As with oil, the way an economy employs its workers depends in part on what they cost. A company building a warehouse must choose how much of the work done within it should be handled by robots and how much by people. When low-wage jobs attract lots of potential hires, it makes sense to delay the upfront investment needed to automate the warehouse and use regular old humans instead. In the same way, carmakers with factories all over the world use many more robots in Japanese plants than in Indian ones.

History also suggests the price of workers plays an important role in the process of innovation. The Industrial Revolution could not have taken place without the invention of the steam engine, but it took the relatively high cost of labor in Britain to nudge business owners to find clever ways to use steam to cut their labor costs. A century later America, rich in land and resources but short of labor, developed its own style of manufacturing, even more productive than Britain’s, which helped make the United States the world’s richest big economy. Just as expensive oil encourages us to wring more utility out of each gallon of gas, high wages encourage companies to make the most of their work forces — and to make full use of whatever new technologies promise to economize on payroll. It is not the technology which is at fault, but the incentives firms face to use it that are letting us down.

So why should productivity growth have fallen in recent decades? Over the past generation, economic and political change handed companies an expanding tool kit to use to limit worker bargaining power. Faced with workers demanding pay raises, bosses can threaten to outsource jobs to contractors, to move them overseas or to hand the work to a much smaller group of well-paid engineers overseeing teams of robots. As a result, economic growth has contributed very little to the inflation-adjusted wages of workers without a college education — and since the turn of the century, everyone but the top 1 percent of earners. And so companies have felt very little pressure to replace stockers with robots, cashiers with touch-screens and customer-service staff with chatbots. Neither has there been much reason to squeeze more productivity out of workers by investing in training or by finding ways to equip them with new, productivity-enhancing technologies. Today, despite an unemployment rate at just 4.1 percent and fat corporate profits, wage growth remains well below the peak rates of the 1990s and 2000s.

Many cutting-edge innovations remain buggy or more prone to failure than human workers. That is why the lack of wage pressure has been a problem; employers need to be fairly desperate to tinker with raw technologies, and to fail and learn, until new techniques are reliable enough and cheap enough to be adopted widely. Early steam engines were clunky and wildly inefficient, and few people had a good idea how to harness them to boats or looms in a profitable way. But in Britain, the incentives created by expensive labor and cheap coal made it worth the trouble to find out. Tinkering in Britain led to steady improvements, until steam was ready to conquer the world.

If low wages are indeed inhibiting productivity, what can we do about it? A large corporate tax cut is unlikely to help. In an economy in which large firms enjoy market power while workers have none, such cuts will raise stock prices and dividends rather than wages and investment. Big increases in the minimum wage would certainly give companies an incentive to automate, but at the cost of jobs for the most vulnerable workers.

A better strategy would be to shift power from companies to workers, to allow workers to bargain for a bigger share of the gains from growth. Keeping companies from getting too big and too dominant would make a difference by increasing the number of companies competing for workers and the competitive pressure they face to maximize worker output.