David Levey pointed me to a Samuel Hammond review of a book by Oren Cass , who is a conservative critic of neoliberalism: Accelerating productivity and automation aren’t to blame for working class woes, either. On the contrary, despite prophecies of robots rendering work obsolete, Cass marshals convincing data to show U.S. manufacturing productivity has essentially stagnated. More importantly, whether job destruction is from automation and globalization has very different implications. When a factory automates a process, output per worker rises and local labor demand may even increase. But when a worker is dislocated by trade, Cass notes, “the […]
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