Unions, Trade and Robots

As I recently discussed in the context of Trade Adjustment Assistance, the economic effects of free trade are strikingly similar to those of technology advances:

As economists like Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux frequently note, the beneficial job churn associated with import competition is no different from that associated with technology gains:

Would it have been appropriate, for example, for the White House to prevent Americans from buying iPods and Kindles until and unless Congress funded the retraining of workers who lost their jobs at Tower Records and Border’s? Should government have stopped automakers from improving the quality of their vehicles until and unless the public fisc was tapped for funds to retrain auto mechanics and tow-truck drivers? Ought government restrict consumers’ access to Lasik surgery until and unless taxpayers pay to retrain workers who make eyeglasses, contact lenses, and saline solution?

In short, people lose jobs due to import competition and they lose jobs due to new technologies (a lot more of the latter than the former, by the way), and while those job losses are obviously tough for the affected workers, American society as a whole is clearly better off by letting the free market work. So why do we treat globalization so differently than mechanization? Boudreaux reasons that it's because "the only thing unique about international trade is its ability to be demagogued by politicians seeking votes from the economically uninformed"...

The same concepts apply to protectionism: those who oppose free trade are just as misguided as those who oppose mechanization.  So with this in mind, I invite you to read the following obituary of inventor George Devol (emphasis mine):

George C. Devol, 99, a self-taught tinkerer whose invention of the robotic arm revolutionized factories around the world, died of a heart ailment Aug. 11 at his home in Wilton, Conn.

The robotic arm, which Mr. Devol dreamed up in the early 1950s, was originally called the “programmed article handling device.” It was a long name for a relatively simple and very smart machine that, in the coming decades, would become a fixture on modern assembly lines.

The Unimate, as the product became known, was designed to perform jobs that were dangerous or costly for human workers. Mr. Devol sold the first of his robotic arms in 1961 to a General Motors plant in Trenton, N.J., where it was programmed to handle the hot metal used in die casting.

Other early customers included Chrysler and Ford. Partly because of the influence of labor unions, which saw the robots as a threat to U.S. jobs, sales did not take off in the United States.

Mr. Devol’s product was wildly successful in countries such as Japan, however, and in the late 1960s the company signed a deal with Kawasaki Heavy Industries. In 2006, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers estimated that there were more than 950,000 industrial robots in operation worldwide....

Mr. Devol was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame this year. “Devol’s patent for the first digitally operated programmable robotic arm represents the foundation of the modern robotics industry,” his induction citation reads. “Today, industrial robots have transformed factories into safer places and improved products with precision and consistency.”...

But like most odd couples, Engelberger and Mr. Devol had something important in common. They believed in the potential of robotics for the United States, even at a time when U.S. clients weren’t buying.

“We’re handing it to the Japanese on a platter,” Mr. Devol told The Washington Post in 1983. “I just can’t understand America.”

When he was in his 70s, Mr. Devol began dreaming up an automatic factory that he would lease to companies.

“How can we afford to let a country as big as this go down the drain in manufacturing capability?” he said in a 1984 interview with the Miami Herald. “I’m the perpetual Don Quixote. Always flailing my arms.”

This really explains a lot, doesn't it?