Making Andrew Yang Smarter

The New York Times ran a column by Andrew Yang, one of the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. Yang used the piece to repeat his claim that automation is leading to massive job loss.

His one piece of evidence is a study that purports to find that 88 percent of job loss between 2000 and 2010 was due to automation. As I and others have pointed out, it is difficult to take this claim seriously. This was a period in which the trade deficit exploded from 3.0 percent of GDP to almost 6....