There's not much difference (from the perspective of the US economy) between outsourcing to China to make a widget for $.20, and automating it in the US to make

There's not much difference (from the perspective of the US economy) between outsourcing to China to make a widget for $.20, and automating it in the US to make it for $.20/item. Each of them are a black box where you put in $.20 of resources and get an item, with no US labor. I think legislation like minimum wage is only a small part of the story too. Lots of people get paid more than minimum wage and we couldn't just put min. wage at $100/hr. I think the fundamentals we are looking for are productivity and macroeconomic policy. Traditionally, the Gov. and central bank stimulate the economy until it reaches full employment, then slow it down when inflation is high. Productivity will determine how much people produce/consume (in total) when everyone is working. Of course there's issues of how those goods are distributed (which is probably not quite as bad as the wealth gap, the rich put a lot of money in stocks etc instead of consuming it). There's also structural problems where the job locations/skills don't match with the workers. While I don't see why in the long-run we can't just produce more of what people want (health care, going out to eat, housing, vacations, etc), if millions of people are displaced rapidly by online shopping, self-driving cars etc I think it will be hard for people to adjust quickly. Also maybe most worrying is some of the macroeconomic stuff that has been relied on to keep the economy closer to full employment is in uncharted territory. The central bank has less ability to stimulate the economy to get us out of a recession than maybe it's ever had, and the alternative of fiscal policy (gov. spending) is controversial so I'm not sure how much it can be relied on in the US either.