Robots are not to blame for the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Millions of Americans who lost manufacturing jobs during the 2000s have long ”known” China was to blame, not robots. Evidently many academics who’ve studied the issue are finally drawing the same conclusion.
For years economists have viewed the increased role of automation in the computer age as the culprit for some 6 million lost jobs from 1999 to 2010 — one-third of all U.S. manufacturing employment. Firms adopted new technologies to boost production, the thinking goes, and put workers out of the job in the process. […]
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