Ever since the Trump administration released its budget on Tuesday, economists (including me) have been ridiculing its assumption that we will see an average annual growth rate of 3.0 percent over the next decade. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects an average growth rate of just under 1.9 percent for this period. This projection assumes slow labor force growth, as the baby boom cohort retires, and a continuation of the weak productivity growth we have seen over the last decade.

The Trump administration’s 3.0 percent growth number presumably assumes that productivity growth will rebound to something like the 3.0 percent growth rate we saw in the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973 and again from 1995 to 2005. It seems that Mark Zuckerberg agrees with the Trump administration’s assessment since, according to the Washington Post, he warned of massive job loss due to technology in the years ahead and the need to have something like a universal basic income to ensure that people have enough money to survive.

If we continue to see the rates of productivity growth experienced in recent years and projected going forward by CBO, we will be seeing a labor shortage, not a shortage of jobs. So Mr. Zuckerberg, along with the Trump administration, has a very different view of the future than most of the economics profession (which doesn’t mean they are wrong).