Where's the Productivity Growth? The Bureau of Labor Statistics Can't Find the Robots!

We hear endless stories in the media about how the robots are taking all the jobs. There was a new rush of such stories after the release of a study by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, which found that robots were responsible for a substantial share of the job loss in manufacturing in the last decade. (For example, this Bloomberg piece by Mira Rojanasakul and Peter Coy.)

However, there remains a very basic problem in the robot story, it is not showing up in the productivity data. To step...