I'm congenitally suspicious of "this time is different" arguments, which often seem very quick to toss out historical experience for the sake of a lively narrative. So when I find myself in discussions of whether the present wave of technological change is unprecedented or unique, I often end up making the argument that while the new technologies are obviously different in their specifics from older technologies, the fact of technology leading to very dramatic disruptions of labor markets is not at all new. To me, the more interesting questions are question how the economy, government, and society react to that ongoing pattern of technological change.
The Gallup Poll has been asking Americans since the 1950s whether they think that the income tax they pay is "too high" or "about right." The figure shows the responses over time including the 2019 poll, taken in early April. (The "don't know" and the "too low" answers are both quite small, and are not shown on the figure.)
For anyone who can do arithmetic, it did not come as a surprise that the "baby boom generation," born from 1946 up through the early 1960s, started turning 65 in 2010. Here's the pattern over time of the "Daily Average Number of People Turning 65." The jump of the boomer generation is marked.
A substantial amount of the discussion of international trade issues starts from the premise that the United States has huge trade deficits and China has huge trade surpluses. But what if only half of that premise is true? Here are a couple of tables on trade balances that I've clipped out of the IMF's World Economic Outlook for April 2019. One shows national trade deficits and surpluses in dollars; the other shows them as a share of the nation's GDP. Of course, the 2019 figures are projections.
Every intro statistics class teaches "correlation is not causation"--that is, because two patterns consistently move together (or consistently opposite), you can't jump to a conclusion that A causes B, B causes A, some alternative factor C is affecting both A and B, or that among all the millions of possible patterns you can put side-by-side, maybe the correlation between this specific A and B is just a fluky coincidence.
Since 1978, China's share of world population has declined mildly from 23% to about 19%. In those same 40 yeas, China's share of world GDP has risen dramatically from 3% to about 20%. Here's China's share of world population and the global economy since the start of its economic reforms.
Daniel Kahneman (Nobel 2002) is of course known for his extensive work on behavioral biases and how they affect economic decisions. He's now working on a new book, together with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, in which he focuses instead on the concept of "noise".