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Beyond the soaring rhetoric, the leader of the free world is clearly a man who is not only conscious of the structural shifts in his own economy and its workplaces, but is deeply troubled by its implications. That worry, in a word, is jobs. The recovery isn't helping much with hiring because start-ups are going for a higher level of computerisation and automation. Last Thursday, the US Labour Department's latest figures offered more evidence that while companies were not firing workers, they were in no hurry to add to their headcounts. Indeed, the jobless rate rose 0.1 percentage point to 7.9 per cent last month. In the last 10 years, the US economy has seen no net job creation, the first decade since the depths of the Great Depression that this has happened. Ordinarily, we could...