I think some of the comments are short-sighted. Yes, automation and robots are going to kill manufacturing jobs and retail jobs, but so what? That doesn’t mean overall jobs are going to decline.
Manufacturing already employs less than 10% of the U.S. workforce and retail is on the way below 10% soon. So when these jobs disappear, just like water, they will just flow elsewhere.
First, funds will be established to educate these unemployed workers. Do you think they will use efficient online education method? Nope, that’s hard to monitor and discriminate against low-income American, so I bet they will put more money in traditional classroom styles. So that means more teachers, and more federal and state employees to monitor the spending.
Second, when people are unemployed, they will likely need more health and social assistance, a segment that has quietly grown above 12% of U.S. workforce already, given most are government funded and inefficiently ran.
Last, the resulting income gap and wealth distribution means the current housing inventory is completely disconnected from the real America. People need either more one-bedroom apartments or McMansions near the beach, both of which are not adequately produced yet and that means more construction jobs. Or Trump could simply order to build more infrastructure, and FED can keep printing money to pay for it. And construction has seen absolutely no productivity growth for years, because, after all, there is no Moore’s Law for backhoes.
So in summary, when jobs are disappearing from manufacturing and retails, the part of economy that we see huge productivity growth in the past few years, they will just migrate to the unproductive sectors of the economy: education, healthcare, construction and government itself…all of which will just become a much larger percentage of the economy in the next decade. And new jobs will be created there.
