Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You're right. For instance, take the garment industry: the big gains in productivity were made a long time ago. It now t

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You're right. For instance, take the garment industry: the big gains in productivity were made a long time ago. It now takes about as many people to make a pair of jeans as it did 30 years ago. But those jeans are very easy to transport. Consequently, the industry is constantly searching the globe for the cheapest possible hour of human labor. If the garment industry where still seeing big productivity gains then they'd have less pressure to seek low labor costs and there'd be less interest in outsourcing. If jeans went bad when packed into a container then there'd be less ability for them to outsource (goods less tradable) but tradability is orthogonal to automatability.