24
Feb
Which choice most logically completes the text?
Some economists have attributed the increasing adoption of automation technology by firms in the United States in part to the productivity gains firms can achieve by automating tasks previously requiring paid labor. Daron Acemoglu et al. recently complicated this account by showing not only that automation’s productivity gains are often unremarkable but that there is a disparity in the US tax code between automation technology and the labor it is nominally equivalent to: the tax code classifies automation-related technology as a depreciating asset, meaning that capital expenditures on that technology can reduce a firm’s tax burden relative to its tax burden if equivalent expenditures were labor costs. Together, these findings suggest that ______.
