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Lumifer comments on The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ - Less Wrong
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Another hypothesis for the mix, conveyed to me by a business major:
The biggest recent change has been the abrupt entry into the information age, with internet companies being in the innovation spotlight. Software companies and other information-centered businesses are far more scalable than most, which means that when a product gets popular, a big profit can result. The idea here is that this provides an exceptionally high opportunity for inequality: information industries create a small population which get the high payoff, with a large number who pay for the new products.
Some simplistic macroeconomic simulations have suggested that there are two equilibriums which an economy can fall into; one where people have roughly the same amount of money, and another where money concentrates into a small number of hands. This makes the tech-inequality idea scary. Surely reality is more complex than the simple simulation; but, innovations with high inequality risk could push us into a different equilibrium...
The traditional story is that when innovators provide new products for everyone to buy, everyone benefits; the innovators may get rich, but the others who buy the product are also better off. Looking at graphs, the standard of living goes way up for the rich, but also rises more slowly for the poor... until the 90s. Then the poor actually get worse off again. (I checked this some time ago, and don't have a convenient link, sorry! In general there are a lot of things in this comment that could use fact-checking.)
Yes, scalability of software is one thing. Another relevant thing is the so-called flattening of the world: it is becoming more connected and less diverse. The barriers to flows of people, goods, information, money are being flattened into nonexistence. This leads to winner-takes-all situations: if your product is better than everything else in, say, Germany, it's likely that it is also better that everything else in the rest of the world.
Color me sceptical. I think the key word is "simplistic" -- unless you show relevance to the real world it's just not useful in any way. Might even be harmful on the general "mind contamination" principles.
That's debatable. Off the top of my head (I stand ready to be corrected on facts), the median salary of the lowest quintile stagnated or even fell a little, but the median income including benefits continued to rise. Also the decline is pretty much limited to men without college education. If you're a woman, or have a college degree your income even without benefits continued to rise.