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Neither is technological progress the only means by which labour is displaced. Defenders of free trade like to suggest it is technology, rather than trade, that is responsible for most job losses, but in truth it is neither: the biggest single source of job loss is competition from other workers. All of us are in competition with one another to sell our services, just as every employer is in competition with each other to buy them.

The result is enormous and constant upheaval in the market for labour — more than three million people leave their jobs every year, and still more people are taken on — dwarfing anything that might be attributed to trade or even technology. Employers do not need technological change as an excuse to shed workers. That is their aim at all times and in all weather: to make do with as little labour as they possibly can, while still filling their orders.

And yet the sum of all their efforts over the decades is not only the highest median standard of living in our history, but also the highest level of employment, both in absolute terms and (until very recently) as a percentage of the population.

Ah, but this time is different, we are told. Then, what was being replaced was simple physical labour — backbreaking, dirty, often dangerous tasks we should be thankful to have been spared. But now, my God, the robots are coming for us: the highly educated, the symbolic analysts, the lawyers and investment advisers and, gulp, journalists, all the folks who’d been told they were irreplaceable, immune. If even these jobs can be replaced, surely there is nothing left for us to do, as a species, but sit around and collect our basic income cheques.