What you need to tell the worker is not that they need to give up their livelihood, but that they need to retrain. Still painful, but much less. Also, there are ways to reduce and relieve the pain of retraining. And who knows for many people acquiring new skills and contacts may even turn out to be exciting and fun.
We need a politician with the guts to openly explain to the public that retraining is a necessity instead of fostering delusions that the old jobs can be kept. In fact, the progress in the development of self-driving cars combined with the fact that the most common job in most states is a truck driver [1] make this something of an emergency.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
The number of niches in the economy are not expanding.
When the average worker gets laid off, he or she stays laid off.
We could sprinkle the market with PhDs and it would solve nothing. The underlying issue is much more structural than the NYT wants to admit.
There's lots of examples of people losing jobs. That's sad for the individual, but long term it's generally good for the country. It'd be easy to say no to those forms of progress that hurt workers, but it'd be the wrong decision in the long run.
No-one said making the right choice has to be victimless, or that the wrong one has to be hard.