Retain the Routine

Matias Cortes, Nir Jaimovich, Christopher J. Nekarda and Henry Siu are very cautious about what to do, what to do, about this;

The share of employment in middle-wage jobs has declined, while employment in high- and low-wage jobs has increased. In the US, this ‘hollowing out of the middle’ has been linked to declining per-capita employment in occupations with a high content of routine tasks – activities that can be performed by following a well-defined set of procedures and are therefore relatively easy to automate....

 And will be automated, if politicians succeed in making it less costly to do so than to continue to employ humans for these tasks. So;

 To design appropriate policy responses, it is important to understand who the disappearance of routine employment is affecting the most, and how the process is playing out.

Though they have nothing to say about policies that have made the employment of people in these jobs to be too costly. Oh, say, compelling employers to purchase costly health insurance for them?  Funding for extended unemployment insurance and other payroll taxes? Just for a start, that is.