Dean Baker: "Robots Don't Cost Jobs, Bad Economic Policy Does"

Dean Baker responding to a piece in the New York Times that warns "The ascension of robots may mean fewer jobs are created...":

While one outcome of the introduction of this new technology could be the loss of jobs in the economy, that would be due to inept economic policy. What the article is describing is productivity growth. This is exactly what we should want. It allows us to be richer if we work the same number of hours or to be as rich and work fewer hours. We had very rapid productivity growth in the three decades following World War II. It did not lead to unemployment, but rather to rapidly rising living standards for the bulk of the population.

In the last three decades the government has pursued policies that have the effect of redistributing income upward so that the gains from growth are not broadly shared.

A comment by George Sai-Halasz in response to the same New York Times article:

Economist were way too slow to wake up to reality. They have been indoctrinated in the “lump of labor fallacy” fallacy. For people who were actually in the trenches working to create the computer power allowing today’s developments, like myself, the writing has long been visible on the wall. See my letter to the NYT of more than 19 years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/28/business/l-don-t-cut-jobs-cut-working-hours-and-count-in-the-computer-effect-093093.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss