Study: As a population gets older, automation accelerates

 

"

In Germany, robots have entered the workplace more to compensate for the absence of workers; 

in the U.S., relatively more robot adoption has displaced a slightly younger workforce."

"companies’ adoption of robots is partly due to shortages in middle-aged labor."

"We provide a lot of evidence to bolster the case that this is a causal relationship, and it is driven by precisely the industries that are most affected by aging and have opportunities for automating work," Acemoglu adds.

 

Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office

Publication Date:

September 15, 2021

 PRESS INQUIRIES

Caption:

MIT economist Daron Acemoglu is co-author of a new study showing that aging populations lead to greater implementation of robots in workplace settings.

Credits:

Image: Digital collage by Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT, with images from iStockphoto

 

SEPTEMBER 15, 2021

Companies' adoption of robots is partly due to shortages in middle-aged labor

by Peter Dizikes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

You might think robots and other forms of workplace automation gain traction due to intrinsic advances in technology—that innovations naturally find their way into the economy. But a study co-authored by an MIT professor tells a different story: Robots are more widely adopted where populations become notably older, filling the gaps in an aging industrial work force.

"Demographic change—aging—is one of the most important factors leading to the adoption of robotics and other automation technologies," says Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist and co-author of a new paper detailing the results of the study.

The study finds that when it comes to the adoption of robots, aging alone accounts for 35 percent of the variation among countries. Within the U.S., the research shows the same pattern: Metro areas where the population is getting older at a faster rate are the places where industry invests more in robots.

[Why not invest more on immigrants training and qualification?]

"We provide a lot of evidence to bolster the case that this is a causal relationship, and it is driven by precisely the industries that are most affected by aging and have opportunities for automating work," Acemoglu adds.

The paper, "Demographics and Automation," has been published online by The Review of Economic Studies, and will be appearing in a forthcoming print edition of the journal. The authors are Acemoglu, an Institute Professor at MIT, and Pascual Restrepo Ph.D. '16, an assistant professor of economics at Boston University.

An 'amazing frontier,' but driven by labor shortages

The current study is the latest in a series of papers Acemoglu and Restrepo have published about
automation,
robots, and the
workforce.

They have previously 

    quantified job displacement in the U.S. due to robots, 

    looked at the firm-level effects of robot use, and 

    identified the late 1980s as a key moment when automation started replacing more jobs than it was creating.

This study involves multiple layers of demographic, technological, and industry-level data, largely from the early 1990s through the mid-2010s. First, Acemoglu and Restrepo found a strong relationship between 

    an aging work force—defined by the ratio of workers 56 and older to those ages 21 to 55—and 

    robot deployment in 60 countries. 

Aging alone accounted for not only 35 percent of the variation in robot use among countries, but also 20 percent of the variation in imports of robots, the researchers found.

Other data points involving particular countries also stand out. South Korea has been the country both aging most rapidly and implementing robotics most extensively. And Germany's relatively older population accounts for 80 percent of the difference in robot implementation between that country and the U.S.

Overall, Acemoglu says, "Our findings suggest that quite a bit of investment in robotics is not driven by the fact that this is the next 'amazing frontier," but because
 

some countries have shortages of labor, especially middle-aged labor that would be necessary for blue-collar work."

Digging into a wide variety of industry-level data across 129 countries, Acemoglu and Restrepo concluded that what holds for robots also applies to other, nonrobotic types of automation.

"We find the same thing when we look at other automation technologies, such as numerically controlled machinery or automated machine tools," Acemoglu says. Significantly, at the same time, he observes, "We do not find similar relationships when we look at nonautomated machinery, for example nonautomated machine tools or things such as computers."

The research likely sheds light on larger-scale trends as well. In recent decades, workers have fared better economically in Germany than in the U.S. The current research suggests there is a difference between 

- adopting automation in response to labor shortages, as opposed to 

- adopting automation as a cost-cutting, worker-replacing strategy. 

In Germany, robots have entered the workplace more to compensate for the absence of workers; in the U.S., relatively more robot adoption has displaced a slightly younger workforce.

"This is a potential explanation for why South Korea, Japan, and Germany—the leaders in robot investment and the most rapidly aging countries in the world—have not seen labor market outcomes [as bad] as those in the U.S.," Acemoglu notes.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/227005/unemployment-rate-in-germany/

 

Back in the U.S.

Having examined demographics and robot usage globally, Acemoglu and Restrepo applied the same techniques to studying automation in the roughly 700 "commuting zones" (essentially, metro areas) in the U.S. from 1990 to 2015, while controlling for factors like the industrial composition of the local economy and labor trends.

Overall, the same global trend also applied within the U.S.: Older workforce populations saw greater adoption of robots after 1990. Specifically, the study found that a 10-percentage-point increase in local population aging led to a 6.45 -percentage-point increase in presence of robot "integrators" in the area—firms specializing in installing and maintaining industrial robots.

The study's data sources included population and economic statistics from multiple United Nations sources, including the UN Comtrade data on international economic activity; technology and industry data from the International Federation of Robotics; and U.S. demographic and economic statistics from multiple government sources. On top of their other layers of analysis, Acemoglu and Restrepo also studied patent data and found a "strong association" between aging and patents in automation, as Acemoglu puts it. "Which makes sense," he adds.

For their part, Acemoglu and Restrepo are continuing to look at the effects of artificial intelligence on the workforce, and to research the relationship between workplace automation and economic inequality.

 

Political orientation predicts science denial – here’s what that means for getting Americans vaccinated against COVID-19

September 16, 2021 8.16am EDT

Adrian Bardon

Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University

The rejection of scientific expertise with regard to COVID-19 vaccines appears to be standing in for something else. As a philosopher who has studied science denial, I suggest that this “something else” includes factors like distrust in public institutions and perceived threats to one’s cultural identity.

Indeed, social scientists looking at the causes of science denial have increasingly narrowed in on two contributing causes.

 Certain personality traits, including 

    - comfort with existing social and cultural hierarchies and 

    - a predilection for authoritarianism, 

go along with a skepticism for science. 

So do closely related aspects of identity, such as 

   - identification with a dominant social group like white evangelical Christians.

One school of thought in psychology, called compensatory control theory, holds that many social phenomena – including ideological science denial – stem from the basic human need for a sense of control over one’s environment and life outcomes. According to this theory, perceived threats to one’s sense of personal control can motivate denial of scientific consensus. The idea is that due to a combination of 

- economic insecurity, 

- demographic changes and the 

- perceived erosion of cultural norms favoring whites, 

some people feel an existential threat to the white supremacy they’ve long benefited from – which in turn spurs them to deny government warnings about the dangers of COVID-19.

I believe this compulsive defensiveness plays a big part in the phenomenon of science denial, once trusted elites like politicians or news media hosts trigger the inclination to oppose some particular science-based public policy. 

You can’t control 

    the coronavirus – or 

    inequality, or a 

    changing culture – 

but you can control 

    whether you 

    take the vaccine or 

    wear a mask. 

This sense of control is implicitly but powerfully attractive on a deep, emotional level.

Denial feeds on political polarization

As I discuss in my book, “The Truth About Denial,” I think that science denial, including COVID-19 vaccine denial, is probably best seen as the result of vicious feedback loops. Factors like 

    economic pain, 

    white Christian identity and 

    low social trust 

play off one another in populations experiencing relative social and informational isolation. This denialism can take hold more easily in people who have chosen to limit their experiences to relatively homogeneous geographic areas, social contexts and news media environments.

https://theconversation.com/political-orientation-predicts-science-denial-heres-what-that-means-for-getting-americans-vaccinated-against-covid-19-165386

 

 

 

US Media Support Tech Regulation—Unless It Comes From China

JULIANNE TVETEN

 

Recently, US media have been aghast at legislation affecting China’s tech sector.

As part of a comprehensive economic initiative, Beijing has instituted a series of regulations—including fines, IPO suspensions, data-collection laws and other measures—for technology businesses that have raised concerns regarding power consolidation,  labor rights, privacy, cybersecurity and user safety, among other issues. Offenders include ride-hailing giant Didi, the finance-tech Ant Group and multinational conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd.

According to major US news sources, the directives are an instance of government overreach, a transgression of which China is routinely accused. Beijing has sent a “stark message” (New York Times, 7/5/21) with an “authoritarian tinge” (Bloomberg, 7/27/21). Its multi–billion–dollar corporate targets are thus “casualties” of “Beijing’s crackdown on private enterprise” (CNN Business, 9/1/21), from which the government expects “total surrender” (New York Times, 7/19/21).

These reports, curiously, arise as US media and policymakers continue a protracted process of advocating for restrictions on the “Big Four” homegrown tech companies—Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon—citing many of the categories of malfeasance associated with Chinese tech companies. (Normally, US media aren’t this enthusiastic about corporate regulation; tech companies’ increasingly large share of ad revenues, which renders them a major competitor for traditional corporate-owned outlets, may help explain this stance.)

Yet no matter how much overlap there may be between each country’s regulatory posture, US media maintain a double standard for corporate tech law in the US and China: In the former, it’s in pursuit of democracy; in the latter, of autocracy.

 

 

 Shipping: “‘Just Get Me a Box’: Inside the Brutal Realities of Supply Chain Hell” [Bloomberg]. “The system underpinning globalization—production on one side of the planet, connected to consumers on the other by trucks, ships, planes, cranes, and forklifts—is too rigid to absorb today’s rolling tremors from Covid-19, or to recover quickly from the jolts to consumer demand or the labor force. It’s avoided a complete collapse only through a combination of human ingenuity, painfully long hours, and, as [logistics manager RoxAnne Thomas] describes a recent success, strategy, mixed with a stroke of luck…. [S]upply uncertainties, disruptions, and inflationary forces are here for the foreseeable future, perhaps into 2023. But how things play out this month, one of two peak seasons each year for goods, will be crucial in determining how long these shortages last and which companies are able to adapt…. With summer winding down, the big test of the global trading system’s resilience might still be ahead. Every October a weeklong national holiday in China marks the unofficial deadline to get shipments out of the world’s second-largest economy in time to reach the U.S. and Europe for the holiday shopping season. With lines of ships outside ports at their longest since the pandemic began, the pressure to meet that cutoff is stronger than ever.” •

 “Trump’s 2020 gains in rural America offset by Biden’s urban dominance” [The Hill].
Biden and Trump drove turnout to a zenith not seen since before American women got the right to vote in 1920. Trump made substantial gains, improving on his 2016 performance to become the most-voted-for Republican presidential candidate in history — but lagging Biden, who earned more votes than any candidate to ever run for president regardless of party…. Biden won 91 of America’s 100 largest counties, while Trump carried 95 of the 100 counties with the smallest populations

 

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/09/200pm-water-cooler-9-16-2021.html

 

 

changes to their municipal drinking water systems

Six of the 11 Michigan cities that have come under state emergency management since 1990 also saw changes to their municipal drinking water systems, the most common being rate increases, water shutoffs for nonpayment and the privatization of water services or infrastructure.

 ....

The researchers also measured community characteristics beyond financial health—including
reliance on state revenue sharing,
the proportion of Black residents and
median household income—

that may have increased the likelihood that cities were targeted for emergency management.

Hughes and her co-authors expected that at least one of the financial indicators used by the state, or a composite financial health score based on all the indicators, would be able to identify all 11 Michigan cities that have experienced takeover.

Surprisingly, that was not the case. The composite financial stress score captured just 45% of those cities. But a city's level of reliance on state revenue sharing captured 82% of the takeovers, while the percentage of Black residents and median household income correctly predicted 64% and 55% of the takeovers, respectively.

"These findings support previous work challenging the technocratic and rational basis of state municipal takeover laws and pointing to the inherent politics in municipal takeovers, specifically the bias and structural challenges facing Black and poor communities," the authors wrote.

The media-coverage portion of the two-pronged study showed that Michigan cities that have come under emergency management were more likely to have changes made to drinking water services than 10 similarly financially stressed Michigan cities that did not come under emergency management.

 

Six of the 11 Michigan cities subjected to emergency management saw changes to their drinking water systems that were implemented to save money or to reduce expenditures. In many cases, those decisions led to poor water quality, service unreliability and increases to water bills, according to the researchers. The 10 comparative cities did not experience any such changes.

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-municipal-takeover-michigan-rational-apolitical.html

 “Liberalism is not, in fact, in disarray. Indeed, in many senses it’s a thumping success. Only three decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, neoliberalism, which preserves the classical doctrine’s package of liberties and rights while installing the market, rather than government, as the ultimate arbiter of wealth distribution, has established itself as a political state of nature throughout much of the developed world…. Who exactly is this book for? Occasionally, through use of the second person, the answer slips through: Last Best Hope is for people who needed the shock of the pandemic to “realize that the miraculous price and speed of a delivery of organic microgreens from Amazon Fresh to your doorstep depends on the fact that the people who grow, sort, pack, and deliver it have to work while sick.” In other words, it’s for people like George Packer: comfortable, middle-class professionals who have come to a belated understanding of the American economy’s brutalities, but don’t want things to change so much that they lose the country that has made them a success and brings them their microgreens.”

“George Packer’s Center Cannot Hold” [The New Republic]. 

Food production generates more than a third of manmade greenhouse gas emissions – a new framework tells us how much comes from crops, countries and regions

September 13, 2021 11.06am EDT

 Xiaoming Xu Postdoctoral Research Associate in Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  

Atul Jain Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 In a new study, we show that the food system generates about 35% of total global man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Breaking down this share, 

production of animal-based foods – meat, poultry and dairy products, including growing crops to feed livestock and pastures for grazing – contributes 57% of emissions linked to the food system. 

Raising plant-based foods for human consumption contributes 29%. 

The other 14% of agricultural emissions come from products not used as food or feed, such as cotton and rubber.

We are atmospheric scientists who study the effects of agriculture and other human activities on Earth’s climate. It’s well known that producing animal-based foods generates more greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based foods, which is why shifting toward a more plant-based diet is recognized as an option for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. 

 ...

Land use change – clearing forests for farms and ranches, which reduces carbon storage in trees and soils – accounts for 29% of total food production greenhouse gas emissions. Another 38% comes from farmland management activities, such as plowing fields, which reduces soil carbon storage, and treating crops with nitrogen fertilizer. Farmers also burn a lot of fossil fuel to run their tractors and harvesters.

Raising livestock generates 21% of greenhouse gas emissions from food production. It includes methane belched by grazing animals, as well as methane and nitrous oxide released from livestock manure. The remaining 11% comes from activities that occur beyond farm gates, such as mining, manufacturing and transporting fertilizers and pesticides, as well as energy use in food processing.

 

 

Among animal-based foods, beef is the largest contributor to climate change. It generates 25% of total food emissions, followed by cow milk (8%) and pork (7%). 

Rice is the largest contributor among plant-based foods, producing 12% of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector, followed by wheat (5%) and sugarcane (2%). Rice stands out because it can grow in water, so many farmers flood their fields to kill weeds, creating ideal conditions for certain bacteria that emit methane.

 

Among individual countries, China, India and Indonesia have the highest emissions from plant-based food production, contributing 7%, 4%, and 2% respectively of global food-related greenhouse gas emissions. The countries with leading emissions from the production of animal-based foods are China (8%), Brazil (6%), the U.S. (5%) and India (4%).

Our framework also shows that raising animal-based foods consumes six times as much land as producing plant-based foods. 

we estimate that 13% of total agricultural land is being used to produce plant-based foods. The other 77% is being used to produce animal-based foods, including croplands that are growing animal feed and grazing lands. The remaining 10% is being used to raise other products, such as cotton, rubber and tobacco.

 

 

 

 

https://theconversation.com/food-production-generates-more-than-a-third-of-manmade-greenhouse-gas-emissions-a-new-framework-tells-us-how-much-comes-from-crops-countries-and-regions-167623

government-sponsored infrastructure, progressive taxation, and anti-monopoly legislation,

 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/13/the-vocabulary-of-neoliberal-diplomacy-in-todays-new-cold-war/ 

Michael Hudson

The problem, of course, is that just as the United States, Germany and other nations grew into industrial powers in the 19^th and 20^th century by government-sponsored infrastructure, progressive taxation, and anti-monopoly legislation, the post-1980 rejection of these policies has led them into economic stagnation for the 99 Percent burdened by debt deflation and rising rentier overhead paid to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sectors. China is thriving by following precisely the policies by which the former leading industrial nations grew rich before suffering from the neoliberal financialization disease. This contrast ....

China recognized from the beginning that its insistence on maintaining control of its economy – steering it to promote overall prosperity, not to enrich a client oligarchy fronting for a foreign investor class – would create political opposition from U.S. Cold War ideologues. China therefore sought allies from Wall Street, offering profit-making opportunities for Goldman Sachs and other investors whose self-interest has indeed led them to oppose anti-China policies.

 ..

 John McCain characterized Russia as a gas station with atom bombs (neglecting to acknowledge that it is now the world’s largest grain exporter, no longer dependent on the West for its food supply – thanks largely to U.S.-sponsored trade sanctions). The corollary image is the United States as a financialized and monopolized economy with atom bombs and cyber threats, in danger of becoming a failed state like the old Soviet Union but threatening to bring the entire world economy down with it if other countries do not subsidize its debt-ridden New Cold War economy.

 

...

What is autocracy and “authoritarianism”?

Foreign moves to defend against U.S. financial takeovers and sponsorship of client oligarchies are denounced as authoritarian. In the U.S. diplomatic vocabulary, “autocracy” refers to a government protecting the interests of its own population by resisting U.S. financial takeover of its natural resources, basic infrastructure and most lucrative monopolies.

All successful economie throughout history have been mixed public/private economies. The proper role of government is to protect economies from a rentier oligarchy from emerging to polarize the economy at the expense of the population at large. This protection requires keeping control of money and credit, land and natural resources, basic infrastructure and natural monopolies in the hands of governments.

 

...

The liberal mass media, academia, and “think tank” lobbying institutions, policy foundations and NGOs sponsor the above-described rhetoric of free markets to create vehicles for capital flight, money laundering, tax evasion, deregulation and privatization (and the corruption that goes with emerging kleptocracies). Neoliberal doctrine depicts all public moves to protect general prosperity from the burden of rentier overhead as being authoritarian autocracy “interfering” with property rights.

...

China is defending itself not only by the productive industrial and agricultural economy its socialist government has sponsored, but by a guiding concept of how economies work. China’s economic managers have the classical concepts of value, price and economic rent, that distinguish earned from unearned income, and productive labor and wealth from unproductive and predatory financial and rentierfortunes.

These are the concepts needed to uplift all society, the 99 Percent rather than just the One Percent. But the post-1980 neoliberal reaction has stripped away from the Western economic vocabulary and academic curriculum. The present economic stagnation, debt burden and locked-in zero interest rates are a policy choice by the West, not a product of inevitable technological determinism.

 

 

 

Left-wing and Right-wing authoritarians - striking similarities

Study: Left-wing authoritarians share key psychological traits with far right

by Emory University

 By Carol Clark | eScienceCommons | Sept. 9, 2021

 https://phys.org/news/2021-09-left-wing-authoritarians-key-psychological-traits.html

In addition to the striking similarities between the two political extremes, the research also highlighted a key difference between the two: Left-wing authoritarians were more likely to perceive the world as a dangerous place and experience intense emotions and a sense of uncontrollability in response to stress. Right-wing authoritarians were more cognitively rigid, less open to new experiences, and less likely to believe in science. 

 

...

The good news is that both extreme authoritarianism and a tendency toward political violence appear relatively rare, Costello adds. Out of a sample size of 1,000 respondents, drawn from the online research tool Prolific and matched to the demographics of the U.S. population for age, race and sex, only 12 reported having engaged in political violence, and they all scored high for authoritarianism.