Robots, not Mexicans, are threat to Trump

Donald Trump is wrong. These four words can generally apply to anything the angry orange man in the White House opines on but he is especially, egregiously and dangerously wrong on jobs, writes Brian Lucey. 

Neither China, nor Mexico, are the cause of the decline in the job prospects of the middle-American white man. Automation is the real job killer. Rather like the Luddites, Donald is raging against forces that have been unstoppable for all of human history. But at least he is, in his own inchoate way, generating a debate on the future of work. In Ireland we see precious little.

Automation, combined with artificial intelligence, is causing a massive upheaval in the labour market. This upheaval will not be confined simply to the middle-class Western world however. The World Bank has estimated that massive numbers of jobs in developing countries, 70% to 80%, may also be in the firing line of our new robot overlords. If this is the case, then we will find that the traditional path to development of countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar may well cut off.