As much as it pains me to agree with Elizabeth Warren, automation is one area where she’s right and Andrew Yang is wrong.

And that’s natural because Yang operates in a Silicon Valley tech bubble.

Has automation claimed jobs? Yes. But its impact is negligible compared to trade policy. That doesn’t mean that Yang’s predictions might not prove accurate. If self-driving trucks replace conventional trucking, that would certainly cost a lot of jobs.

Self-driving cars and automated pallet deliveries might end up claiming plenty of jobs.

But that sort of thing has happened in the past too.

Yang’s insistence that the conventional economy is doomed because of automation and all we can do is hand out $1,000 welfare checks to everyone is arrogant and stupid.

Automation won’t shift us to a jobless economy. Bad trade policies have and can again. That and importing huge numbers of immigrants under the impression that what we really need is cheap labor. And MAs in Sociology. 

Restoring manufacturing has worked. We just need to follow the bouncing ball instead of the singularity fantasies.