But the distribution of those gains will go to owners of capital and intellectual property

An interesting juxtaposition.

For the bleak assessment, Megan McArdle presents When Work Disappears.

It's impossible to look at what's happening to the bottom half of American society and not worry. Some of the breakdown is cultural--a fraying of the basic ties that keep people connected and cared for. Some of it is economic, the disappearance of steady employment that allows people to do the bourgeois work of planning for the future. And in some ways, those trends are reinforcing each other. A community cannot insist that its members work hard and plan for the future if there are no jobs available; the resulting erosion of work and education ethics makes unemployment worse.

The problem is that all the proposed solutions ring hollow. Until roughly the last five years, it was possible to believe that education would be the solution: send more kids to school, retrain people for new jobs. But college graduates aren't finding it so easy to obtain solid employment either. It's true that having a college diploma is still much better than not having a college diploma, but that doesn't mean that by sending more kids to school, we're actually making the workforce more productive, much less mitigating the problem of economic change; we may just be forcing people to jump over a higher bar to gain access to a shrinking number of jobs. Paul Krugman points out that these days, highly educated workers still have to fear having their job disrupted.

Then there is Who are the new economic optimists? by Tyler Cowen

“The great stagnation will end for a lot of people but not everyone,” Mr. Cowen said. “I think there will be great breakthroughs but the distribution of those gains will go to owners of capital and intellectual property."

This is, I think, an example of a statement that is always true, or has been true for millennium, but is more true now than ever before.

Read the original article for the source of Cowen's bullish views.

While I think Megan McArdle's concerns are fully justified, I am in the bullish camp. The nation's fundamentals are good enough and better than just about anywhere else in the world. There are some minor physical infrastructure improvements that need to be implemented but nothing like the wholesale programs of the past. There is much more work to be done in restoring the integrity and trust in both the legislative and administration branches of our government (an empirical and institutional observation, not partisan) but that will take time to earn back lost trust and confidence. There is a fair amount of regulatory reset and policy refreshment that needs to occur but all of which is feasible with goodwill and better leaders in both Congress and Administration, and more citizens holding elected figures accountable for their promises and actions.

The nature and rates of change are unlikely to slow. Everyone has to grapple with globalization, disintermediation, instant-everywhere-always-on connectivity, etc. and all the changes that those conditions drive. We can ride this wave to greater security and prosperity but not while locked in the old mindsets of divisive identity politics, partisan or ideological commitment, or other essentially inconsequential obsessions that have little real world consequence. How do we help those that are unproductive to become productive, how do we help those that are insecure to become more secure? These are the real issues that we can tackle if only we didn't allow ourselves to get distracted by the comfortingly simplistic siren songs of those committed to the old, tired and ineffective nostrums of yesteryear.