Sami Mahroum and Elif Bascavusoglu Moreau write:  Ever since the industrial revolution, humans have been ambivalent about technological progress. While new technology has been a major source of liberation, progress, and prosperity, it has also fueled ear that it will render labor redundant.

So far, experience has seemed to discredit this fear. Indeed, by boosting productivity and underpinning the emergence of new industries, technological progress has historically fueled economic growth and net job creation. New innovations accelerated – rather than disrupted – this positive cycle.

But some are claiming that the cycle is now broken, especially in technologically savvy countries like the United States.

But are we really in the throes of a Frankenstein’s dilemma, in which our own creations come back to haunt us? Or can we beat the productivity paradox by harnessing the power of machines to support development in ways that benefit more than the bottom line?

There is good reason to be optimistic. Many countries – even technologically savvy ones – can still benefit from the self-reinforcing cycle of technological advancement, rising productivity, and employment growth. Luxembourg, Norway, and the Netherlands – three innovative and capital-intensive economies that regularly appear in the upper quartile of productivity per hour and employment, according to OECD data from 2001-2013 – are prime examples.

Cynics will suspect that Luxembourg and Norway have managed to sustain this dynamic only because of their peculiar economic structures in finance and natural  resroucces.

The Netherlands has been a champion of innovation, gaining a fifth-place ranking in the recent INSEAD Global Innovation Index. A striking 85% of large Dutch firms report innovative activities, while more than 50% of all firms are “innovation active.” Dutch firms are also world patent leaders; Eindhoven, the hometown of the electronics company Philips, is the world’s most patent-intensive city.

So what is the Dutch secret for ensuring that technological progress benefits all?

The Netherlands seems to be undergoing a sort of industrial revolution in reverse, with jobs moving from factories to homes. The Dutch labor market has the highest concentration of part-time and freelance workers in Europe, with nearly 50% of all Dutch workers, and 62% of young workers, engaged in part-time employment – a luxury afforded to them by the country’s relatively high hourly wages.

Many young Dutch work part-time as schoolteachers. But a more lucrative – and common – source of part-time employment in the Netherlands is the subcontracting of “white collar” services. Highly skilled or specialized workers sell their services to a wide range of businesses, supplementing the work of machines with human value-added activity.

Another key to the Netherlands’ success is entrepreneurship. In 1990-2010, self-employment rates fell across the OECD countries, with business ownership in the US, for example, having declined rapidly since 2002. In the Netherlands, however, business ownership has grown steadily since 1992, reaching 12% of the labor force in 2012. Almost 70% of Dutch business owners were exclusively self-employed in 2008.

Rates of business ownership and self-employment are also high in low-income countries like Mexico. But the Netherlands is much wealthier, and boasts high levels of per-hour productivity, employment, and participation – largely owing to its flexible and adaptive labor market.

In short, the Netherlands has restructured its economic value chain to accommodate a new division of labor between humans and machines.

Machines may be reaching new heights of intelligence, but they are no match for human resourcefulness, imagination, and interaction. This is a lesson that countries would do well to learn from the Dutch.

When times are tough in Germany, Berlin staves off unemployment by paying for private jobs with government subsidies.

Should the US look to comparable foreign economies for examples of how to create and keep jobs. Berlin’s model for dealing with job retention during downturns is one the US might explore.

Instead of an unemployment system, they have a wage subsidy system so you don’t let people go in the first place. Germany’s “Kurzarbeit,” or short-work, policy, one that Germans are enthusiastically proud of. It allows companies to reduce workers’ hours with the government picking up the tab for the lost time.

U.S. officials have run into trouble in the past by suggesting European solutions to America’s problems.

Germany’s policies would be difficult to replicate in the United States, said American Enterprise Institute scholar Desmond Lachman. The German workforce is highly unionized, he said, making it easier for workers to get concessions from the central government when times are tough.

Lachman also said the German policy does little to create new jobs, and widens the gap between top earners and those at the bottom who don’t get salary increases when Berlin steps in with subsidies.  But this is not job creation.  It keeps unemployment down, perhaps increasing the number of people at the bottom.

During the Great Recession, the German labor market proved especially resilient. In 2010, when the United States and the rest of the world were losing jobs, Germany actually added them because companies there took advantage of the government program.

According to a survey for the Munich-based research group Ifo Institute, in the first quarter of 2010 — the depths of the European sovereign debt crisis — 39 percent of German manufacturers were using Kurzarbeit, allowing them to hold onto skilled labor at a time when many firms around the globe were shedding jobs.

Many on the right and left, including President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, have mentioned the Kurzarbeit concept as something the United States should consider. And evidence from Germany, Europe’s strongest economy, shows that it stops companies from cutting jobs.