The Machines Displacing Middle Wage Jobs: Don't Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Comforting Story

We are hearing endless accounts of how technology is displacing middle wage jobs (e.g. see the piece by David Autor and David Dorn in the NYT today). That would be work like manfacturing jobs, bookkeeping jobs, and other jobs that used to provide a middle class standard of living. It's a comforting story for the people who control the media, but it happens not to be true.

The story told by Autor and Dorn is that technology displaces these jobs putting downward pressure on the wages of formerl...