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There's nothing like a good horror movie to draw a crowd. Just ask Donald Trump, who won the U.S. presidency by insisting that the economy was imploding and murder rates were soaring. Or Nigel Farage, the Brexit leader who managed to convince millions of voters that foreign immigrants were somehow poisoning British prosperity. In both cases, all the evidence said precisely the opposite. But facts didn't matter one bit.

Bleak, misleading scenarios have somehow gained magical powers over voters' minds. After all, nothing cuts through media clutter like a clearly enunciated danger — and politicians, public policy experts and academics have learned how to play the scare-the-rube game to their advantage. It's time the rest of us learned how to push back. We should start by booing two popular scare stories off the stage.

The first is the one that depicts aging workers living like vampires off a shrinking work force, in a geriatric version of Shaun of the Dead. You've probably encountered the sinister-sounding math, which shows that Canada had six workers to every retiree in 1971 but will have only two workers per retiree by 2056. Many observers, including the Centre for the Study of Living Standards in Ottawa, have warned this means an inevitable slowdown in economic growth. Ottawa's economic advisory council, a blue-ribbon panel of top executives, has urged huge increases in immigration as well as higher retirement ages to offset the demographic drag.

As dispiriting as all that sounds, the second scare story is even worse. It has to do with the growing impact of robots. Moshe Vardi, a professor of computational engineering at Rice University in Houston, is among those who predict that smarter machines equipped with artificial intelligence will wipe out many middle-class jobs in the years ahead. He projects unemployment rates greater than 50% within a generation. Bill Gates thinks governments should levy a tax on automation to help fund the armies of workers who will be displaced by uppity robots.

It all sounds very bad indeed. But before you surrender to the prevailing despair, think a bit more about these two looming apocalypses. You may notice something strange.

Yes, you can worry about our aging population. Alternatively, you can fret that robots will grab most of our jobs. But, oddly enough, you can't agonize over both problems simultaneously. If everything proceeds according to the experts' forecasts, the aging of Canada's population will result in fewer potential workers—but that won't matter a damn, because robots will already be performing all the routine chores anyway.

At moments like this, we should all remember that unjustly overlooked genius, Alfred E. Neuman. You may recall him as the grinning, jug-eared teenager on the cover of Mad magazine. "What, me worry?" was his motto. The kid had a point. Maybe, just maybe, we should all chill.

A good place to start is by easing back on the demographic doom and gloom. Senior executives may fret that the supply of prime-age workers isn't growing as rapidly as it once was, but a tighter labour market carries some rather pleasant consequences for you and me. It implies a shift in the power balance between employers and employees. All else being equal, businesses will have to shell out more money to attract the people they need.

For Canada's middle class, this shift will be more than welcome. Wages will rise as employers compete to attract the best young talent. Schedules will become more flexible in order to convince older workers to stay on the job longer. For most of us, these changes will be reason for a big Neuman-style grin.

And the good news doesn't stop there. Despite the slowdown in the growth of the domestic workforce, most seniors won't be compelled to live on cat food. They'll be fine, because the bulk of retirees' incomes is derived from savings accumulated during their working lives, not from direct transfers from current workers. Private investors, as well as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, are free to invest those savings outside Canada, in countries with substantially younger demographics. As a result, there's no reason to think that Canada's aging population will impose any ceiling at all on retirees' incomes.

So let's agree that an aging population isn't quite the threat it's cracked up to be. But how about those job-stealing robots?

This seems an even loonier obsession. One of the more disappointing economic trends in recent years has been a persistent decline in productivity—the amount of value an average worker can generate. This hurts all of us, because the only way to create a better standard of living for everyone is to boost our collective productivity. Given that, why would anyone object to an invasion of productivity-enhancing robots?

To be sure, technology can erase specific jobs. But advances in auto-mation have always left us even more prosperous on the whole. David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that 41% of the U.S. workforce was employed in farming in 1900. A century later, thanks to productivity-boosting machinery, farm jobs had dwindled to only 2% of the labour market. Yet that enormous shift occurred without any resulting widespread unemployment.

Technology designed to be a job replacer often turns out to be a job creator. Despite the introduction of automated banking machines, the number of human bank tellers in the United States actually rose between 1980 and 2010. Employment increased because the new machines allowed human tellers to concentrate on more lucrative roles, like selling bank services, rather than on the mundane tasks now performed by the ABMs, Autor says.

He argues that we may be worrying about the wrong problem. If robots do replace large numbers of humans and spur huge gains in productivity, the question becomes how we choose to distribute the resulting abundance. Of course, compared with previous centuries, when scarcity was the dominant issue, abundance is a very nice problem to have. As the immortal Neuman might say: What, us worry?

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