Why Is the U.S. So Bad at Protecting Workers From Automation?
“In a televised speech to the nation in February 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan warned that 7 million Americans were caught up ‘in the personal indignity and human tragedy of unemployment.’ ‘If they stood in a line, allowing three feet for each person,’ he explained, ‘the line would reach from the coast of Maine to California.’ The unemployed were not only former assembly-line workers—they were secretaries, accountants, and cashiers, among other professions, too.”