Equally, on the other side of the pond, while Trump is determined to put the blame for the US’s economic ‘ills’ at the feet of lopsided trade deals, from a labour point of view, the forces of automation will most likely turn out to be the bigger villain – one that could well be harder to vanquish, especially if you are equally determined to lock out those workers willing to work the automatable jobs at a salary that can compete with robots.
As Huw van Steenis, global head of strategy at Schroders remarked in a note out on Monday, one of the focal points for the latest World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was the step change in the perceived level of threat to jobs from automation and the fourth industrial revolution.
“Consultancy McKinsey,” he said, “shared new research suggesting 86% of manufacturing job losses in US between 1997 and 2007 were a result of rising productivity, 14% because of trade. What’s more some 1.1 billion workers and $15.8 trillion in wages are associated with activities technically automatable today.”
Many wheels were set in motion in 2016 and many more will start spinning in 2017 and at present there is no way to tell where they will lead or when they will stop spinning, but if the first three weeks of the year are anything to go by, there noise is likely to be deafening and picking out the realism from the rhetoric is going to be crucial.
