Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: Robots Aren’t Taking Your Jobs

Must-Read: Let me register a complaint about the very sharp Matt Yglesias: http://vox.com seems to me to be getting a little #Slatepitchy these days–and that is a problem. Bait-and-switch between what the headline and the teaser promise and what the article delivers is already the reason I do not click on links to Slate

The right teaser would be: “Don’t worry that robots are taking your jobs–they are not (at least, not yet). Do worry that robots are not amplifying your productivity.”

Matthew Yglesias: Robots Aren’t Taking Your Jobs: “The good news is that these concerns are wrong…

…None of the recent problems in the American economy are due to robots–or, to be more specific about it, due to an accelerating pace of automation. Moreover, even if the pace of automation does speed up in the future, there’s no real reason to believe that it will be a problem. The bad news is that these concerns are wrong. Rather than an accelerating pace of automation, we’ve actually been living through a slowdown in the pace of productivity growth. And that slowdown is a huge problem. Unless it reverses, we’ll be waking up soon to find ourselves in a depressing world of longer working years, unmanageable health-care needs, higher taxes, and a public sector starved of needed infrastructure resources. In other words, don’t worry that the robots will take your job. Be terrified that they won’t.

July 27, 2015

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