Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased.

Did the number of cashier's per customer (or perhaps more significantly, as a share of the population -- not labor force) increase? If you look at even AEIs graph [0] that they use to try to sell idea that ATMs didn't kill cashiers' jobs, it shows cashiers increasing rapidly during the very slow rollout of ATMs in the 1970s and 1980s, and the growth tapering off to very slow growth as ATMs take off in the 1990s and beyond (and remaining relatively flat even after the number of ATMs itself flattens in the mid-00s, probably as ATMs basically reached saturation but are still increasing functions, reducing the need for more tellers.)

[0] http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...

View on HN

The US Department of Labor has more detailed info in their "Occupational outlook handbook".[1] They project a 2% increase in the number of cashiers from 2014 to 2024, compared to 7% for all occupations.

Bank teller employment is in decline.[2] -8% from 2014 to 2024, says DOL's projection. Although, as DOL says, "Job prospects for tellers should be favorable because many workers leave this occupation."

AEI's last data point is from 2008, which was before most ATMs could cash checks and pay out immediately. Now that ATMs can read and validate checks (including handwritten ones, there's considerable AI behind that), the big Friday check cashing line is at the ATM, not the teller windows.

A friend of mine runs a branch of a major bank. The bank is moving to a branch layout which looks like a car dealership without the cars. There's a receptionist to direct traffic, and offices on both sides with sliding glass doors, just like the ones in car dealerships. That's where they sell loans and other financial products. In the back, barely visible, are two teller windows. There are conveniently placed ATMs both inside and outside the branch. That's what's happening to bank tellers.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/cashiers.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/te...

My credit union in the US has moved to a similar design last year… except that the tellers are behind a video screen. 2 tellers for 4 screens.

My bank in France took it a step further in 1999: no more tellers at all. Nobody touches cash except for the machines. The staff is therefore considerably reduced and only for less common operations, or high-touch sales.

I agree. The numbers should be scaled to # of customers and/or population. To some extent, this is addressed in the text. ATMs reduced the cost of operating a branch, so banks opened more branches. It's easy to see that number of tellers has kept up with population growth. US population was ~200e6 in 1970 and is now ~300e6. From that AEI chart, tellers have grown almost as fast.

(Made some edits to this comment after I realized I mistook the tellers graph for the ATMs.)

Why is your proposed metric better than the original? Honest question.

Not the parent, but all other things remaining the same, population growth alone will drive the need for more cashiers. Since ATMs did not stop population growth, percentage based metrics help account for that.

So the different types of numbers can help drive home different points:

* in absolute numbers, ATMs didn't cause any job losses.

* in relative numbers, there are less job opportunities in this space. (e.g. there used to be a need for 1 cashier per N people, not there is only a slot for 1 cashier per 2N people).

The second type of thinking is what people are worried about - if we keep reducing percentage of people who are needed to do stuff, what the other folks do?

There's also the factory vs car improvement difference. Factories did not make workers obsolete; cars did make horses obsolete. I'm not sure we can ahead of time tell whether particular technological improvements are more like factories or cars.

>I'm not sure we can ahead of time tell whether particular technological improvements are more like factories or cars.

When those improvements are AI-driven automation, we can.

AI is a huge area that will lead to many advances, each one with different impact.

I think the second is actually much less worrisome than the first. With absolute job losses, people who lose their jobs need to retrain or accept (probably much) lower pay in different fields. Both of those are hard on people psychologically, and requires very expensive government intervention to mitigate. With the second you just alter the mix of what young people are trained in originally. It will be more expensive to train a young person in programming as opposed to truck driving, but it's not nearly as bad as training a 50 year old trucker in programming, fiscally or psychologically.

Because difficulty of finding a job is related to jobs per unit population (absolute numbers aren't important, and labor force is the wrong comparison because jobs becoming scarce causes people to exit the labor force, which includes only those working or actively looking for work, which people stop doing when actively looking for work doesn't pay off.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com