Will technology make things worse?

Emerging markets (EMs) have gained at the expense of advanced economies (AEs) because of globalisation, wrote Abheek Barua because of "the death of low skilled but employment rich sectors like textile and the support economies that grew round it". Economists Dorn and Hanson "estimate that competition from China caused direct manufacturing job losses of 1.5 million between 1999 and 2007" in the US. Technological change has created a "college premium" between "skilled white collar earnings and blue collar earnings" so that the share of wages to GDP "has dropped by a good 5% from 2000 to 2017". "Middle class families are seeing their incomes stagnating as they are squeezed by the ultra-rich taking a bigger slice, says an international report from the OECD economics think tank." Increasing inequality has given rise to "new forms of nationalism, isolationism, populism and protectionism". Before the Industrial Revolution, "Income gaps between Europe and poorer parts of the world were small," wrote Prof D Rodrik. "But as the West developed in the nineteenth century, the world economy underwent a 'great divergence'." This was largely due to colonialism when the colonial powers freely looted conquered people. Economist Utsa Patnaik has calculated that the British looted $45 trillion from India alone. The US became rich on slave labor. "In 60 years, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved person increased 400 percent." "The ownership of enslaved people increased wealth for Southern planters so much that by the dawn of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region." At that time women were not allowed to own property or business but white women could own slaves whom the could buy and sell. Since 1980s EMs, led by China, began to grow faster than rich countries. "For the first time in history, the typical developing-country resident was getting richer at a faster pace than his or her counterparts in Europe and North America," wrote Rodrik.  Giving rise to populism in the West. "Even during the Industrial Revolution, in the 19th century, the world economy rarely grew faster than 2.5% a year," wrote Ruchir Sharma. It was the baby boom after World War II that lifted global growth to 4% through a combination of "more workers and more output per worker". With fertility rates dropping growth is never going to reach such levels. No wonder, people like Prof Thomas Piketty are advocating an end to capitalism and redistribution of wealth. That is what is advocated by communism. We thought that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had buried that ism forever. What happens when technology makes more people redundant?