Noah Smith, Columnist

Don't Blame Robots for President Trump

It's tempting to connect industrial automation to Midwestern job loss to 2016 Republican votes. But the link doesn't hold up.

January 17, 2018 at 10:00 AM UTC

By Noah Smith

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

It wasn't this guy.
Photographer: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

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Human beings have a natural fear of being replaced by machines. Folk tales like the legend of John Henry, the mighty railroad worker who out-hammered a steam engine and then died of exhaustion, are forever depicting the rise of technology as a desperate battle by humanity against obsolescence. In the early 1800s, a disorganized movement of British workers known as Luddites expressed the revolutionary sentiment of the day by smashing industrial machinery.

QuickTake Automation and Job Loss