Knowing the ideological predisposition of a particular economist is often a better predictor of what that individual is likely to say than anything contained in the data under examination.

Nearly 90 percent of fast food workers are twenty or older, and the average age is thirty-five.17 Many of these older workers have to support families – a nearly impossible task at a median wage of just $8.69 per hour.

Growth in median incomes during this period tracked nearly perfectly with per capita GDP. Three decades later, median household income had increased to about $61,000, an increase of just 22 percent. That growth, however, was driven largely by the entry of women into the workforce. If incomes had moved in lockstep with economic growth – as was the case prior to 1973 – the median household would today be earning well in excess of $90,000, over 50 percent more than the $61,000 they do earn.

In 2012, Google, for example, generated a profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.9 Contrast that with the automotive industry. At peak employment in 1979, General Motors alone had nearly 840,000 workers but earned only about $11 billion – 20 percent less than what Google raked in. And, yes, that’s after adjusting for inflation.

In Japan, a new machine is able to select ripe strawberries based on subtle color variations and then pick a strawberry every eight seconds – working continuously and doing most of the work at night.

The nearly perfect historical correlation between increasing productivity and rising incomes broke down: wages for most Americans stagnated and, for many workers, even declined; income inequality soared to levels not seen since the eve of the 1929 stock market crash; and a new phrase – “jobless recovery” – found a prominent place in our vocabulary.

Vision Robotics, a company based in San Diego, California, is developing an octopus-like orange harvesting machine. The robot will use three-dimensional machine vision to make a computer model of an entire orange tree and then store the location of each fruit. That information will then be passed on to the machine’s eight robotic arms, which will rapidly harvest the oranges.

We eventually will have to move away from the idea that workers support retirees and pay for social programs, and instead adopt the premise that our overall economy supports these things. Economic growth, after all, has significantly outpaced the rate at which new jobs have been created and wages have been rising.

In this, there is a strong cautionary note as we look to the future: as IT continues its relentless progress, we can be certain that financial innovators, in the absence of regulations that constrain them, will find ways to leverage all those new capabilities – and, if history is any guide, it won’t necessarily be in ways that benefit society as a whole.

In 2011, big companies generated an average of $420,000 in revenue for each employee, an increase of more than 11 percent over the 2007 figure of $378,000.