I don’t think policing analogies is serving the conversation well. Someone whose job disappears in a puff of smoke doesn’t have a reason to care about whether

I don’t think policing analogies is serving the conversation well. Someone whose job disappears in a puff of smoke doesn’t have a reason to care about whether the job was automated or whether it was moved overseas—in both cases, the economic activity is still there (or more likely, it’s increased), but the workers who trained for it are no longer getting compensated, and our concerns are for the welfare of these workers. Social consequences and all that. Manufacturing jobs face both outsourcing and automation. The resulting productivity gains have certainly not been “swallowed”—consumer goods are just so damn cheap and plentiful these days—but the overall impact on local economies is sometimes disastrous. If you take a look at the US manufacturing sector, the output is higher than ever (maybe minus a dent from COVID), and the resulting benefits are spread across the US population (better access to manufactured goods), but the relative power of labor and capital is diverging—and both automation and outsourcing are making that possible. They both allow capital owners to create goods with lower labor costs. That’s the whole point, and the analogy makes a lot of sense. IMO, a big part of the problem is that capital owners are so effectively able to externalize risk.