$15 minimum federal minimum wage?

[Rationalist]

Agreed, but I think the question remains, will there be enough jobs created for those who lose theirs due to automation?

Probably. It all depends on how we structure education. If we stopped driving the cost of tuition up by ending federally backed school loans, fewer people would go to 4-year colleges, and they would instead go to community colleges. If more people went into trades, then we'd finally stop having labor shortages in things like plumbing. A lot of blue collar jobs pay better than white collar ones now.

Now, in the long run, if this re-adjustment occurred, then wages for these specialized blue collar jobs would fall over time, but a purely market-based system for education would maintain a reasonable equilibrium. You'd see periodic surges in one field or another as wages rise and fall.

Automation has a long history of rendering jobs obsolete, but with each passing decade, new jobs are created. Working on robots will probably become a high demand job over time, since AI isn't yet at a point that can truly replicate human problem-solving skills. When AI does reach that point, then it should be interesting, but creative jobs will likely be in high demand by then.

[Chris]

I'm not saying they employ them out of compassion either. The only thing really keeping automation from going further is the upfront investment. Initially, the cost of automation is higher. It takes a while for machines to pay for themselves. However, the speed at which they do is largely tied to the cost of labor.

If you jack up the cost of labor significantly via a large increase in the minimum wage, then the initial cost of automation starts to look less burdensome.

A good example of where automation quickly increased due to rising labor costs is in the car wash industry in NYC. Reason did a great segment on it.

The head of McDonald's Corporation has spoken in favor of raising the min wage. Nice guy, you say, no, while McD's can afford it, small specialty sandwich shops cannot without raising prices or closing. Result is increased market share for McD's. And the result of that is increased revenue to fund automating most of its jobs.