From Deirdre McCloskey in Reason Magazine, The Myth of Technological Unemployment

When a Ford plant installed robots, Walter Reuther, a long-ago president of the United Auto Workers union, is said to have asked a manager: “How are you going to get them to buy Fords?” But Reuther’s argument is fallacious. Employees of car companies are a trivial share of the car-buying public. You can’t create prosperity merely by having workers purchase from their own employers.

Reich has accused the following things of driving down American wages: “Automation, followed by computers, software, robotics, computer-controlled machine tools and widespread digitization.” But such innovations have actually raised real wages, correctly measured, because a human supplied with a better tool can produce more outputs. And the point of an economy is production for consumption, not protection of existing jobs.

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