This throwaway paragraph from this week’s Economist struck me as something substantial that I haven’t seen discussed much:

“Last year Amazon had a 40% share of American e-commerce and 6% of all retail sales. There is little evidence that it kills jobs. Studies of the “Amazon effect” suggest that new warehouse and delivery jobs offset the decline in shop assistants, and the firm’s minimum hourly wage of $15 in America is above the median for the retail trade.”

Do you see it?

Let’s be very clear here - working in a shop and working in a warehouse are not the same job. They are roughly the opposite job. If you work in a shop, you interface with people all day long. If you work in a warehouse, you interface with a computer all day long (and these days it tells you what to do). I have done both of these jobs (a few shops and short fork in a liquor distributor) and I can assure you the same people (except me, apparently) do not work in both of these places.

My major problem with a lot of economic analysis and a lot of data science is that it looks at everything in the aggregate without zooming in on individual experiences. I'm not sure that we should be surprised when someone who is told that their job in the local shop is gone but they’re welcome to go work in a warehouse is pissed. I would be.