Costinot adds: “If you are at peace with some high-level assumptions about the way markets operate, we can tell you that the only objects of interest driving th

Costinot adds: “If you are at peace with some high-level assumptions about the way markets operate, we can tell you that the only objects of interest driving the optimal policy on robots or Chinese goods should be these responses of wages across quantiles of the income distribution, which, luckily for us, people have tried to estimate.” Seems pretty wonky. Robots have compounding effects, gradually then all at once — and at some point it reaches a watershed moment. Consider the extreme case of putting half or more of the workforce out of a job. Where is the money going to come from to give them a UBI?