Very well written article. As always, go for the low hanging fruit first. These practices could also apply to consumer goods et al later ... if needed. Automation is definitely a more likely savior than $2/day employment. As for gov't subsidies ... the libertarian in me is not a big fan ... but I can see where it comes from. Issue here, however, is that with our higher labor costs ... the ROI on automation is higher even w/out subsidies. Either way, this level of objective analytics seems to have no place in current journalism. That is a good thing.
Am I misreading the Forbes article you linked? It looks to me like it endorses the $100k figure, not the $600 more.
Also, figures of a few hundred dollars more once we build up industrial capacity do ignore the fact that it takes a long time to build up industrial capacity. In 25 years, maybe the iPhone would return to twice its current inflation-adjusted price, but that's a long time from now
Sound business practice has always been don't let the $100 per hour guy do $5 per hour work it's just not productive. Workers in the US are pretty firm that $15 per hour is as low as they want to go. Now union auto workers from what I have seen run $28 - $50. Currently the US sits at "full employment" a bit of an oxymoron as there are +/- 4% still unemployed. Where are the factory workers going to come from ?
Have a look at Formic: automating abundance in the US.
https://formic.co/
Very well written article. As always, go for the low hanging fruit first. These practices could also apply to consumer goods et al later ... if needed. Automation is definitely a more likely savior than $2/day employment. As for gov't subsidies ... the libertarian in me is not a big fan ... but I can see where it comes from. Issue here, however, is that with our higher labor costs ... the ROI on automation is higher even w/out subsidies. Either way, this level of objective analytics seems to have no place in current journalism. That is a good thing.
Am I misreading the Forbes article you linked? It looks to me like it endorses the $100k figure, not the $600 more.
Also, figures of a few hundred dollars more once we build up industrial capacity do ignore the fact that it takes a long time to build up industrial capacity. In 25 years, maybe the iPhone would return to twice its current inflation-adjusted price, but that's a long time from now
Sound business practice has always been don't let the $100 per hour guy do $5 per hour work it's just not productive. Workers in the US are pretty firm that $15 per hour is as low as they want to go. Now union auto workers from what I have seen run $28 - $50. Currently the US sits at "full employment" a bit of an oxymoron as there are +/- 4% still unemployed. Where are the factory workers going to come from ?