But there is little evidence that this is now happening at an accelerated or game-changing pace. While we are commonly warned, as Kevin Drum put it recently, that “smart machines are going to put lots of people out of work over the next few decades, and this is going to substantially increase income inequality,” neither recent unemployment nor inequality trends suggest that this dystopian nightmare has begun. As CEPR’s John Schmitt and Kris Warner point out, the share of displaced workers reporting unemployment as a result of “plant closing” or “position abolished” has been pretty constant since such surveys were launched in the late 1980s; those reporting jobs lost due to “insufficient work,” by contrast, nearly doubled (from 22 to 43 percent) between 2006 and 2010. Increased unemployment, in other words, is cyclical (a reflection of insufficient demand in a recessionary economy) and not structural (the result of a skills mismatch or technological displacement).

More to the point, patterns of occupational change do not line up in any credible, chronological manner with concurrent patterns of wage inequality. As the graph below (drawing on Mishel, Shierholz, and Schmitt) summarizes, occupational shares across the last generation shifted fairly steadily—especially from middle-wage to high-wage occupations. But the corresponding trends in wage inequality are starkly discontinuous. There is a spike in the gap between low-wage and median-wage workers in the 1980s (especially stark for women, and starting a bit earlier for men), but this levels off after 1990. By the same token, trends in the wage gap at the top (between median and high-wage workers) also bear little relation to changing occupation shares—sometimes growing as the shift in occupational shares slowed, sometimes narrowing as the shift in shares picked up. Slow and steady shifts in the demand for low-, middle-, and high-wage workers, in short, seem to have little to do with the wage gaps between them.

While K–16 education and workforce development are undoubtedly important (and underperforming), it is not clear that even dramatic improvements on that front would close the gap. The last fifteen years have seen significantly slower growth in high-skill, high-wage jobs than in the economy at large. Even those with the right skills are pounding the pavement. Education and training may not be the golden ticket but instead, as James K. Galbraith suggests, “a kind of lottery, whose winners and losers are determined, ex post, by the behavior of the economy.”

In short, the notion that inequality is generated by rapid technological change and skill shortages is not sustained by the recent American experience. If demand for certain workers or certain skills were reflected in wages, we would expect to see wage gains where that demand was highest and wage stagnation where it was weakest. But this is not the case. Since 1969 labor’s share of income has fallen most rapidly in those sectors where union presence withered, not where computers displaced labor. Across our last two business cycles, income concentrated not in sectors or regions where skills were most in demand but where speculative bubbles (dot-com, housing, finance) bloomed and burst. During our most recent recession and recovery, the notion of a “skills shortage” was belied by the fact that job openings and available workers were distributed fairly evenly across the economy, and that skilled workers saw no “bidding up” of their wages or increase in their work hours. Indeed, most of the growth in wage inequality across the last generation can be found within occupations, and not in their relative share of the labor market.

Finally, whatever causal importance we assign to technological change, it is hard to see it as a credible account of the different trajectories of inequality across countries. Technological change is a challenge faced by all national economies, and the secular decline in labor’s share of national income is common to most advanced economies. And yet on key measures of inequality, differences across national settings (and especially the outlying status of the United States) remain profound. To illustrate this, Graph 4 charts the Gini index of inequality against a simple metric of educational achievement (the share of the population with a postsecondary education) for the United Statesand its peers (other wealthy democracies). In both 1985 and 2007, the United Statesleads the pack in both educational attainment and inequality.

Technological change, in short, falls flat as either a causal or cross-national explanation for American inequality. Indeed, as Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez concluded recently, the very fact that wealthy nations with essentially similar histories of technological change show such divergent patterns of inequality suggest that institutional and policy differences—and not the underlying technological change—are the key. In this sense, the magnitude or pace of labor’s displacement is less important than the fact that, as Peter Frase notes, such displacement is now occurring “without many of the countervailing protections that labor enjoyed in the heyday of the postwar Keynesian compromise.”

In the United States, those differences—or those lost protections—are now pretty familiar: a long decline in union density and bargaining power, the retreat of basic labor standards and their enforcement, a fiscal policy that accommodates spells of high unemployment out of an irrational fear of inflation, and the evaporation of fiscal or regulatory restraint on incomes at the very top. The robots and computers had little to do with it.