I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, January 21st.

And while automation has long been known to cut labor costs in the United States and displace some workers,

new research underscores its pivotal role

in widening disparities right now. In the past 40 years, at least half, if not more, of the

increasing wage gap among American workers is attributable to automation, according to MIT

economist Darren Achamaglu. His research shows this is particularly true for men without college degrees.

But if you think of this as just having to do with machines that replace factory workers, it's becoming much more in the 21st century.

You know, the last few years have brought rapid investments in not just hardware,

but software and artificial intelligence that have the potential to displace even more

workers and more kinds of workers. So we're going to talk about this now. Joining me now for

a tech news roundup is Steve Lour, who has covered technology, business, and economics for the New York

Times for more than 20

years. Maybe you saw his article. Economists pin more blame on tech for rising inequality.

Steve, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC. Thanks for having me, Ryan. Appreciate it. Steve,

as you write in your piece, automation wasn't always seen as a bad thing from a labor standpoint.

You write economists point to the post-war years from 1950 to 1980 as a golden age when technology

forged ahead and workers enjoyed rising income. So how did they coexist?

You get shared prosperity when the technology

moves ahead, as does training and education. And that's, that was the story from really 19, the early

1950s to 1980s. And after that, the growth in post-secondary education started to decline in the United States.

Employers spent less on training.

And we started to see this divergence, which has only increased.

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