Andrew Yang Is Wrong

Either that, or everyone else is. The centerpiece of Yang’s campaign is that technology is rapidly displacing labor, creating the prospect of mass unemployment in the not distant future.

As a factual matter, this is wrong about the present and recent past. Productivity growth, which measures the rate at which technology is displacing human labor, has averaged just 1.3 percent annually since 2005, the slowest pace on record. This compares to an annual growth rate of 3.0 percent in the long Gol...