Do we really want to recover the tens of thousands of pinsetter jobs that used to be filled by boys and young men at bowling alleys prior to the adoption of the automatic pinsetting machine in the 1940s? Or return to 1950, when there were more than 100,000 elevator operators, an occupation that essentially disappeared after the widespread adoption of self-service elevators? Or rekindle the glory days of motion-picture projectionists, who numbered more than 30,000 in 1940 and now, in the age of multiplexes, fewer than 5,000?

What technology giveth, it taketh away. Atkinson and Wu note that occupations associated with railroads — engineers, conductors, etc. — increased 600 percent in the 1850s. They kept growing until the 1920s, when the advent of cars and trucks began to erode the railroad market; the trajectory in railway jobs has been downward ever since.

The number of telephone operators and data-entry clerks has declined by about 50 percent since 2000, although we don’t lack for communication or ready information.

This sort of occupational churn is inevitable when an economy is becoming more productive, and indeed, the average American worker — equipped with once-unimaginable technological tools — now produces in an hour what his predecessor 100 years ago produced in a day.