Another of the doomsday scenario (aside from the war on photosynthesis) is that automation is reducing jobs available to people TODAY. They give all these anecdotal evidence fallacies of factories and groceries stores having less staff and this indicates we are driving people to be jobless. The conclusion they derive is that there’s a mutually inverse relationship between automation and employment, that is to say: as automation increases employment declines.
If this was the case then you would see unemployment rates correlate with automation, but this isn’t the case and we are at one of the lowest unemployment rates in US history. Some of the slightly smarter ones might say unemployment rates don’t address people who have given up on looking for a job and create these imaginary scenarios where we are manipulating the data with unemployment rates and there’s a giant mass of people unable to be employed because of automation.
So they’re talking about Labor Force Participation Rate, which we have numbers for. As the society as a whole you can see a decline from 2007 (fin crash) to 2015 where it starts increasing: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate
But we have to remember that correlation doesn’t equal causation. What’s truly causing the decline? The retirement crisis has started where the baby boomers are retiring in droves. If you look at the participation rate of those adults of working age instead of the population as a whole, you see a very different graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Labor participation declined for a few years, and has increased with Trump in office as the GDP and demand for employees in the US increases. If there was an mutually inverse relationship with automation and employment you should see employment declining as automation increases. Countries with far less automation have higher unemployment and labor participation rates than the US, and countries with more automation than us, like South Korea, have a thriving economy and unemployment isn’t rampant.
So overall their assertions are false, based on zero data but on logical fallacies of anecdotal evidence, cherry picking scenarios and falsely turning them to a general rule and getting all emotional and push their doomsday BS on us. This is even such a big concerned that they’re presidential candidates offering a minimum $1,000 for all adults to fight the false narrative of massive unemployment that’s supposedly happening with no plans on how he’s going to pay the trillions of dollars of deficit this would cause. They’re literally playing to the emotions of the masses. But most likely many of these are just too stupid to make sense of the data. I had one train economist attack me on my claim that automation isn’t affecting labor participation rates and it’s overall good for the economy (who’s complaining about paying bills online, or the marvels of electricity that automated light at night or cooling your cooler automatically with a refrigerator and not needing to buy ice everyday?).
Overall the half-wit used the same arguments above, when asked to explain why the participation rate is going up in recent years along with automation he simply vanished. The half-wit was more interested in pushing his false imaginary narrative if it meant he was “right” than finding out the truth. In any case, this doomsday narrative is also nonsense.