> 2. On the other hand, there are signs of technological underemployment – robots taking middle-skill jobs and then pushing people into other jobs. Although some people will be “pushed” into higher-skill jobs, many will be pushed into lower-skill jobs. This seems to be what happened to the manufacturing industry recently. (70% confidence)

There's a couple research papers from the NBER that I think show this has been happening since the early 90's.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18334.pdf

The graphs of for the jobless recoveries are particularly telling. One thing the authors suggest is that before the 90's after a recession we recovered the jobs that were lost due to the slowdown, but after the 90's companies could outsource or automate during the recession to deal with the economic pressures, so when the economy recovered those jobs weren't around to come back to.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18901.pdf
From the conclusion

> In particular, we have argued that after two decades of growth in the demand for occupations high in cognitive tasks, the US economy reversed and experienced a decline in the demand for such skills. The demand for cognitive tasks was to a large extent the motor of the US labor market prior to 2000. Once this motor reversed, the employment rate in the US economy started to contract. As we have emphasized, while this demand for cognitive tasks directly effects mainly high skilled workers, we have provided evidence that it has indirectly affected lower skill workers by pushing them out of jobs that have been taken up by higher skilled worker displaced from cognitive occupations. This has resulted in high growth in employment in low skilled manual jobs with declining wages in those occupations, and has pushed many low skill individual's out of the labor market.

Moreover, the early 90's are about the same time we see a rise in disability benefits, especially for children. There's a big increase that starts in the early 90's. Some of this is probably from the welfare reform that happened around that time, but http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ has some pretty interesting insights and that was written in 2011. They end the article with

> Somewhere around 30 years ago, the economy started changing in some fundamental ways. There are now millions of Americans who do not have the skills or education to make it in this country.

And as you mentioned, we don't have any programs to bridge that gap between low and high skilled jobs. It used to be that you could work your way up, training on the job and gaining new skills. Instead we turn to formal training or education, but those have capital costs that create a barrier of entry into the higher paid labor market. If you're already working one or more low income jobs then it's not just the monetary but also the time capital required to retrain. Either you spend most of your time working and training/studying or you take the opportunity cost of quitting your job in the hopes of improving your skills to find a new one. It seems many are taking a third route of going to a doctor and getting on disability benefits, and while I can't find it I read an article a while ago where one of the doctors straight up said that they include education in the decision, seeing some people as unemployable with their level of education. I think doctors making that judgement call is it's own discussion, but just furthers the point.

Then you've got companies like Dollar General betting on America having a "permanent underclass", their own words: https://www.google.com/search?q=dollar+general+permanent+und...

I think we're only just realizing this now, but I pretty much agree with your sentiment that we're not ready to handle this. Even if we could fix the issues with cheap foreign and domestic labor that's not going to stop automation and IMO we're already in the post-automation future, just with globalization providing a similar effect.

> might eventually be willing to subsidize something like a universal basic income.

I'm kinda interested if there's any studies that use disability benefits as a kind of natural experiment for basic income since in a way it's already a form of UBI. There's some obvious differences, but one of the assumptions of SSDI is that you're incapable of working and that's similar to one of the criticisms of UBI that it would incentivize people not to work, which could have negative social consequences. I'm sure there's something we could learn from looking at people on disability benefits about that.