Should-Read: Tom Simonite: Robots Threaten Bigger Slice of Jobs in US, Other Rich Nations

Should-Read: This is a serious problem: success at exporting told developing countries that their efforts to build engineering communities of practice were working; the fact that a lot of global value was created in labor intensive manufacturing industries meant that industrialize-via-export policies had large potential reach and oomph. Those days may be over: Tom Simonite: Robots Threaten Bigger Slice of Jobs in US, Other Rich Nations: “Although the short-term disruption from automation may be smaller in developing countries than in richer countries…

…the developing nations face more difficult challenges in the longer term. China has shown how low-cost manufacturing can provide a kind of step ladder that helps a country gradually climb into more complex and lucrative sectors, says Brad DeLong, an economics professor at University of California, Berkeley, who worked in the Clinton administration. But as automation technology gets cheaper and more capable, more manufacturing likely will migrate back to countries like the US. “The fear is that China is the last country for which this will be a successful strategy,” DeLong says. Governments need to think not just about how automation affects workers, but their entire economic underpinnings…