Be Calm, Robots Aren’t About to Take Your Job

Mark Thoma comments on Be Calm, Robots Aren’t About to Take Your Job, MIT Economist Says..

I've been arguing for a long time that in coming decades the major question will be about distribution, not production. I'm not very worried about stagnation, etc. — we'll have plenty of stuff to go around. I'm worried about, to quote the title of a political science textbook I used many, many, many years ago as an undergraduate, "who gets the cookies?" not how many cookies we're able to produce So I agree with Autor on this point:

Mr. Autor … added, “If we automate all the jobs, we’ll be rich—which means we’ll have a distribution problem, not an income problem.”

Emphasis Mine

Karl Marx made the same point in discussing Capitalism. The main problem has always been one of distribution.