As we’ve seen in other examples of mass disruption, there’s a general assumption by employers who fire workers en masse to replace them with automation that somehow it’ll all work out because someone else will hire the discarded workers. In a consumer-based economy, this is a dangerous assumption.
Relying on The Other
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The TMI Show" talk show. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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The top 10% of earners, who account for half the retail spending in the US, are gonna have to pick up the slack. Shop ’til you drop!
There would be some shuffling of the economy. Maybe Apple fails because nobody can buy iPhones. But then we’ll just be an energy/weapons based economy.
At any rate, AI is a big dud. LLMs are too expensive to train for what they do, and once this bubble pops, AI development is on ice forever. (It’s of zero military value, so it’s unlikely China will be in an AI race with us.) The threat of AI is mostly used to justify laying off people. The lay-offs are really because of high rates now that U.S. hegemony has collapsed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
That’s a new one on me. I’d have said that the US hegemony is collapsing because of the combination of a rising standard of living in China and the tariffs; with the result that our near unending supply of cheap stuff is going away.
Interest rates rose in 2022, before the tariffs.
Right, it’s the interest rates, not the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The high rates are supposed to fight off inflation, but inflation was one of the things that did in Biden, and maybe it will be one of the things that does in Trump. High rates also hurt employment of course. If it weren’t for the tariffs, we’d have high inflation or high unemployment, not both, and setting interest rates would be easy. With tariffs, we have both high inflation and high unemployment, so every way out is painful. (Unless, we can reverse those tariffs and start a public works program or similar, but that ain’t going to happen.)