Glad to see people recognizing that when strong labor markets boost wages, this does not have to mean higher prices. Higher wages can equally well be passed on to faster productivity growth. wsj.com/articles/techn…
What's strange, tho, is how people insist on seeing faster wage growth --> faster productivity growth as a *problem*. 
As a matter of logic, if you are concerned either that rising wages will lead to inflation, or that lack of labor is holding back growth, evidence that employers respond to rising wages by taking steps to raise productivity should make you less worried.
If you are worried about low productivity growth - and isn't that something we are often told to worry about? - then stories about employers substituting away from scarce labor should make you see labor supply constraints as a positive good. But somehow nobody does.
Think about the argument here. On the one hand, it's "supply, not demand" that is holding back growth. but on the other hand, faster productivity growth is also supposed to be holding back job growth. It's impossible for both of those things to be true.
If employers are hiring all the labor they can get, learning to make more stuff with that labor won't reduce hiring. If they are hiring only the workers they need to meet demand, then yes productivity growth can reduce jobs - but in that case it's not supply holding back growth.
People (and I don't think it's @greg_ip who's the problem here so much as the people he's asking to) tie themselves in knots because they want cuts to UI and "labor supply" generally to be the answer, even when the facts are 180 degrees from the ones used to support that before.
To put it another way, our big macroeconomic problem cannot simultaneously be too many jobs for the available workers, and too many workers for the available jobs.
If you are worried about jobs recovery being too slow, the answer is more demand, same as it ever was. Cutting unemployment benefits is only going to make it worse. If, on the other hand, you are worried about overheating, slower job growth is just what you should be hoping for.
What this article seems to be trying to do is somehow make the fact that this is a very good jobs market for "unskilled" workers, into an argument that those workers should accept wage cuts for their own good. But you can't square that circle.
(Scare quotes for a reason.)
(Scare quotes for a reason.)
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