All this talk about permanent unemployment in the United States is making people nervous. You can read about it in recent issues of The Economist, The New York Times, and in the book The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The arguments are familiar. Advanced forms of automation now making their way into the workplace will put an end to America’s enviable record of job creation. Today’s sluggish job growth, the argument goes, is not an aftershock of the Great Recession, it is a window into the future. The United States will create jobs with all the dynamism of a parked car.