The focus on the urgent need for a recovery in investment and productivity as a necessary precondition of a recovery in UK economic growth, which is shared by Martin Wolf (in his article ‘Muddling through won’t deliver growth’, Opinion, November 6) and Lord Stern and Dimitri Zenghelis in their letter (‘Resolve savings problem and growth will follow’, November 6), may need revision.

It was not the increases in investment and productivity themselves which were the key factors in generating the great, revolutionary and socially-beneficial advances in economic growth in the UK (and, of course, other developed economies) over the last 200 years but their financial consequence: the steady spread of income and wealth through employment.

It is this hitherto reliable nexus between investment and employment which automation, robotics, IT and now artificial intelligence (with its impact on professional services like the law and medicine) is effectively dismantling and pushing towards its natural limit. 

Statistics confirm the steady increase in income inequality over the last 50 years and the increasingly divergent returns to capital and to labour and it is not difficult to see this fundamental economic and social shift as a major factor in the recent elections in the UK, the US and elsewhere.

Giles Conway-Gordon