Matthew C Klein, Columnist

Why Work If a Machine Takes Your Job?

Technological advancement is destroying more jobs than it creates. How might this alter society?

November 12, 2013 at 10:35 PM UTC

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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Most economists will tell you that workers displaced by technological progress and globalization should be able to find comparable employment elsewhere -- or at least that the income losses of those who lose their jobs are more than offset by the broader gains to consumers as a whole.

Yet you have to wonder if that's quite right. Is it possible that machines and trade might eventually polarize the rich world's labor force into two distinct classes: servants and elites? If we want to prevent that, we may need to reconsider how we think about work and income in an age of abundance.