Opinion The Robot Apocalypse Has Been Postponed

But intuition might be deceiving. The best reason to doubt Yang's story is contained in productivity statistics, which measure the output of the gainfully employed and which traditionally rise rapidly during periods of technological change -- because even if workers are losing their jobs to the spinning jenny or the automobile, other workers should be increasing their productivity with the new technology's assistance. Lately this hasn't been happening. Instead productivity growth in the developed world has decelerated over the last decade. To quote a recent summary, in mature economies "labor productivity growth rates halved from an average annual rate of 2.3 percent in the period 2000-2007 to 1.2 percent from 2010-2017."