Source: Dr. Mike Walden, NCSU COLLEGE OF AG & LIFE SCIENCES, 7/31/20


The calendar says 2020, but some say it’s really 2030. Huh? Did we suddenly lose a decade? I, for one, certainly hope not, because that would make me 79 instead of 69.

Actually, no one is saying it really is 2030. What they mean is the ongoing trends in the economy have accelerated so rapidly that the world we are looking at now is closer to what it would have been in 2030. In other words, the future is on us sooner than we thought.

What is the cause of this time travel? It’s the COVID-19 pandemic. As economists look at how businesses, households and workers have coped with the virus, many of us see outcomes we wouldn’t have expected until many years in the future.

Here’s a good example. Meat processing plants use large numbers of individuals working in close proximity to convert cattle, hogs and poultry into products supermarkets and restaurants can use. In fact, meat processing is an important economic sector in North Carolina.  

When some of these plants had virus outbreaks, several economists – including me – speculated that down the road we would see the processing plants begin to replace workers with machines and technology. The logic was that machines and technology are immune to virus outbreaks, and thus when a future pandemic occurred, these high-tech food processing plants could continue operating.

I thought such a conversion was years away. Then a couple of weeks ago I read that some meat processing plants have already begun to introduce robots for some of their work. The article said that the robots weren’t yet ready to do all the processing work, but over time the robots would be refined and their tasks expanded.

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