Machines are labor, but they don’t buy gifts

CNBC has a video on youtube about the concern over machines replacing people. They actually touch upon many relevant aspects of the issue… high unemployment, increasing corporate profits, productivity of machines, rising real GDP, stagnating median household incomes, low minimum wages and even social instability.

Replacing people with machines, like paying lower real wages, is a fallacy of composition  It can be more profitable for an individual business to replace people with machines and pay less wages, but if more and more businesses do this, people overall will have less income and less purchasing power to buy the finished goods of production.

Production seeks demand. Demand depends on people getting paid for producing. So even though there may be a balanced trade off in production as utilization of capital rises and utilization of labor falls, production will be progressively limited by weaker demand.

The United States has a demand-constrained economy.  The fact that some people are being replaced by machines is only part of the story. We will explore the subject of macro-economic demand here on Angry Bear blog in future posts.

Source

TheBankNews. The Great Divide Economics of Wall Street. Youtube.com. 7/22/2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9uUdCHCqHE