Lurking behind the headline employment figure was another number that carried with it an ominous warning for the future. In the years since the onset of the financial crisis, the population of working-age adults in the United States had increased by about 15 million people.19 For all those millions of entrants into the workforce, the economy had created no new opportunities at all. As John Kennedy said, \u201cTo even stand still we have to move very fast.\u201d That was possible in 1963. In our time, it may ultimately prove unachievable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In 1998, workers in the US business sector put in a total of 194 billion hours of labor. A decade and a half later, in 2013, the value of the goods and services produced by American businesses had grown by about $3.5 trillion after adjusting for inflation\u2014a 42 percent increase in output. The total amount of human labor required to accomplish that was . . . 194 billion hours. Shawn Sprague, the BLS economist who prepared the report, noted that \u201cthis means that there was ultimately no growth at all in the number of hours worked over this 15-year period, despite the fact that the US population gained over 40 million people during that time, and despite the fact that there were thousands of new businesses established during that time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These highlights are from the Kindle version of Rise of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":15162,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"yoast_head":"\n
Rise of the Robots Highlights<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n