Similarly, Andy Kessler, writing for The Wall Street Journal, argues that technology will—as it always has—create more jobs than it consumes. After taking a swipe at notions of a “bigger welfare state and universal basic income and other services to coddle displaced workers,” Kessler explains that technology consistently augments rather than obviates human labor. Again, this seems to be true, but if technology allows one employee to do the work formerly done by two or three or ten employees doesn’t this reasonably allow for less people employed in a given industry?

Consider that Tesla’s Gigafactory, an incredible feat of state-of-the-art engineering and robotics, can produce the Model 3 electric vehicles with little human interaction. CEO Elon Musk referred to the factory as an “alien dreadnaught,” and expects the production process to be fully automated within a few years as the company needs the production rate to exceed “people speed.” While there is little doubt that a such remarkable manufacturing process will require the input of highly-skilled engineers, software developers, and others, the sophistication of the technology that enables the Gigafactory goes beyond mere augmentation.

With 16 million square feet, Ford’s River Rouge Complex in Michigan employed 100,000 people at it’s peak in 1939 each with a 160 square feet of space each. Today it employs 6,000 workers, whose proportion of the complex has risen to 2,667 square feet. The Gigafactory, by contrast, is 5.5 million square feet and employs 272 employees who each have a spacious 20,220 square feet. Of course these remaining employees can be said to be greatly augmented, but for many, many others they are simply replaced.

Confronting Inequality

It’s true that the economy as a whole is far better off with more yoga instructors and gardeners—the US economy is far bigger than it was in 1939 despite the changes within the staffing plan at it’s biggest automotive factories. What is different is that along the way economic growth has become wholly divorced from median household income, which is stagnating. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Since 1973, the median man working full-time, full-year has seen no sustained growth, dropping from $53,291 in 1973 to $51,902 in 2002 and falling further over the 2002-07 recovery and the recession to $50,383 in 2014.” Andrew Mcafee and Erik Brynjolfsson, authors of The Second Machine Age, refer to this phenomenon as ‘The Great Decoupling.’ When factoring in continuous increases labor productivity—also divorced from median family income—a clearer signal of exploitation is hard to come by: