> Where is the long-term focus on what to do about automation? https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/30/rick-wartzman-book-excerpt-automation-donald-

> Where is the long-term focus on what to do about automation? https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/30/rick-wartzman-book-excerpt-automation-donald-trump-215207 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/30/rick-wart... > A study by University of Chicago economist Yale Brozen would find that while 13 million jobs had been destroyed during the 1950s, the adoption of new technology was among the ingredients that led to the creation of more than 20 million other positions. “Instead of being alarmed about growing automation, we ought to be cheering it on,” he wrote. “The catastrophe that doom criers constantly threaten us with has retreated into such a dim future that we simply cannot take their pronouncements seriously.” > Economists started to explore the issue in the early 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution. Most classical theorists of the time—including J. B. Say, David Ricardo and John Ramsey McCulloch—held that introducing new machines would, save perhaps for a brief period of adjustment, produce more jobs than they’d destroy. By the end of the century, concern had faded nearly altogether. “Because the general upward trends in investment, production, employment and living standards were supported by evidence that could not be denied,” the economic historian Gregory Woirol has written, “technological change ceased to be seen as a relevant problem.” We go through this "fear" pretty regularly and it's unfounded. Also from the article: > General Motors, for example, added more than 287,000 people to its payroll between 1940 and the mid-1950s. “There is widespread fear that technological progress … is a Grim Reaper of jobs,” GM vice president Louis Seaton told lawmakers. “Our experience and record completely refutes this view.”