A variant on this explanation is not that America has stagnated, but that other nations such as India and China have begun to catch up. In a global economy, America businesses and workers can’t earn a premium if they don’t have greater productivity than their counterparts in other nations. Technology has eliminated many of the barriers of geography

Digitization, in other words, is not a single project providing one-time benefits. Instead, it's an ongoing process of creative destruction;

Even the low wages earned by factory workers in China have not insulated them from being undercut by new machinery and the complementary organizational and institutional changes. For instance, Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of the electronics manufacturer Foxconn, announced this year a plan to purchase 1 million robots over the next three year

We don’t believe in the coming obsolescence of all human workers. In fact, some human skills are more valuable than ever, even in an age of incredibly powerful and capable digital technologies. But other skills have become worthless, and people who hold the wrong ones now find that they have little to offer employers. They’re losing the race agains

Examining other statistics reveals a deeper, more widespread problem. Not only are income and wages—the price of labor—suffering, but so is the number of jobs or the quantity of labor demanded (Figure 3.4). The last decade was the first decade since the depths of the Great Depression that saw no net job creation.

The median worker is losing the race against the machine.

Ever-greater investments in education, dramatically increasing the average educational level of the American workforce, helped prevent inequality from soaring as technology automated more and more unskilled work. While education is certainly not synonymous with skill, it is one of the most easily measurable correlates of skill, so this pattern sugg

Because the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation. We are in no danger of running out of new combinations to try. Even if technology froze today, we have more possible wa

Why has the scourge of unemployment been so persistent? Analysts offer three alternative explanations: cyclicality, stagnation, and the “end of work.”