What's the problem exactly? Job growth has been stagnant for 5 years?<p>Productivity is the ratio of units of output per unit of input, where you can abstract input as being either capital or labor. Indeed, productivity continues to grow as a consequence of technological advances. When mankind started using oxes to plough fields, landworkers' productivity rose significantly. As we develop more tools to aid us in daily tasks, less labor - and sometimes even less capital - is required to perform those tasks.<p>During the relatively prosperous past decades, organizations have grown heavy, and were able to do so because of a continuously rising product demand. People started over-working and over-consuming. Then there was an external shock, media started talking about a financial crisis, people started being more considerate of their consumption in the face of job insecurity, and businesses that grew too heavy needed to get back into shape. This is a process that has significant feedback effects. The process of business getting back into shape means the cutting non-contributing jobs (think of excess layers of management), which by itself causes a growth in productivity. In this sense, employment growth and productivity growth can be negatively correlated, and it is not necessarily "technological advances" that drive productivity growth.<p>Telling us that technology is destroying our jobs is the same as telling us that China is stealing our jobs, though they may affect different industries (I don't see Chinese laborers replacing our butchers.) The thing is that the working population is very flexible, and despite offshoring certain jobs the average American still works over 50 hours a week. Population growth hasn't justified job growth in the US for the past 40 years, so perhaps a stagnant job growth is a good thing in that it draws things back to "normality".