Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

INTRODUCTION
    Sometime during the 1960s, the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman was consulting with the government of a developing Asian nation. Friedman was taken to a large-scale public works project, where he was surprised to see large numbers of workers wielding shovels, but very few bulldozers, tractors, or other heavy earth-moving equipment. When asked about this, the government official in charge explained that the project was intended as a “jobs program.” Friedman’s caustic reply has become famous: “So then, why not give the workers spoons instead of shovels?”
    Friedman’s remark captures the skepticism—and often outright derision—expressed by economists confronting fears about the prospect of machines destroying jobs and creating long-term unemployment. Historically, that skepticism appears to be well-founded. In the United States, especially during the twentieth century, advancing technology has consistently driven us toward a more prosperous society.
    There have certainly been hiccups—and indeed major disruptions—along the way. The mechanization of agriculture vaporized millions of jobs and drove crowds of unemployed farmhands into cities in search of factory work. Later, automation and globalization pushed workers out of the manufacturing sector and into new service jobs. Short-term unemployment was often a problem during thesetransitions, but it never became systemic or permanent. New jobs were created and dispossessed workers found new opportunities.
    What’s more, those new jobs were often better than earlier counterparts, requiring upgraded skills and offering better wages. At no time was this more true than in the two and a half decades following World War II. This “golden age” of the American economy was characterized by a seemingly perfect symbiosis between rapid technological progress and the welfare of the American workforce. As the machines used in production improved, the productivity of the workers operating those machines likewise increased, making them more valuable and allowing them to demand higher wages. Throughout the postwar period, advancing technology deposited money directly into the pockets of average workers as their wages rose in tandem with soaring productivity. Those workers, in turn, went out and spent their ever-increasing incomes, further driving demand for the products and services they were producing.
    As that virtuous feedback loop powered the American economy forward, the profession of economics was enjoying its own golden age. It was during the same period that towering figures like Paul Samuelson worked to transform economics into a science with a strong mathematical foundation. Economics gradually came to be almost completely dominated by sophisticated quantitative and statistical techniques, and economists began to build the complex mathematical models that still constitute the field’s intellectual basis. As the postwar economists did their work, it would have been natural for them to look at the thriving economy around them and assume that it was normal: that it was the way an economy was supposed to work— and would always work.
    In his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, Jared Diamond tells the story of agriculture in Australia. In the nineteenth century, when Europeans first colonized Australia, they found a relatively lush, green landscape. Like American economists in the 1950s, the Australian settlers assumed that what theywere seeing was normal, and that the conditions they observed would continue indefinitely. They invested heavily in developing farms and ranches on this seemingly fertile land.
    Within a decade or two, however, reality struck. The farmers found that the overall climate was actually far more arid than they were initially led to believe. They had simply had the good fortune (or perhaps misfortune) to arrive during a climactic “Goldilocks period”—a sweet spot when everything happened to be