The MIT economist David Autor has shown that instead of inequality rising across the board, there are actually two different effects: inequality rising at the top and lowering at the bottom.2 This matches Cowen’s thesis of average being over, with the middle part of the income spectrum being compressed into the bottom and stretched out at the top.

At least since the followers of Ned Ludd smashed mechanized looms in 1811, workers have worried about automation destroying jobs. Economists have reassured them that new jobs would be created even as old ones were eliminated. For over 200 years, the economists were right.