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There’s been quite a lot of commentary about the Hamilton Project conference on robots and all that. Let me just add my two cents about the “framing paper“.

What strikes me about this paper — and in general what one still hears from many people inside the Beltway — is the continuing urge to make this mainly a story about the skills gap, of not enough workers having higher education or maybe the right kind of education. The paper acknowledges, sort of, that the trends people thought they saw in the 1990s aren’t visible in later data, but then jumps right back into discussing education as the solution as if nothing had happened.

But if my math is right, the 90s ended 15 years ago — and since then wages of the highly educated have stagnated. Why on earth are we still hearing the same rhetoric about education as the solution to inequality and unemployment?

The answer, I’m sorry to say, is surely that it sounds serious. But, you know, it isn’t.