William Lazonick: Robots Don't Destroy Jobs.

Rapacious corporate executives do. Americans are understandably upset about profits without prosperity. Corporate executives seem to be the big winners, while the middle class is declining, and young people face a bleak economic future. How did this happen? It's easy to blame technology, especially the automation that supposedly displaces workers, but that's not the real story: The fact is, that automation creates jobs. It's the misuse of corporate profits that is destroying them. There was a time, when high corporate profits meant bright employment prospects for most members of the US labor force. That relation between profits and prosperity was strongest in the immediate post World War II decades, when US corporations led the world in manufacturing, provided workers with career long employment security, and reinvested profits in productive capabilities in the United States. For the past three decades, however, the pursuit of corporate profits has been at the expense of prosperity for an ever growing proportion of the American population. This disconnect between profits and prosperity began in the 1980's, with permanent plant closings that cost production workers their middle class jobs. It increased in the 1990's, as major US corporations scrapped the career with one company norm, that has prevailed for salaried employees, and it became common even for college educated people with a couple of decades of work experience, to find themselves on the wrong end of the pink slip. Then, in the 2000s, as US corporations accelerated the globalization of production activities, the jobs of all members of the US labor force, no matter what their level of educational attainment, became vulnerable to competition from qualified people in lower wage areas of the world. Profits without prosperity is now starting to get attention in the mainstream press. In his New York Times op-ed, "Robots and Robber Barons", Paul Krugman seeks to explain why, with corporate profits up, labor compensation is down. As part of the ongoing digital revolution, he argues, robots are throwing American workers out of their jobs.