What Mr. Bush seems to admire most, however, is a more recent book, “Coming Apart,” which notes that over the past few decades working-class white families have been changing in much the same way that African-American families changed in the 1950s and 1960s, with declining rates of marriage and labor force participation.
Some of us look at these changes and see them as consequences of an economy that no longer offers good jobs to ordinary workers. This happened to African-Americans first, as blue-collar jobs disappeared from inner cities, but has now become a much wider phenomenon thanks to soaring income inequality. Mr. Murray, however, sees the changes as the consequence of a mysterious decline in traditional values, enabled by government programs which mean that men no longer “need to work to survive.” And Mr. Bush presumably shares that view.
.. Republicans, however, believe that American workers just aren’t trying hard enough to improve their situation, and that the way to change that is to strip away the safety net while cutting taxes on wealthy “job creators.”
Bernie Sanders’s Long Run
Reagan’s classic move was to ignore Congress and speak directly to the American people. But Sanders’s version of The Speech is upended Debsianism:
There is a war going on in this country. I am not referring to the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. I am talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people against working families, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country. The billionaires of America are on the warpath. They want more and more and more.
This is a war that’s been going on, oh, since 1968, which is when economic inequality in the United States, like the new right, began its long rise.
Why a Meaningful Boost for Those at the Bottom Requires Help From the Top
But even raising middle-class wages probably wouldn’t be enough to offset the recent gains at the top. Since 1970, the best five-year run of income growth for the bottom 90 percent of families came between 1994 and 1999, when the group’s income rose by 14.1 percent, adjusting for population growth. If the bottom 90 percent had enjoyed the same run of income gains between 2009 and 2014, they would have collectively earned $683 billion during that time — almost identical to the $682 billion that the top 10 percent pulled in. And that would have been with the best income growth in almost two generations. (The actual increase in income for the bottom 90 percent was $79 billion.)
.. . Between 1992, the last full year of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, and 2000, the last full year of Bill Clinton’s, the average income of families in the bottom 90 percent grew by a seemingly impressive 15.4 percent. But the average income of families in the top 10 percent grew by over 50 percent. (The average income of the top 1 percent nearly doubled.) Inequality between the bottom 90 percent and the top 10 percent increased substantially.
..
Or, put differently: The Clinton years had very impressive economic growth over all, some of which benefited families in the bottom 90 percent. But a majority of the growth benefited those in the top 10 percent, who took home nearly two-thirds of all the income gains as a group.
.. They make that argument not just because there’s no precedent in the past 45 years for a rate of growth that would raise everyone else’s income rapidly enough to narrow the income gap, but also because they believe rapid growth for the very affluent precludes rapid growth for everyone else.
Enslave the robots and free the poor
The economist Robert Gordon, doyen of the skeptics, has noted that the average growth of U.S. output per worker was 2.3 percent a year between 1891 and 1972. Thereafter, it only matched that rate briefly, between 1996 and 2004. It was just 1.4 percent a year between 1972 and 1996 and 1.3 percent between 2004 and 2012.
.. An ancient Roman would have understood the way of life of the United States of 1840 fairly well. He would have found that of 1940 beyond his imagination.
.. The collapse in child mortality is surely the single most beneficial social change of the past two centuries. It is not only a great good in itself; it also liberated women from the burden, trauma, and danger of frequent pregnancies. The jump in high school graduation rates—from less than ten percent of young people in 1900 to roughly 80 percent by 1970—was a central driver of twentieth-century economic growth.
.. Yet except for the upward blip between 1996 and 2004, we are still—to adapt the Nobel laureate Robert Solow’s celebrated words of 1987—seeing the information technology age “everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
The American economy has enjoyed . . . low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, . . . immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies. Yet during the last 40 years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognise that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.
.. Raising productivity in manufacturing matters far less now that it generates only about an eighth of total U.S. GDP. Raising productivity in caring for the young, the infirm, the helpless, and the elderly is hard, if not impossible.
.. In their book The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson and McAfee offer as a parallel the story of the inventor of chess, who asked to be rewarded with one grain of rice on the first square of his board, two on the second, four on the third, and so forth. Manageable in size on the first half of the board, the reward reaches mountainous proportions toward the end of the second. Humanity’s reward from Moore’s law—the relentless doubling of the number of transistors on a computer chip every two years or so—will, they argue, grow similarly.
.. Yes, it is possible to imagine driverless cars. But this would be a far smaller advance than were cars themselves.
.. The idea that a small minority should overwhelmingly benefit from new technologies should be reconsidered.
.. It is also possible that the ultimate result might be a tiny minority of huge winners and a vast number of losers. But such an outcome would be a choice, not a destiny. Techno-feudalism is unnecessary. Above all, technology itself does not dictate the outcomes. Economic and political institutions do. If the ones we have do not give the results we want, we will need to change them.