“The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.”
J.M. Keynes.
The
big news this weekend, short of President Trump attacking North Korea, will likely be how the French vote on Sunday.
Mr Macron is expected by the pollsters to romp home with a 24 percent lead. The
polls are highly unlikely to be wrong by such an amount.
Below
some better news for once from America. However unlikely, so far President
Trump seems to be good for America. For now animal spirits rule.
U.S. job growth rebounds sharply, unemployment rate falls to 4.4 percent
U.S. job
growth rebounded sharply in April and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.4 percent,
near a 10-year low, pointing to a tightening labor market that likely seals the
case for an interest rate increase next month despite moderate wage growth.
Nonfarm
payrolls surged by 211,000 jobs last month after a paltry gain of 79,000 in
March, the Labor Department said on Friday. April's job growth, which was
broad-based, surpassed this year's monthly average of 185,000.
There
were hefty increases in leisure and hospitality, healthcare and social
assistance as well as business and professional services payrolls.
The drop
of one-tenth of a percentage point in the jobless rate took it to its lowest
level since May 2007 and well below the most recent Federal Reserve median
forecast for full employment.
"These
developments should keep the Fed firmly on track to hike rates again in June
and should motivate a hawkish shift in the interest rate forecasts they will
release at that meeting," said Michael Feroli, an economist at JPMorgan in
New York.
More
In EUSSR news, “Glenfarclas” Junker proposes
to drop English, and this time not for scotch. Juncker finally gets that Brexit
means John Bull is leaving the asylum. It’s not a divorce, just Great Britain
checking out of a very flawed, malfunctioning hotel. It’s not for GB to tell
the rump-EUSSR which language to conduct their business in, though English is
the most widely prevalent second language of the world.
If they’re all happy with French good luck to
them. Equally so if they pick German, Italian, or Greek. My tip would be for
them to learn Chinese, although I suspect that the winner will be German. However,
the wealth and jobs destroying, sclerotic, unreformable, dying EUSSR, will
still have one English speaking country still in the union, so treaties and all
the pettifogging regulations will still have to be translated into English as
well. No savings there then.
Q: What do you call a Frenchman advancing on Baghdad?
A: A salesman.
Brexit: English is losing its importance in Europe, says Juncker
European commission chief’s remark follows Theresa May’s broadside against EU ‘meddling’ in UK electionsThe English language is losing importance in Europe, the president of the European commission has said amid simmering tensions over the Brexit negotiations.
Speaking to an audience of European diplomats and experts in Florence, Jean-Claude Juncker also described the UK’s decision to leave the EU as a tragedy.
“Slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe,” Juncker said, to applause from his audience. “The French will have elections on Sunday and I would like them to understand what I am saying.” After these opening remarks in English, he switched to French for the rest of the speech.
Making a stout defence of the EU, Juncker said the UK had voted to leave the project despite historic successes and a recent uptick in economic growth. “Our British friends decided to leave the EU, which is a tragedy,” he said.
Juncker promised to negotiate with the UK in full
transparency but added that “there should be no doubt whatsoever that it is not
the EU which is abandoning the UK, they are abandoning the European Union and this is a difference
which will be felt over the next few years”.
More
Merkel says wants good partnership with Britain after Brexit
German Chancellor Angela
Merkel called on Friday for fair and constructive negotiations with Britain
over its exit from the European Union, with the aim of retaining a good
partnership.
"We
will of course need, and want to have Britain as a good partner in the
future," Merkel said in a speech in Hamburg, adding that the Brexit
negotiations would be "extremely complex and intense".
"Britain
will in future be less closely connected than until now, including in the
economic domain," she said, adding that it would be important nonetheless
to have good ties with Britain on economic, security and defense policy.
A man walking past the Olympic stadium carrying a long case is
stopped by a guard. "Are you a pole-vaulter?" asked the guard.
"No, I'm German actually; but how did you know my name was
Walter?"
Some
articles I get are just too good not to share. This weekend food for thought on
our coming automated future.
When Robots Take All of Our Jobs, Remember the Luddites
If you don’t think the transformation we’re embarked upon is a profound one, consider this: Within two decades, half the jobs in this country may be performed by robots. What then of our unemployment rate and social safety net? Opinion is divided: Will the next technological wave further skew the wealth distribution toward the uber-rich, or will it ultimately create more entrepreneurial and job opportunities than it destroys?There is an interesting historical precedent for our situation, an era during which the technological firmament shifted just as abruptly as it is here and now. In the United Kingdom in the year 1800, the textile industry dominated economic life, particularly in Northern England and Scotland. Cotton-spinners, weavers (mostly of stockings), and croppers (who trimmed large sheets of woven wool) worked from home, were well compensated, and enjoyed ample leisure time.
----When Robots Take All of Our Jobs, Remember the Luddites
By Clive ThompsonOriginally published in Smithsonian magazine, January 2017
What a 19th-century rebellion against automation can teach us about the coming war in the job market
Is a robot coming for your job?
The odds are high, according to recent economic analyses. Indeed, fully 47 percent of all U.S. jobs will be automated “in a decade or two,” as the tech-employment scholars Carl Frey and Michael Osborne have predicted. That’s because artificial intelligence and robotics are becoming so good that nearly any routine task could soon be automated. Robots and AI are already whisking products around Amazon’s huge shipping centers, diagnosing lung cancer more accurately than humans and writing sports stories for newspapers.
They’re even replacing cabdrivers. Last year in Pittsburgh, Uber put its first-ever self-driving cars into its fleet: Order an Uber and the one that rolls up might have no human hands on the wheel at all. Meanwhile, Uber’s “Otto” program is installing AI in 16-wheeler trucks—a trend that could eventually replace most or all 1.7 million drivers, an enormous employment category. Those jobless truckers will be joined by millions more telemarketers, insurance underwriters, tax preparers and library technicians—all jobs that Frey and Osborne predicted have a 99 percent chance of vanishing in a decade or two.
What happens then? If this vision is even halfway correct, it’ll be a vertiginous pace of change, upending work as we know it. As the last election amply illustrated, a big chunk of Americans already hotly blame foreigners and immigrants for taking their jobs. How will Americans react to robots and computers taking even more?
One clue might lie in the early 19th century. That’s when the first generation of workers had the experience of being suddenly thrown out of their jobs by automation. But rather than accept it, they fought back—calling themselves the “Luddites,” and staging an audacious attack against the machines.
**********
At the turn of 1800, the textile industry in the United Kingdom was an
economic juggernaut that employed the vast majority of workers in the North.
Working from home, weavers produced stockings using frames, while
cotton-spinners created yarn. “Croppers” would take large sheets of woven wool
fabric and trim the rough surface off, making it smooth to the touch.These workers had great control over when and how they worked—and plenty of leisure. “The year was chequered with holidays, wakes, and fairs; it was not one dull round of labor,” as the stocking-maker William Gardiner noted gaily at the time. Indeed, some “seldom worked more than three days a week.” Not only was the weekend a holiday, but they took Monday off too, celebrating it as a drunken “St. Monday.”
Croppers in particular were a force to be reckoned with. They were well-off—their pay was three times that of stocking-makers—and their work required them to pass heavy cropping tools across the wool, making them muscular, brawny men who were fiercely independent. In the textile world, the croppers were, as one observer noted at the time, “notoriously the least manageable of any persons employed.”
But in the first decade of the 1800s, the textile economy went into a tailspin. A decade of war with Napoleon had halted trade and driven up the cost of food and everyday goods. Fashions changed, too: Men began wearing “trowsers,” so the demand for stockings plummeted. The merchant class—the overlords who paid hosiers and croppers and weavers for the work—began looking for ways to shrink their costs.
That meant reducing wages—and bringing in more technology to improve efficiency. A new form of shearer and “gig mill” let one person crop wool much more quickly. An innovative, “wide” stocking frame allowed weavers to produce stockings six times faster than before: Instead of weaving the entire stocking around, they’d produce a big sheet of hosiery and cut it up into several stockings. “Cut-ups” were shoddy and fell apart quickly, and could be made by untrained workers who hadn’t done apprenticeships, but the merchants didn’t care. They also began to build huge factories where coal-burning engines would propel dozens of automated cotton-weaving machines.
-----In mid-November 1811, that earthquake began to rumble. That evening, according to a report at the time, half a dozen men—with faces blackened to obscure their identities, and carrying “swords, firelocks, and other offensive weapons”—marched into the house of master-weaver Edward Hollingsworth, in the village of Bulwell. They destroyed six of his frames for making cut-ups. A week later, more men came back and this time they burned Hollingsworth’s house to the ground. Within weeks, attacks spread to other towns. When panicked industrialists tried moving their frames to a new location to hide them, the attackers would find the carts and destroy them en route.
A modus
operandi emerged: The machine-breakers would usually disguise their identities
and attack the machines with massive metal sledgehammers. The hammers were made
by Enoch Taylor, a local blacksmith; since Taylor himself was also famous for
making the cropping and weaving machines, the breakers noted the poetic irony
with a chant: “Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them!”
Most
notably, the attackers gave themselves a name: the Luddites.
-----At heart, the fight was not really about technology. The Luddites were happy to use machinery—indeed, weavers had used smaller frames for decades. What galled them was the new logic of industrial capitalism, where the productivity gains from new technology enriched only the machines’ owners and weren’t shared with the workers.
The
Luddites were often careful to spare employers who they felt dealt fairly.
During one attack, Luddites broke into a house and destroyed four frames—but
left two intact after determining that their owner hadn’t lowered wages for his
weavers. (Some masters began posting signs on their machines, hoping to avoid
destruction: “This Frame Is Making Full Fashioned Work, at the Full Price.”)
----These days, Adrian Randall thinks technology is making cab-driving worse. Cabdrivers in London used to train for years to amass “the Knowledge,” a mental map of the city’s twisty streets. Now GPS has made it so that anyone can drive an Uber—so the job has become deskilled. Worse, he argues, the GPS doesn’t plot out the fiendishly clever routes that drivers used to. “It doesn’t know what the shortcuts are,” he complains. We are living, he says, through a shift in labor that’s precisely like that of the Luddites.
Economists
are divided as to how profound the disemployment will be. In his recent
book Average
Is Over, Tyler
Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argued that automation could
produce profound inequality. A majority of people will find their jobs taken by
robots and will be forced into low-paying service work; only a minority—those
highly skilled, creative and lucky—will have lucrative jobs, which will be
wildly better paid than the rest. Adaptation is possible, though, Cowen says,
if society creates cheaper ways of living—“denser cities, more trailer parks.”
Erik
Brynjolfsson is less pessimistic. An MIT economist who co-authored The
Second Machine Age, he thinks automation won’t necessarily be so bad. The Luddites thought
machines destroyed jobs, but they were only half right: They can also,
eventually, create new ones. “A lot of skilled artisans did lose their jobs,”
Brynjolfsson says, but several decades later demand for labor rose as new job
categories emerged, like office work. “Average wages have been increasing for
the past 200 years,” he notes. “The machines were creating wealth!”
The
problem is that transition is rocky.
More
