Slow Boring

By January of 2020, 80.6 percent of prime-age workers had jobs. That measure cratered during Covid, but bounced back rapidly to 80.9 percent by June of 2023. The Obama-era labor market wasn’t sluggish because of ATMs — it was sluggish because policymakers were inflation-averse and settled for a slow recovery. In 2020, a different set of policymakers made different choices and got different results.

That was a lot of throat-clearing because I want to establish my bona fides before I say this: I think it’s time to think seriously about AI-induced job displacement. …