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 t

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.