Not in every case. You can look at workers in the Rust Belt. Their well paying jobs with benefits were "replaced" and new jobs never came, unless you think working at Walmart for close to minimum wage is one of those new jobs.
Even when, say, manufacturers come back and produce domestically, they've reduced what used to be a 1,000+ person job to one that requires 40 engineers and a handful of maintenance people. It's not like any of those factory workers who were laid off in the past were later rehired as engineers, either.
It isn't "society" that's absorbed absorbed increased worker productivity, but employers and those who own the automation. Worker productivity in the US increased dramatically over the last 20 years, and even more over the last 40. Despite that, worker compensation hasn't increased, and has roughly remained the same over those same 40 years[1].
And the old coal mining towns in Northern England (and South Wales).
With wages the minimum wage in 1980 was $3.10, while the last increase from 2009 rose from $6.55 to $7.25 per hour
What society has "absorbed" is an expectation that stock markets will continue rising at a pace that significantly outstrips inflation and (related) wage increases. Pension funds and individual retirement savings (401k, RRSP) heavily rely on employers pocketing the bulk of productivity increases for themselves and continuing to exploit labour. It'd be interesting to see the chaos that would arise if governments decided at some point that workers should get an equal share of that.
Yes it has. Food is way cheaper now. Clothes are way cheaper. Transportation is way cheaper. Housing is way better (and cheaper if you want what passed for housing in the 40s).
It's important because wealth is essentially power, so concentration of wealth inevitably changes the balance of power in society. And that in turn creates a feedback loop where the wealth and powerful can undermine thelaws and regulations intended to keep the distribution of wealth and power from becoming too lopsided.
This is why I view the current everything-as-a-service model that takes things people used to own and turns them into things people rent pretty skeptically.
Really I think it’s a balancing act. Since we can’t just get rid of the concept of power, we try to regulate its use. This is pretty difficult.
It’s why these wage debates get so heated - they threaten the core social power of people.
And it absolutely is a feedback loop. Something about absolute power corrupting absolutely.
People have been saying it for far longer than 50 years:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
The trouble is, both sides of the argument are correct. When disruption occurs, many people are badly disadvantaged even if society as a whole moves forward. It would be best to find ways to reduce the impact on the affected people without holding up automation and other improvements which have been shown to be beneficial to productivity in the long term.
People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago. A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity (cheaper goods, foods, and much more complex high end goods (iPhone, airplanes, etc).