"Those increases tended to mean fewer jobs. Of course, lots of factors weigh on manufacturing employment. Foreign competition, overvaluation of the dollar and r

"Those increases tended to mean fewer jobs. Of course, lots of factors weigh on manufacturing employment. Foreign competition, overvaluation of the dollar and rising productivity all play a big part, too. But even after taking all those other factors into account, Acemoglu and Restrepo still found that additional robots in an area reduces workers and cuts local wages." I'd be interested in seeing (paywall, unfortunately) how they took that into account because the last paper I read with this thesis (Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devaraj, Myth and Reality, CBER, Ball State U) explicitly did not take those factors into account, and in fact deliberately conflated the effect of offshoring, outsourcing and automation to make their point that automation, not outsourcing was to blame. It's worth noting the exceptionally strong political imperative to blame the effects of trade on automation given the profits involved, the strong desire of business to continue to engage in labor arbitrage & maintain cross continental supply chains. This makes automation a critical scapegoat. More likely is that the rate of automation-related job destruction (which is about 400 years old, not 10 years old) and automation-related job creation (ditto) hasn't changed over the years, it's just that low skill technology related job creation has been moved abroad to arbitrage the wage differential and is assumed out of this study's model (correct me if I'm wrong). For example, those million odd people working at Foxconn making iPhones are likely not counted in this study as jobs that "could have been created in America, but weren't" even though that's exactly what they were.