Thursday, October 7, 2021

Op-ed: Why everything that can be automated, should be automated: Levi Strauss CFO — Harmit Singh,

No-brainer. Increased efficiency and productivity, lower costs, and standardized production. The Luddite argument doesn't apply since jobs that can be automated and robotized are "shit jobs" that machines should be doing rather than people, whose time can be put to better use. Paid leisure is a better use but there are a lot of other substitutes for "shit jobs." Of course, this would require re-configuring the system, which is both an economic and political matter, but it is doable.

NetNet CNBC
Op-ed: Why everything that can be automated, should be automated: Levi Strauss CFO
Harmit Singh, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Levi Strauss & Co. Singh is a member of the CNBC Global CFO Council

See also

Project Syndicate
A Second Chance for Global Development
Rebeca Grynspan, former vice president of Costa Rica and now Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

Also at PS

Overemphasis on RCT's maybe, but the idea of pilots and testing in policy-making is sound. Oh, and China does it. In the US and most other democracies, policy-making is political, meaning ideological rather than evidence-based.

Who's Afraid of Evidence-Based Policymaking?
Ori Heffetz, Professor of Economics at Cornell University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and John A. List, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.

2 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Private equity has tried to automate garbage clllection where they have only one person in the truck and he operates a robotic arm that picks up a special plastic toter and garbage always spills all over the place or blows out and they guy just drives off leaving the resident to have go out and clean it up…

I’ve seen planned gated communities where they pay someone in security to have to go all around the community with a golf cart on garbage day with a garbage can and picker upper to clean up the mess…

Peter Pan said...

Just like Humphrey-Hawkins and the Trillion Dollar Coin, wake me up when it happens.