RiseoftheRobots_TechnologyandtheThreatof.epub

RISE OF THE ROBOTS 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 h......