot in the
1980s and early 1990s, hasn’t changed much since then. Indeed, recent
college graduates had stagnant incomes even before the financial crisis struck.
Increasingly, profits have
been rising at the expense of workers in general, including workers with the
skills that were supposed to lead to success in today’s economy.
Why is this happening? As best as I can tell, there are
two plausible explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is
that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other
is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power.
Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one side, robber barons on
the other.
About the robots: there’s no question that in some
high-profile industries, technology is displacing workers of all, or almost
all, kinds. For example, one of the reasons some high-technology manufacturing
has lately been moving back to the United States is that these days the most valuable
piece of a computer, the
motherboard, is basically made by robots, so cheap Asian labor is no
longer a reason to produce them abroad.
In a recent book, “Race Against the Machine,” M.I.T.’s Erik Brynjolfsson
and Andrew McAfee argue that similar stories are playing out in many fields,
including services like translation and legal research. What’s striking about
their examples is that many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and
high-wage; the downside of
technology isn’t limited to menial workers.
Still, can
innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even
workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But
the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this
possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo is best known for
the theory of comparative advantage, which makes the case for free trade; but
the same 1817 book in which he presented that theory also included a chapter on
how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could
actually make workers worse off, at least for a while — which modern scholarship
suggests may indeed have happened for several
decades.
What about robber barons? We don’t talk much about
monopoly power these days; antitrust enforcement largely collapsed during the
Reagan years and has never really recovered. Yet Barry
Lynn and Phillip Longman of the New America
Foundation argue, persuasively in my view, that increasing business
concentration could be an important factor in stagnating demand for labor, as corporations use their
growing monopoly power to raise prices without passing the gains on to their
employees.
I don’t know how much of the devaluation of labor either
technology or monopoly explains, in part because there has been so little
discussion of what’s going on. I think it’s fair to say that the shift of income from labor to capital
has not yet made it into our national discourse.
Yet that shift is happening — and it has major
implications. For example, there is a big, lavishly financed push to reduce
corporate tax rates; is this really what we want to be doing at a time when
profits are surging at workers’ expense? Or what about the push to reduce or
eliminate inheritance taxes; if we’re moving back to a world in which financial
capital, not skill or education, determines income, do we really want to make
it even easier to inherit wealth?
As I said, this is a discussion that has barely begun —
but it’s time to get started, before the robots and the robber barons turn our
society into something unrecognizable.
A
version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 10, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Robots
And Robber Barons.
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