This is an extremely cogent article on the unemployment issue. It appears the US needs to seriously start considering the structural unemployment that results f

This is an extremely cogent article on the unemployment issue. It appears the US needs to seriously start considering the structural unemployment that results from accelerating efficiency gains brought on by technological progress. Although I am a huge proponent of free markets, I've always worried what would happen when the radical pace of technological change outpaced the average person's marketable skills. My take on this is that human abilities are normally distributed, and the average employable person lies right at the mean in ability. Technology, on the other hand, started at the far left of the ability curve and slowly began automating the most menial tasks. Over the last century, the mean technological ability line has inched ever closer to the mean human ability line, eliminating otherwise employable people from the market along the way. You don't have to be a Singularitarian to see that this line has already caught up to the mean human ability, as evidenced by the blue collar recession we have experienced recently. The problem is that about 68% of the human population lie within one standard deviation of the average. If you look at the income gap data, it appears there is a divergence occurring in job demand, where only the high skilled and certain non-automated low skilled jobs are in demand. The big fat middle of the distribution appears to have been automated, hence the lack of demand for blue collar jobs and the structural unemployment we see today. I would be curious to hear HN's opinions on how to deal with this issue. I am at a loss, as the foundation of the issue is based on the non-malleable human ability distribution and the ever accelerating pace of technological efficiency.