If robots were taking our jobs, the productivity of the workers who still have jobs — the total amount of work that gets done divided by the total number of people who are employed — would be going up rapidly. But it’s not. It is rising, but it’s rising slower than it did in the past.
And the slowing rate of productivity growth is an important source of the wage slowdown that people have been worrying about.
The 2015 Economic Report of the President calculated that if productivity growth had continued at its 1948–1973 pace for the past 40 years, the average household’s income would be $30,000 higher today. By contrast, had inequality stayed at its 1973 level for the same period, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers calculates that the average household’s income would be only $9,000 higher.