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Comment by Inconel | Hacker News Reader

It is my feeling that at least some of the anger being expressed isn't so much about jobs being displaced by robots today or in the near future, although these are serious concerns as well, but instead the steady hollowing out of these manufacturing jobs through offshoring over a period of 20-30 years were the overwhelming financial benefits have gone to a very small portion of the American population, namely those occupying high positions within multinational corporations.

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Arguably the overwhelming benefits have gone to a very large portion of the American population, so large that it's hard for individuals to trace and see. Think of the cascade of effects of all these manufacturing outputs being created more efficiently/cheaply, which in turn are inputs to other products, and the opportunity savings of which flow into other endeavors all around us.

However, I do generally agree with your diagnosis that the anger isn't so much about automation per se, as about changes in post-war economic structures finally starting to reach some tipping point, whether perceived rightly or not.

Do you have any data for that position?

Wage growth for example has been flat overall:

https://frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker/?panel=1

Half of Americans make under 30k a year:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/goodbye-middle-class-...

Yet the cost of goods has been increasing steadily:

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infla...

Wage growth has been flat because compensation has shifted from wages to benefits. Real compensation per hour has done nothing but increase.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

98 dollars in 2004 to 105 dollars now is a downward trend once you factor inflation.

The data I cited already takes inflation into account. You can tell from the word "real" in the title of the series.

My mistake. Still how much of this growth is hitting the poor and middle class as opposed to executives? My data excludes salaries above 100k.

I guess it will be hard to link such things causally to automation, specifically. I'm not an economist, but just speaking from the consensus that improvements to efficiency in the allocation of scarce capital should make everyone better off in a liberal economy (and even illiberal ones). Perhaps zooming out from the US to the whole world, it's more apparent that vast swathes of humanity have been lifted up in part by things like automation and freer trade.

I suppose the US's experience is not typical of the world's... after ww2, the US alone was something greater than 50% of global gdp, and its manufacturing base equally huge in comparison. Life is good when you are so far on top, even for the common worker, who with minimal education and no experience could find a job that supported an owned home, a homemaking wife, kids, a car, and two vacations a year. A couple of decades of that, and it starts to seem normal. But it was always abnormal, a result of fortunate post-war circumstances, and now that the rest of the world is catching up, perhaps we are returning to normality.

The cascade of effects means that people can afford massive flat-screen TVs, but not houses to put them in. This is much worse than the reverse but looks good when you abstract the details away through statistics like inflation.

The facts do not seem to support that. Domestic output has steadily increased, ergo offshoring is not causing job loss.

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