Yeah, but the jobs never come back after those drops. (It's almost entirely a one-way trend over the last 19 years...) There's a big three-year drop that star

Yeah, but the jobs never come back after those drops. (It's almost entirely a one-way trend over the last 19 years...) There's a big three-year drop that starts in 2001. Then it goes from that steep drop to a slowly-declining drop -- before that next massive "2008" drop (which lasts through December of 2009). So it seems plausible that the loss of jobs was caused by specific events. (Whereas if it were the creep of automation, it seems like it'd be happening more gradually, factory by factory....) I guess you can argue that the economic hardship of a bust forced companies into sudden and widespread cost-cutting measures like replacing humans with robots. But another study cited in the article argues against that theory. (The article acknowledges that automation has taken some jobs, but that it's a much smaller fraction, and that latching onto that as the single explanation makes us miss the other factors -- as well as possible solutions.)