On Oct 04, 1996 12:46:16, 'Gerald Levy <glevy@pratt.edu>' wrote:
Jerry,
No one denies that there are many examples of labor-saving forms
of technical change. Are you claiming that those you list are
not capital-saving as well?
John
If you want examples of branches of production where labor-saving forms of
>technical change are common, here are some:
>
>I. Manufacturing
>=============
>
>o auto assembly: it can readily be observed in recent decades that
>following technical change, the output level/plant doesn't increase
>(this can be observed by the relatively stable line speed), however,
>there are fewer workers required/plant to produce the same output.
>Examples of specific technologies available on request.
>
>o chemical industry and process industries in general, including
>plastics, steel, cement, and gas.
>
>o paper products and the woodworking industry.
>
>o plastics and rubber processing.
>
>o metals manufacture.
>
>o metal fabrication.
>
>o textiles, including leather processing, show manufacture, and
>apparel.
>
>o electrical and electronic products.
>
>o clay and cement products.
>
>o asbestos processing.
>
>o glass industry.
>
>o iron and steel manufacture.
>
>o electrical engineering.
>
>o shipbuilding.
>
>o bituminous coal mining.
>
>o newspaper typesetting.
>
>
>II. Service Industries
>==================
>
>o banking and commerce; recent technical changes include ATMs,
>magnetic-ink character recognition, automatic check depositing,
>automatic fund transfers. The savings here is in terms of laborers
>required to produce a given amount of services.
>
>o reail sales. Process innovations included electronic cash registers,
>bar codes (UPC), materials handling equipment, etc..
>
>o transportation: technical changes such as automation in container
>ships, electronic reservation and billing systems, etc.
>
>o distribution: automatic warehousing and storage, recod keeping and
>scheduling, etc.
>
>o health care and medicine: medical data collection, advances in
>clinical laboratory techniques, computers monitoring critically ill
>patients, computer tomography, automated delivery systems, etc.
>
>o libraries: computer cataloging and searching (e.g. LEXIS).
>
>o hotels: reservation and billing systems.
>
>o postal industry.
>
>o meter readers: electronic meter reading and remote control from a
>truck.
>
>etc., etc., etc....
>
>
>In Solidarity,
>
>Jerry
>