The Robots Are Coming
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Robots on Demand, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
In today’s newsletter, we look at the increasing use of robots in areas from factories to fast food, the week ahead in global economics and how economists are re-imagining Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations.”
Robot Revolution
Use of automation for mundane tasks has been under way for generations. But the pandemic as well as subsequent labor shortages and rising wages are pushing U.S. businesses to turn to robots like never before.
Some one-third of firms confronting difficulties in hiring are implementing or exploring automation to replace workers, a recent Federal Reserve survey of chief financial officers found.
The latest round of quarterly earnings has shown executives from a range of businesses confirming the trend, Alex Tanzi reports. With the latest monthly employment report showing sustained large wage gains, there’s a cost consideration too. Average hourly earnings rose 4.9% in October from a year ago, the most since February and much higher than the 2.7% average over the five years through 2019.
Knightscope makes security robots that look a bit like R2-D2 from Star Wars. They can patrol sites such as factory perimeters and cost from $3.50 to $7.50 an hour. The company says it’s attracting new clients who are having trouble hiring workers to keep watch.
The longer that millions of Americans linger on the sidelines of the job market, the bigger the risk that automation could make America’s income and wealth gaps worse.China’s inflation risks are building while new Covid-19 outbreaks are dimming the outlook for economic growth, throwing the spotlight back on policy makers as the Communist Party’s top leaders gather for a crucial political meeting this week.
Inflation data Wednesday is set to show another surge in factory-gate prices to a fresh 26-year high and a pick-up in costs for consumers. More companies are starting to pass on higher raw-material costs to customers, while vegetable prices have recently spiked because of bad weather.
Elsewhere, central bankers in Mexico, Peru and Romania are expected to increase interest rates again, while their counterparts in Thailand and Serbia are likely to keep borrowing costs unchanged.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde are among dozens of policy makers scheduled to speak. Three centuries before Glasgow hosted the COP26 conference aimed at mitigating climate change, it played home to Adam Smith, often credited as the “father of economics.”
Now, the past and the present are colliding as a group of economists publish a rethink of Smith’s most famous work, “The Wealth of Nations,” to reflect the modern challenge of a warming planet.The project, which takes the form of a 60-page book of essays, involved reassessing Smith’s well-known theories of value, development and how markets are shaped by an “invisible hand.”
While Smith’s opus is traditionally viewed as promoting lightly-regulated markets, the authors of the essays argue that if he were writing today he would be pushing for financial and economic curbs to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
