While digital technologies have undoubtedly created new goods/services and boosted productivity in some activities (e.g. Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2015), there is also evidence that productivity gains from these technologies have sometimes fallen well below expectations (e.g. Acemoglu et al. 2016). Either way, over the past 40 years, waves of digital technologies – including personal computers, numerically controlled machinery, robotics, and office automation – have increased inequality. This is both because some of these technologies, such as personal computers, have been highly complementary to more educated workers (Autor et al. 1998, Autor et al. 2003, Goldin and Katz 2008), and […]
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