May 04, 2016
That’s what a Reuters article in the NYT inadvertently told readers. The piece begins by telling readers:
“Some of the richest, smartest and most powerful humans have an important message for the rest of us as they convened this week to discuss pressing global issues: the robots are coming.
“At the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, at least four panels so far have focused on technology taking over markets to mining – and most importantly, jobs.”
The piece goes to blame technology for destroying large numbers of middle class jobs, which it argues is a main cause of wage stagnation. The problem is that if these smart and powerful people had access to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (BLS) they would know that productivity growth (the rate at which robots and other technologies are taking our jobs), has been extremely slow over the last decade, as in the opposite of fast.
This means that we have to look to other causes of inequality, like boneheaded macro policy that leaves millions unemployed, trade policy that displaced millions of manufacturing workers, and longer and stronger patent and copyright protection that make the rest of us pay larger rents for drugs, software, and other protected items.
But the rich and powerful prefer the robot story, and apparently, because they are rich and powerful, they can get the media to take it seriously.
Comments