Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product.

[Agony]

9. "There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from

technological progress." We need better economists and leaders then. Our winner-take-all "exceptional" system needs a do-over.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/why-workers-are-losing-the-war-against-machines/247278/1/
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At least since the followers of Ned Ludd smashed mechanized looms in 1811, workers have worried about automation destroying jobs. Economists have reassured them that new jobs would be created even as old ones were eliminated. For over 200 years, the economists were right. Despite massive automation of millions of jobs, more Americans had jobs at the end of each decade up through the end of the 20th century. However, this empirical fact conceals a dirty secret. There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

People with little economics training intuitively grasp this point. They understand that some human workers may lose out in the race against the machine. Ironically, the best-educated economists are often the most resistant to this idea, as the standard models of economic growth implicitly assume that economic growth benefits all residents of a country. However, just as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson showed that outsourcing and offshoring do not necessarily increase the welfare of all workers, it is also true that technological progress is not a rising tide that automatically raises all incomes. Even as overall wealth increases, there can be, and usually will be, winners and losers. And the losers are not necessarily some small segment of the labor force like buggy whip manufacturers. In principle, they can be a majority or even 90% or more of the population.

If wages can freely adjust, then the losers keep their jobs in exchange for accepting ever-lower compensation as technology continues to improve. But there's a limit to this adjustment. Shortly after the Luddites began smashing the machinery that they thought threatened their jobs, the economist David Ricardo, who initially thought that advances in technology would benefit all, developed an abstract model that showed the possibility of technological unemployment. The basic idea was that at some point, the equilibrium wages for workers might fall below the level needed for subsistence. A rational human would see no point in taking a job at a wage that low, so the worker would go unemployed and the work would be done by a machine instead.
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