Robots and automation will destroy American jobs — it’s a worrying refrain we hear echoed by prominent figures in academia, the private sector, and the media alike. The Brookings Institution, the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, labor leader Andy Stern and, most recently, CNN, all have issued serious, well-researched reports and written books saying so. Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Carnegie Mellon University scholar Vivek Wadhwa goes even further, predicting that thanks to automation, unemployment will top 70% within the next century.

Thanks to these reports, policymakers across the political spectrum have called for a vast array of solutions to deal with a radically different future of work. A look at the facts, however, shows a very different reality: Jobs are not currently disappearing due to automation in a way that throws people out of work — and haven’t done so historically. In fact, a major problem facing the American economy is not too much job displacement, but too little.