Productivity advances are not being made in booming new industries; they are being made by laying people off or moving production to low-cost countries in Asia. One way or another, falling workforces in the west are producing broadly the same output.

Nor is the internet a great job generator. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and eBay may be changing the way we read and communicate – but in the US they have created fewer than 100,000 direct jobs. This, argues Cowen, is what lies behind America’s increasingly jobless recoveries and the squeeze on the incomes of its middle-class workers.

Our scientists and technologists have not been able to create inventions that can be industrialised at the same pace as they once did.