Mr. Trump has his reasons for focusing on manufacturing, though. They don’t all have to do with economics. He ignores the fact that many of Michigan’s auto industry jobs were lost to automation, or to foreign manufacturers operating in the right-to-work South, because depicting the Chinese, Japanese and Mexicans as job-stealing alien villains better fits his America First narrative.
.. Mr. Riddle is skeptical of Mr. Trump’s promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States: “If other presidents couldn’t do it, how can he?”
.. He’s also ahead among voters ages 50 to 70, who came of age when a factory job was still a birthright, and share his nostalgia for those years.
.. Reagan Democrats — in 1980, they were 65 percent of the electorate, compared with 36 percent in 2012 — but Mr. Trump has tailored his politically incorrect alpha male persona and his protectionist message specifically to them.
.. As Lansing’s mayor, Virg Bernero, has noted, G.M. can build the same number of cars with 5,000 workers as it did with 25,000 in the 1950s and ’60s.
.. The Trump conundrum is that his campaign is about loss. His appeal is strongest among people who feel their social, economic and political influence slipping away, but he appeals to them specifically because their numbers are dwindling, thus making them less effective as an electoral coalition.
Where machines could replace humans—and where they can’t (yet)
Because of the prevalence of such predictable physical work, some 59 percent of all manufacturing activities could be automated, given technical considerations. The overall technical feasibility, however, masks considerable variance. Within manufacturing, 90 percent of what welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers do, for example, has the technical potential for automation, but for customer-service representatives that feasibility is below 30 percent.
.. Manufacturing, for all its technical potential, is only the second most readily automatable sector in the US economy. A service sector occupies the top spot: accommodations and food service, where almost half of all labor time involves predictable physical activities and the operation of machinery—including preparing, cooking, or serving food; cleaning food-preparation areas; preparing hot and cold beverages; and collecting dirty dishes. According to our analysis, 73 percent of the activities workers perform in food service and accommodations have the potential for automation, based on technical considerations.
.. Retailing is another sector with a high technical potential for automation. We estimate that 53 percent of its activities are automatable, though, as in manufacturing, much depends on the specific occupation within the sector.
The Case for Smart Protectionism
About 11.5 million of the 11.6 million jobs created in the recovery have gone to workers with at least some college education, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
.. The U.S. government spends 0.4 percent of GDP on childcare and early education, while France, Denmark, and Sweden all spend at least three times more as a share of their economies. It is cheaper to publicly invest in the achievement and health of poor young children than to spend billions trying to remediate them as adults.
.. Many workers don’t have time for training, because U.S. welfare policy pushes them to find work immediately, even if it doesn’t lead to a more prosperous career
.. Automation redistributes wealth—from routine-based work to work that cannot be automated. Globalization redistributes wealth, too—from activities that can be off-shored to the owners of global supply chains. Economic history is one long story of wealth being created, destroyed, consolidated, and, yes, redistributed.
.. Of the 27 million net new jobs created between 1990 and 2008, 99 percent occurred in so-called “nontradable” occupations, which is work that must be done locally, such as a treating patients, teaching students, or cutting people’s hair.
Driverless Cars: Insurers Cannot be Asleep at the Wheel
The in-built chauffeur comes in the form of a rotating LIDAR laser taking 1.3 million recordings per second, and it’s a better driver than you.
.. In the UK 23% of all car insurance claims result from parking incidents of which 71% occur during reversing. A switch to driverless cars could largely eliminate these costs.
.. Volvo has aspirationally declared that by 2020 no-one will die in one of its cars – a claim which will hinge on the robustness of Volvo’s technology.
.. As Henry Ford is attributed to saying: “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.