It increases automation and therefore productivity. It increases the demand for legal unskilled labor. Money earned is spent in America rather than sent to foreign countries as remittances

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hvb2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not every job can be automated. Picking crops for example or cleaning hotel rooms.

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

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nine_zeros 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Brexit is so funny because it is literally a real world example of how isolation reduces economic growth and causes poverty - and yet, America goes ahead with similar isolation.

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Den_VR 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Picking crops or cleaning hotels rooms cannot be automated… for less than it costs to hire seasonal/migrant workers, today.

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-...

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ben_w 3 days ago | parent [-]

Right now, cleaning rooms cannot be fully automated at any price. The AI to control the robots just isn't good enough for how broad a term "unclean" can be.

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.

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Den_VR 3 days ago | parent [-]

When you get into the “ at any price ” range, then you should be up for engineering the room to support fully automated cleaning, and so I’d contend this is possible today. For certain situations. For example, automatic cleaning of a capsule hotel. I’ve just checked into one myself, nearly everything is self-service with an rfid band for access. How about automatic cleaning of a clean room?

	▲	ben_w 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but "For certain situations" is a strong barrier here. 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.

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ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reduced labor by executive power doesn't increase automation, it introduces a labor shortage.

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...

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margalabargala 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Still, none of that outweighs the inflationary pressure.

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.

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bluefirebrand 3 days ago | parent [-]

High unemployment would mean companies would have to offer more money to attract people

They want unemployment to be low so they can keep wages and salaries suppressed

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kergonath 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Except, of course, that this is completely backwards. Low unemployment shifts the balance of negociating power towards workers as companies have to compete to get them. See the massive growth in AI engineers’ wages for a nice illustration of this.

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.

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bluefirebrand 3 days ago | parent [-]

This is my bad. For some reason I got "unemployment rate" twisted in my head and thought it was related to the number of unfilled jobs

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

	▲	kergonath 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Then we agree :) There are signs of upwards wage pressure in the last couple of years, we’ll see how sustainable that is.

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margalabargala 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What? That makes no sense, did you mix up your high/low words? Or could you elaborate on your opinion that is perfectly opposite all accepted economic understanding?