Why Economists Are Bad At Economics

If you want an informed, thoughtful analysis of the effects of robotization on productivity, investment, employment and wages, ask an art school professor. Jason E. Smith's two-part series, "Nowhere to Go: Automation, Then and Now," (part one and part two) at Brooklyn Rail cuts through all the statistical aggregation category errors to highlight the accumulation dilemma that economists just don't seem capable of either grasping or admitting.

Current speculations on both the promise and threat of automation are confronted with an ongoing crisis of accumulation. In this climate, a fragmentary implementation of automation is unlikely either to liberate large fractions of humanity from work, or produce mass unemployment of the sort envisioned over and again by commentators for the past century.

Smith has a PhD in comparative literature, which perhaps explains why he can tell the difference between an arbitrary catch-all term like "service sector" and the very different and distinctive components that are lumped together in it. Both promise and threat evaporate when the components are dis-aggregated and the jumble untangled. Definitely worth a read.