Slowly, it dawned on The Economist that there was a catch...

From a special report, "Technology isn't Working," in The Economist:

The integration of large emerging markets into the global economy added a large pool of relatively low-skilled labour which many workers in rich countries had to compete with. That meant firms were able to keep workers’ pay low. And low pay has had a surprising knock-on effect: when labour is cheap and plentiful, there seems little point in investing in labour-saving (and productivity-enhancing) technologies. By creating a labour glut, new technologies have trapped rich economies in a cycle of self-limiting productivity growth. 

Fear of the job-destroying effects of technology is as old as industrialisation. It is often branded as the lump-of-labour fallacy: the belief that there is only so much work to go round (the lump), so that if machines (or foreigners) do more of it, less is left for others. This is deemed a fallacy because as technology displaces workers from a particular occupation it enriches others, who spend their gains on goods and services that create new employment for the workers whose jobs have been automated away. A critical cog in the re-employment machine, though, is pay. To clear a glutted market, prices must fall, and that applies to labour as much as to wheat or cars.

Meanwhile, at Counterpunch, Alan Nasser shows how to add two and two to get four, instead of "huh?":

There is an alternative, and the only one that is capable of addressing a situation in which profits and economic growth can no longer be achieved by investing in real production and hiring workers. An overripe, industrially saturated economy can be made into one that can deliver on capitalism’s false promises. All workers can be employed, but for far fewer hours, and a just living wage can be provided to all. This is the arrangement recommended by Marx and Keynes.