When a company buys a 2x faster copy machine, they don&#x27;t double the salary of the human operator.  If a department is able to lay off half its staff thanks to automation, they don&#x27;t double the salaries of the remaining staff.<p>There&#x27;s little in the way of forces that push wages up.  Unions, basically, acting on the idea that rich companies should share the wealth.  The market value of a human butt-in-chair operator remains low.  Unskilled labor is a commodity, and it can be found increasingly cheaply on the global market.<p>Keynes died before the first computer was invented.  Probably his concepts of &quot;technological innovation&quot; and &quot;worker productivity&quot; do not apply today.