[...] warehouses are potentially a source of vast amounts of employment for less-skilled Indians (of which there are hundreds of millions). Yet the falling cost of simple robotics and the increasing power of computing means that many of those jobs may never be created. Instead a very small number of highly skilled Indian programmers may earn a good living writing code to control the robots who travel the great aisles within these warehouses, moving around goods shipments that might otherwise have been handled by human workers.

[...] Advanced economies cannot turn poor countries into rich ones, and we lack a foolproof recipe for poor countries seeking to make themselves rich. What can be achieved and has reliably been achieved, is the process of helping residents of poor countries to become rich by welcoming them into places with strong social capital.

Mass immigration has always been the obvious, pie-in-the-sky solution to wide gaps in incomes across countries. [...]

Secular stagnation slowly undermines support for the existing economic order, and while it is possible that governments will eventually settle on benign solutions to the problem, it is more likely that prolonged secular stagnation will lead to a broad backlash against global economic integration, and a costly turn inward.

We might not care so much about these inequities if the digital revolution were reducing the costs of all the many things the typical household wants to buy, from steak dinners to adequate housing to a top-flight university education. But cost reductions have so far been highly uneven: massive for some things, such as digital entertainment; completely absent for others, such as homes in nice neighbourhoods.

And so stagnant wages end up mattering an awful lot. Low pay for the great mass of workers is distributionally unfair. It undermines support for the market-based economic system that enables sustained economic growth. Low pay also reduces the incentive to invest in technologies that boost the productivities of less-skilled workers, or which substitute [...] it is an enormous problem; continued productivity growth is ultimately the route to lives of greater comfort for all of humanity: it is how humanity contrives to produce more from less, so that all can have more.

[...] Many of the world's richest cities are choked by inadequate infrastructure. Given rock-bottom interest rates, it seems absurd that places like New York, London and San Francisco aren't receiving extraordinary new investments in that infrastructure [...]

The rich world could shepherd the global economy towards that ideal outcome by allowing lots more immigration from poorer places. Immigration would enable richer places to 'export' their strong social capital to poorer places (by bringing large shares of the populations of poorer places into countries where strong social capital dominates). That would naturally deepen social and financial capital per human worker. Global savings could also be mobilized to invest in additional infrastructure in the rich countries accepting new workers. The appetite for safe, rich-country government debt is nearly insatiable.

[...] In labour organizers' dreams, that cooperation becomes a class consciousness--a solidarity--which would provided a coherence to a labour political agenda. [...]

[...] it is easy for all the participants in the economy to convince themselves that their participation is what matters, that they are the authentic creators of value, that their effort is what ought to be rewarded most handsomely. And everyone has a point. But while we can rely on economics to do some of the work of sorting out who deserves what, we are kidding ourselves if we think the invisible hand can be trusted to handle the whole job. Left alone, the invisible hand is simply the thudding fist of the powerful. [...]

[...] The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn't rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

That is not a radical statement. People take what they can take, and it is only the interplay of countervailing forces and the tolerance of the masses that limits that impulse--that works to create institutions that limit that impulse.

[...] People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can them capture for himself.

[...] Is there any reasonable story available which explains how it is that poverty in developing countries, or in the ghettos of disadvantage in rich countries, is a necessary part of the system that provides us with smartphones and luxury cars and enriches a relative handful of executives and financiers? Is it really the case that one can't be got rid of without threatening the system that provides for us the other?

Of course not. The worst inequities of industrial history were never a necessary accompaniment to the march towards greater prosperity. [...]