Note that the drop in labor's share of income corresponds very highly with the entry into the global market of huge new labor pools in China and the rest of Asia. Very basic economics suffices to explain it: the ratio of labor to capital suddenly went way up, so the price of labor had to go down. I have very high confidence that this situation is going to start to reverse as the Chinese start to accumulate capital.
I have very high confidence that this situation is going to start to reverse as the Chinese start to accumulate capital.
But is your confidence high enough to counterbalance the loss if it turns out you're wrong?
In the piece, Drum links this article by economist Noah Smith, which concludes:
......It may turn out that the "rise of the robots" ends up augmenting human labor instead of replacing it. It may be that technology never exceeds our mental capacity. It may be that the fall in labor's income share has really been due to the great Chinese La
Kevin Drum has an article in Mother Jones about AI and Moore's Law:
Although he only mentions consumer goods, Drum presumably means that scarcity will end for services and consumer goods. If scarcity only ended for consumer goods, people would still have to work (most jobs are currently in the services economy).
Drum explains that our linear-thinking brains don't intuitively grasp exponential systems like Moore's law.
He also includes this nice animated .gif which illustrates the principle very clearly.
Drum continues by talking about possible economic ramifications.
Drum says the share of (US) national income going to workers was stable until about a decade ago. I think the graph he links to shows the worker's share has been declining since approximately the late 1960s/early 1970s. This is about the time US immigration levels started increasing (which raises returns to capital and lowers native worker wages).
The rest of Drum's piece isn't terribly interesting, but it is good to see mainstream pundits talking about these topics.