© RMV/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Duncan Weldon
Popular economics moves in cycles, and each cycle gives rise to a new worry about the future. Back in 2008/9 the fashionable concern was about debt, a fear driven partially by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s This Time is Different. By 2014, cooler kids were clutching copies of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and fretting about inequality. Nowadays the zeitgeist anxiety is that robots are about to take all of our jobs. Propelled by a never-ending stream of books and op-eds, it is a fear that is surprisingly well spread, encompassing a spectrum from billionaire technologist Bill Gates to French Socialist presidential contender Benoît Hamon. Thankfully though, while a robot takeover is capturing a lot of column inches, it isn’t showing up in the data.