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The US will find out the hard way how much of their undesirable work is done by people that "steal their jobs". Jobs that no American wants to do.
The UK already has seen this with Brexit https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44230865
Both farms and hotels have an increasing number of jobs being automated where it makes economic sense, or for pure novelty’s sake.
https://www.farmprogress.com/technology/tethered-drones-can-...
I don't want to comment about picking crops, that's rapidly changing and I don't expect to be up-to-date with this. I've seen people being confidently wrong about "cows won't milk themselves" decades after there were machines cows could operate by themselves to get milked.
So, the example with most saliency for me (which may not be the hardest to deal with) is:
Imagine a hotel that is hosting a convention, and is fully occupied for five days. On day one, a norovirus infection event gets everyone, on day four everyone's digestive tracts are voided from both ends with about 40 seconds' warning. How well do the automation systems cope?
This example is probably quite close to the top of the list of things I expect cleaning staff to be hoping someone can automate/has already automated, because noro is hella infectious like that and who on earth would actually want to be the one who has to clean up after such incidents, but has this kind of cleanup actually been fully automated yet?
I had to clean up after a relative (which is why it's salient for me), and I think I caught it from them because I'd missed the inside of a cupboard door handle before removing my gloves.
> How about automatic cleaning of a clean room?
Positive air pressure, air filters, and requiring occupants to wear stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom#/media/File:Cleanroo...
Would be one of the easier cases, given they are work environments and by extension there's an expectation of reduced scope of things for the automation to be doing, though even then I'd expect some unplanned incidents require human intervention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortage
Increased capacity utilizing automation would introduce automation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_capacity
Increasing demand doesn't magically necessitate that technological resources sprout from nothing to replace human resources.
An introductory macroeconomics source instructs one on this
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...
Increasing automation and therefore productivity means an increase in profits to the owners, not a drop in prices, except in the most competitive industries.
Unemployment is already extremely low. There aren't tons of Americans waiting to step into these jobs. If unemployment were 10% that would be a different story, but we're close to full employment. So instead of the jobs going to Americans, the produce rots in the fields, and prices go up.
They want unemployment to be low so they can keep wages and salaries suppressed
High unemployment helps employers because they can put pressure on the workers, who are less likely to find a job with better conditions or at all.
The fact that low unemployment is associated with stagnating wages these days is a massive failure of the capitalist system. It means that the situation is deteriorating and some of the levers cannot be used. There is no way out without pain.
So my reasoning was "if there are not many unfilled jobs, it makes it tougher for people to find work, meaning the unemployment rate is low" which of course does not logically follow
My mistake
There are signs of upwards wage pressure in the last couple of years, we’ll see how sustainable that is.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/wh...
Would Americans work those jobs if those jobs paid well?
Regardless of the fact that a lot of poor people don't live in the areas where most of those jobs are but they do get their produce from there..
The top 4 counties in the US for agriculture production are all in the central valley in California.
Which in turn will create more pressure to increase the salaries until it reaches the equilibrium that satisfies everyone.
The alternative is to use de-facto slave labor just for the sake of cheap food?
The lower your income is, the bigger the % you spend on necessities like food. So when those go up, the lower incomes are again hit the hardest as they spend a higher percentage of their total income on it. And these are necessities not nice to haves
I am not. You are confusing transient effects with the equilibrium state.
Btw, for low wage employees everything is a significant % of their wage. The only meaningful way to increase their wages is to decrease the supply of cheap labor. This is exactly what happened during Covid where no one was willing to work for $8/hr and the wages went up.
When people realize that their wage doesn’t guarantee good living they will look for a better job or demand a raise.
If a lot of the farm workers in California are gone how does that help the people in Nevada or Michigan that are unemployed... You think they're going to fill those positions?
> When people realize that their wage doesn’t guarantee good living they will look for a better job or demand a raise
Wow... When your job requires no education or training? I guess everyone who works 2 or more jobs in the us needs to talk to you. They're all missing this obvious point.
Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy
No. Riding salaries do not lead to inflation by themselves. What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market. In other words: printing money leads to inflation.
Not necessarily, if price of product A goes up and I have to buy that it means I have less money to spend on product B. Meaning demand on product B goes down so its price goes down.
If we go back to the point that we're talking about, being how it affects the lowest incomes, then you can see how an ever increasing % of their income is locked up in food/housing etc.
By your logic "What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market." Why is the rate of inflation even a value that isn't known beforehand? Surely we control our own printers, no?
This is nonsense. If an economy doubles and the money supply grows 10%, you get deflation. If the money supply is stable and half the country gets bombed, you get inflation.
Price levels are a function of both money demand and money supply. Ignoring the demand side of the equation doesn’t work.
Nope. This is one of the reasons we had insane inflation after Covid: we printed too much.
For example, here: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042015/how-does-mon...
You can have an economy with zero money printing that experiences inflation or deflation.
You said in the comment above.
How do you read “price levels are a function of both money demand and money supply” and get that?
Going back to the top, you claimed “riding [sic] salaries do not lead to inflation.” That is nonsense. Even if we ignore that rising salaries cause the money supply to increase through increased velocity, wealth effect and credit creation. (This is why when the economy is strong central banks raise rates to keep price levels stable. You have to destroy money to make up for the money being created by the private sector.)
In other words, to keep inflation at bay, one of the things you do, you restrict money supply.
Again, nobody said money supply doesn’t affect price levels. But in this example, rising wages caused the inflationary impetus without any money printing. To correct for that, the money supply must be reduced.
If you’re piloting a plane, deflecting the control surfaces will move the plane. But so will winds. If winds buffet your plane you have to deflect control surfaces to get back to where you were. That doesn’t mean the wind doesn’t exist.
Rising salaries can cause inflation all on their own. Even in an economy with a fixed money supply. (So can printing money, but nobody was debating that.)
Immigration is a distraction. Trump is deporting fewer folks than Obama did [1], he’s just doing it while pumping tens of billions to his buddies via ICE contracts.
Tariffs are a regressive tax. If food and metal is more expensive, service and manufacturing workers will be pinches.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-deportations-trump-six-mont...