Looking over their shoulders ...

So should chinese workers and american taxi/truck drivers be looking over their shoulders as the robots approach ?

The Great Disruption

In a podcast from the Commonwealth Club ....  "It's time to stop just worrying about climate change, says Gilding; instead, we need to brace for impact, because global crisis is no longer avoidable. "

(Couldn't be?) Made in America

This article in the NY Times is a pretty sobering account of why the iPhone is built in China (spoiler alert, it is not the cost of labor).  It leaves a different sense of timeline (decades rather than years) for any recovery in the US economy, a little different from the folksy ad run by Americas Power.  But maybe we are looking for a return to a past that can no longer be afforded.

When the price of carbon and thus transportation is unrealistically low, the incentive is to centralize production.  If we were to meaningfully deal with global warming, production would move closer to the markets and revitalize the local supply chains, likely at a lower level of per capita consumption. Intellectual property can be distributed cheaply ... maybe what is needed is for FoxConn to become truly multinational and for the domestic labor markets to adapt to a changed world.

Employment in the US

In his article, Zakaria: Romney's Real Problem, Zakaria states:  "If you look at job creation over the last 20-25 years in America, you’ll notice that we haven't been able to create any jobs in what is called the “tradable sector” of the economy - those jobs that are subject to global competition. The only jobs we’ve really created have been in industries like health care, government, and construction, which are basically local industries shielded from global competition. You can't outsource the building of a New York skyscraper to a Chinese worker."  Looking a little further, the Economist has an article Moving to Stagnation, which discusses job growth and movement in the US (and certainly is not happy news for NM).  Foriegn Affairs has a nice, longer article (for fee), Globalization and Unemployment, on the structural issues facing jobs in the US.