Economic observers are wondering whether rising wage inequality in our era and falling workforce participation may owe something to the uniquely widespread effects of information. David Neumark at the University of California, Irvine, wrote that they “focus on automation as it has been one of the dominant forces that has threatened low-skilled jobs in the United States in recent decades … . Minimum wages can exacerbate these changes, when they raise the price of low-skilled labor in automatable jobs, for which machines can be substituted.”

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