> So going solely by that figure, as long as the gain in efficiency from automating a job is > 42% it's a net positive for the economy?
No, because 1$ to a poor person is actually 1.12$ returned to the economy. It gets even bigger when you go into 1$ to education.
>And that's even _if_ you assume 100% of the savings goes directly into the company owner's pockets and isn't simply being re-invested somewhere else.
Well that's the thing. Even if you give money to wealthy people they're not going to invest more than a poor person will with it. A person in poverty has immediate needs to spend the money on where a wealthy person does not.
> No, because 1$ to a poor person is actually 1.12$ returned to the economy.
Okay, so >60% then, assuming the average worker at an Amazon warehouse meets your definition of "poor". Still a totally achievable figure.
> Even if you give money to wealthy people
We're not talking about _giving_ money to anyone here, we're talking about automation. Automation means efficiency gains for _Amazon_ (the corporation) not Bezos personally, so you can't just make the lazy assumption that 100% of any savings made by Amazon goes directly into Bezos' pockets (as egypturnash did earlier in this thread).
But even if you do make that ridiculous assumption, _and_ we assume your figures are correct, it still only takes a >60% efficiency gain for the economy to break even on the transaction, correct?
A >60% efficiency gain is not small at scale, and part of the reason why automation is succeeding but not exactly in all the spaces we expect. Even the article covers that jobs are being lost, but not many jobs as one would intuitively believe.
Furthermore, someone who is out of work as a result of automation will also be a loss in the broader economy (as they will need services, the government loses income tax where applicable). The math I assume gets very complicated very quickly. But claiming "and from bezos' pocket, where?" is a reductionist statement that can be met with an equally reductionist "nowhere because we know rich people don't invest as much in the economy as they take".
I think the reason automation isn't taking over as quickly as expected isn't because the efficiency gains are small, but because the capital investment required to automate is often large, and because many of the jobs that haven't yet been automated are complicated to solve in the general case. (This machine, for example, only handles boxing; it can't actually pick products off the shelves because that's a very general problem that's more difficult to solve.)
There are also numerous other economic effects to consider, such as the increased activity from capital spending on automation equipment and software, and (as you pointed out) the economic losses from higher short-term unemployment.
My initial question was only made in reply to a reductionist and intellectually lazy statement implying that the company owner is the only one who benefits from automation. I asked that question in an attempt to get the other commenter to think more carefully about their position (the answer isn't "nowhere" by the way, as the very figures you yourself provided indicate that 70% of it goes directly back into the economy). Unfortunately it doesn't look like they ever replied, but nonetheless I think I've made my point.
No, because 1$ to a poor person is actually 1.12$ returned to the economy. It gets even bigger when you go into 1$ to education.
>And that's even _if_ you assume 100% of the savings goes directly into the company owner's pockets and isn't simply being re-invested somewhere else.
Well that's the thing. Even if you give money to wealthy people they're not going to invest more than a poor person will with it. A person in poverty has immediate needs to spend the money on where a wealthy person does not.