The first is that “automation can directly displace labor in the affected sector.” Second is that “automation can create new jobs in new areas.” The authors note that “job losses at brick-and mortar department stores were more than made up for by new opportunities at fulfillment and call centers.” The third effect is that “higher incomes increase demand for jobs throughout the economy, including in ways that are not directly linked to technology. For example, the share of workers in leisure and hospitality in the United States has steadily trended upward as household incomes have risen, enabling people to afford more restaurants and travel.” And the fourth effect is that “technology may replace specific tasks rather than entire jobs — leaving substantial room for human employment in jobs that will be changed by worker’s having a new tool at their disposal.”

Both the upside and the downside of artificial intelligence, Furman and Seamans point out, have “the potential to dramatically change the economy,” adding that

On the one hand, the potential for increased productivity growth is welcome given the decades-long slowing in productivity growth in the United States and other advanced economies. On the other hand, the potential for AI-induced labor disruptions could potentially exacerbate existing problems in the labor force, including the decades-long decline in male labor force participation rate.

The 2017 Trump tax cut not only boosted incentives for corporations to replace workers with robots, it has also created incentives for American companies to move production overseas, even as it directed resources toward “opportunity zones” in what the Trump administration defines as “neglected and underserved communities” — incidentally providing a bounty of lucrative grants, guarantees and breaks for real estate developers.

While Trump is clearly attuned to the political power of white working class anger — in 2016 he ignited a blue-collar insurgency and mobilized white men in particular — his campaign rhetoric is also expedient. He is highly attuned to the agenda of the Republican Party he leads, not to mention the corporate establishment and its antipathy to corporate taxation. And it goes without saying that the tax cut was enormously beneficial to Trump and to his family — by conservative estimates he will personally save from $11 to $15 million annually and his estate will reap millions.

The reality for the voters who believed in Trump is not so bright. Take two counties, Alger and Ontonagon, both on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 (57-37 and 60-34). Two years later, their respective unemployment rates are 8.4 and 9.4 percent, compared with the low national rate of 3.7 percent. These two counties have median household incomes of $41,270 and $35,038, far below the national median, which is $61,372.

On Monday, the Daily Mining Gazette in next door Houghton County, Mich., reported that the “opioid crisis has hit the Ontonagon County region hard” with “one of the highest opioid-related hospitalization rates in Michigan.”

Andrew K. Shotwell, a local attorney, told the County Board that opioid use is increasing and that “Ontonagon in the top 10 for that in the state of Michigan.” The Gazette reported that prescriptions “rose from 65.6 per 100 people in the county in 2009 to 113 in 2016, more than the number of people.”

E.P. Thompson, looking at 19th century England, put the plight of similarly technologically displaced people best:

Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience.

Ontonagon County is at an extreme, but at the extreme, it illuminates the bleak dislocation much of Trump country has suffered.