DON'T BLAME ROBOTS BLAME KRUGMAN

Let's just go line by line through this mother:
He was at a conference the other day. 
One can gather, just from his remarks, about the assumption about robots taking good jobs or jobs in general away resulting in both lagging wages and soaring inequality, that it was strictly an economists' conference.... 
Who else would reach such a consensus about the effects of robots on wages? 
Who asks such questions?
Economists. (To be continued. Check back.)

The thesis re robots he says was a universal assumption at the conference, not a hypothesis. 
He says that what everyone (all economists) knows isn't true. Bingo. 
All economists are wrong about this but him, it seems.
We are back to my fatal economist tar baby Boomerbutt post, the favorite recent post!

He thinks this assumption has had disastrous implications for policy (what kind he doesn't say). 
One disastrous implication, for him, is that it has lead to a clamor, from the left, for universal basic income, on the related assumption that robotics will lead to truly vast (and by implication frankly limitless) unemployment.
Bear in mind that his whole discussion here if framed by its implications for only the domestic economy. 
That is one of the economists' fairy tale assumptions, related here to the robotics assumption, and to the end of work assumption.
Krugman doesn't like any of that, but he trades here on the domestic economy fairy tale assumption. 
Take a few guesses why.

He says predictions are hard, especially about the future, so robots taking over all jobs, or contributing to inequality, are not something one should as an economist try to predict: one should just let the future unroll by market forces, presumably.

So, he seems to think that it is not an economist's job to predict the future, based in part on the fact that he believes that those economists who predict a robot takeover are wrong (already). Do you see the circularity here, or is it just me?

And, a related point, if is not an economist's job to predict the future, then what is an economist for?

Krugman seems not to know for sure what an economist is for. Trust me, I am with him on that!

So, not robots. Automation not to blame.  So what did happen to American workers over the past 40 years (his number; I count from 1945, almost 80 years of mostly masked relentless decline)?

He doesn't say!  I can tell you the reasons why, but why not put on your thinking cap? And why not wonder why he doesn't say?

Progressives shouldn't fall for facile technology fatalism. Then he recounts some of the most unsettling facts in industrial history, analogizing them to robotics, poo poo ing their profound and catastrophic effects, as if history didn't matter at all to progressives in search of a higher truth.

British mechanization almost wiped out Indian and Turkish textile fabric production, which had been boomed prior to that,  almost overnight, and put a huge dent in carpets in Persia, resulting in deindustrialization of those areas thereafter.

Is tech disruption accelerating? (This is what you are supposed to worry about, acceleration, not its relentless march forward at a certain already widespread killing pace anyway.)  

Not 'accelerating', according to Krugman's data, so, not to worry your pretty heads over this wonkish false signal detail of his account.

Because he focusses intentionally and misleadingly only on domestic employment, he omits the 800 pound gorilla in the room, that of globalization's diffusion of tech throughout the underdeveloped and developing world, and the rise of attacker states using it to impoverish Western worker wages while they raise their own, etc. It has been known for a long time to lead to the obsolescence of billions of workers worldwide, in spite of what Krugman said, yesteryday.
Here is a prior post, and a reference, on the subject:

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

RE BROOKS VS KRUGMAN WHAT THE WORKING CLASS IS TRYING TO SAY THE GLOBAL TRAP HAD SAID IT ALL

Published in English in 1997, over 20 years ago. 

Only three journalists were allowed to attend the Conference. One of them wrote the book.

Perhaps Krugman attended, as an economist. There were some.

See: The Global Trap, State of the World Forum, Wikipedia

Here was a video from the 1995 Forum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_OWyr0C-5s