John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes

by Mark Skousen  · 22 Dec 2006  · 330pp  · 77,729 words

46 Chapter 3. Karl Marx Leads a Revolt Against Capitalism 64 Chapter 4. From Marx to Keynes: Scientific Economics Comes of Age 105 Chapter 5. John Maynard Keynes: Capitalism Faces Its Greatest Challenge 133 Chapter 6. A Turning Point in Twentieth-Century Economics 163 Chapter 7. Conclusion: Has Adam Smith Triumphed Over Marx

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felt disenfranchised by industrial capitalism and sought radical solutions to inequality, alienation, and exploitation of the underprivileged. Finally, in the twentieth century, the British economist John Maynard Keynes sought to stabilize a crisis-prone market system through activist fiscal and monetary government policies. The Pendulum and the Totem Pole The stories and ideas

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a pendulum-like swing between the two extremes, eventually coming to rest in the middle. Consequently, the moderate, middle-of-the-road position held by John Maynard Keynes appears to be the more balanced and ideal. But is his system the way to achieve growth and prosperity? Or is the middle of the

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George Stigler called the "crown jewel" of economics, the "most important substantive proposition in all of economics" (Stigler 1976, 1201). Next on the list is John Maynard Keynes. Despite substantial criticism of the Keynesian model, it continues to endure as a macroeconomic model in institutional analysis and policy matters. As a defender of

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from a recession? Will eliminating tariffs between two countries increase trade and jobs between them? Will decontrol-ling oil prices eliminate the energy crisis? Will technological unemployment in one industry lead to new employment in another? Will a competitive environment eventually break down monopolistic power in a particular market? Individuals have differing

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, the Society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved." Clearly, under Mandeville's infamous paradox, self-interest results in social benefit. Both Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes have written approvingly of Mandeville's fable. According to Hayek, Adam Smith gained insights into the division of labor, self-interest, economic liberty, and the

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1997, 71).11 As pointed out in this chapter, Smith endorsed this progressive view of commercial society. In the French edition of The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes rated Montesquieu as France's greatest economist, primarily due to his embryonic liquidity-preference theory of interest, his opposition to hoarding, and his advocacy of

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. Samuel Johnson, "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money" (Boswell 1933, I, 657). It was John Maynard Keynes who wrote, "It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens" (Keynes 1973a [1936], 374). Today we

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100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, by Martin Seymour-Smith (1998), seven economists are listed: Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich von Hayek . . . and Karl Marx. The Living Marx: A Dismal Failure Engels would have to wait until the twentieth century before Marx's influence

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economist, went to the London School of Economics for graduate work, became an ardent Hayekian, then briefly fell under the spell of Harold Laski and John Maynard Keynes, and finally converted to Marxism! From then on, the debonair Sweezy made every effort to make Marxism respectable on college campuses. Returning to Harvard as

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M E N T I N T E R E S T A N D M O N E Y JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES MACMILLAN AND CO.. LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET. LONDON 1936 John Maynard Keynes ( 1 8 8 3 - 1 9 4 6 ) , B r i t i s h e c o n o

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the last quarter of the nineteenth century. —MarkBlaug (in Black, Coats, and Goodwin 1973) The period between Karl Marx and the next big-three economist, John Maynard Keynes, witnessed a gigantic leap in economics as a powerful new engine of analysis that achieved unparalleled success among the social sciences. In the previous chapter

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Marshall accomplish? Unlike Jevons, Marshall founded his own school, the so-called British or Cambridge school, with student prodigies such as A.C. Piguo and John Maynard Keynes. He was a synthesizer, combining the classical economics of cost (supply) and the marginalist economics of utility (demand). He often compared supply and demand to

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theory of macroeconomics and a vigorous policy for curing the depression—a new model that excited the minds of a whole new generation of economists. John Maynard Keynes Capitalism Faces Its Greatest Challenge A thousand years hence 1920-1970 will, I expect, be the time for historians. It drives me wild to think

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way to preserve economic liberty without the government taking over the whole economy and destroying the foundations of Western civilization. It was the voice of John Maynard Keynes, leader of the new Cambridge school. In his revolutionary 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes preached that capitalism is inherently

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like him" (1992, 537). Keynes Born Amid Britain's Ruling Elite What kind of man was Keynes, who could engender such devotion and such hostility? John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was an intellectual elitist from his earliest childhood. When asked once how to pronounce his name, he replied, "Keynes, as in brains." Born

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wishful thinking, but Mises could not have misread the times more egregiously in 1948. It was in that very year that the new economics of John Maynard Keynes was being hailed by Keynes's rapidly growing number of disciples as the wave of the future and the savior of capitalism. Literally hundreds of

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thrift, countercyclical fiscal policy, national income accounting, and C + I + G were all new topics introduced in the first edition of Economics in 1948. Only John Maynard Keynes was honored with a biographical sketch in early editions, and only Keynes, not Adam Smith or Karl Marx, was labeled "a many-sided genius" (Samuelson

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Friedman (1998) At the end of the twentieth century, the editors of Time magazine gathered around to choose the Economist of the Century. They chose John Maynard Keynes, who more than any other economist provided the theoretical underpinning of an active role for an enlarged welfare state during the post-Great Depression era

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worst depression of modern times. Once again, Adam Smith faced imminent demise. Marxists were in the wings waiting to take over when a new doctor, John Maynard Keynes, presented the world with new medicine, with which he proposed to save Adam Smith and restore him as the father of capitalism. But Keynes turned

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created. Today the neoclassical market framework is stronger than ever before, and its applications are ubiquitous. In 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote an optimistic essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." After lambasting his disciples who predicted never-ending depression and permanent stagnation, Keynes foresaw a bright

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, Francis. 2000. "Will Socialism Make a Comeback?" Time, May 22, 110-12. Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1975 [1965]. "How Keynes Came to America." In Essays on John Maynard Keynes, ed. Milo Keynes, 132-41. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Garrison, Roger B. 1985. "West's 'Cantillon and Adam Smith': A Comment." Journal of Libertarian

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on Theory and Public Policy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. . 1948. Saving American Capitalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Harrod, Roy. 1951. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Hart, Michael H. 1978. The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. New York: Hart. . 1992. The 100

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. New York: Simon and Schuster. Heilbroner, Robert, and Peter L. Bernstein. 1963. A Primer on Government Spending. New York: Random House. Hession, Charles H. 1984. John Maynard Keynes. New York: Macmillan. Hicks, John R. 1937. "Mr. Keynes and the 'Classics'; A Suggested Interpretation." Econometrica 5:2 (April), 147-59. Higgs, Robert. 2006. Depression

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York: W.W. Norton. . 1963 [1930]. Essays in Biography. New York: W.W. Norton. . 1971. Activities 1906-1914: India and Cambridge. The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes. Vol. 15. London: Macmillan. . 1973a [1936]. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. . 1973b. The General Theory and After, Part I, Preparation

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. The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes. Vol. 13, ed. by Donald Moggridge. London: Macmillan. Klamer, Arjo, and David Colander. 1990. The Making of an Economist. Boulder, CO: Westview. Knight, Frank H

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the Wealth of Nations." American Economic Review 76, 3 (June): 297-313. Moggridge, D.E. 1983. "Keynes as an Investor." In The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes, 1-113. Vol. 12. London: Macmillan. . 1992. Maynard Keynes. London: Routledge. Montesquieu, Charles. 1989 [ 1748]. The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller

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. The State of Humanity. Cambridge, UK: Blackwell. . 1996. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Skidelsky, Robert. 1992. John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937. London: Macmillan. . 2003. John Maynard Keynes: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. New York: Penguin Books. Skousen, Mark. 1990. The Structure of Production. New York: New York University Press. , ed

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond

by Daniel Susskind  · 14 Jan 2020  · 419pp  · 109,241 words

will create for us—both now and in the future—and, most important, set out how we might respond. It was John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist, who popularized the term “technological unemployment” almost fifty years before Leontief wrote down his worries, capturing in a pithy pairing of words the idea that new technologies

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from economic life today, to dismiss it as a fantastical idea plucked out of the ether by overly neurotic shock-haired economists. By exploring how technological unemployment might actually happen, we will see why that attitude is a mistake. It is not a coincidence that, today, worries about economic inequality are

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intensifying at the exact same time that anxiety about automation is growing. These two problems—inequality and technological unemployment—are very closely related. Today, the labor market is the main way that we share out economic prosperity in society: most people’s jobs are

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anxious. As time passed, economists also started to take the threat of automation seriously. As noted before, it was Keynes who would popularize the term “technological unemployment” in 1930. But David Ricardo, one of the founding fathers of economics, struggled with this issue more than a century before him. In 1817, Ricardo

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less easy to identify than its destructive cousin. Distinguishing clearly between the substituting and complementing effects of technology helps to explain why past anxieties about technological unemployment were repeatedly misplaced. In the clash between these two fundamental forces, our ancestors tended to pick the wrong winner. Time and again, they either neglected

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old saying, nothing in life can be said to be certain, except death, taxes—and this relentless process of task encroachment. 6 Frictional Technological Unemployment When John Maynard Keynes popularized the term “technological unemployment” about ninety years ago, he prophesied that we would “hear a great deal in the years to come” about it.1 Despite his

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clarity about the threat, however, and his prescience about the anxiety that would accompany it, he did not really explain how technological unemployment would happen. He

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would prove to be or simply ignoring that factor altogether. It also helps to explain why economists have traditionally been dismissive of the idea of technological unemployment: there appeared to be firm limits to the substituting force, leaving lots of tasks that could not be performed by machines, and a growing

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demand for human beings to do them instead. But economists’ dismissal of technological unemployment is misconceived. The pragmatist revolution has shown that those supposedly firm limits to the capabilities of machines are not so firm after all. The substituting

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of Labor, as we have since the Industrial Revolution began. The challenge for those of us who agree with Keynes, then, is to explain how technological unemployment might be possible, without neglecting—as people have done in the past—the helpful complementing force. WORK, OUT OF REACH Greek mythology tells of a

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representative, the evidence suggests that for now this hollowing out is likely to continue.7 And from it comes the first reason to expect frictional technological unemployment: the leap to the top is increasingly difficult to make. In the past, it was possible to ride successive waves of technological progress up

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decades to come, I imagine, he will be laughing at us, from the academy of economists in the sky. Like Keynes and his predictions about technological unemployment, Leontief may have misjudged the timing but, with great foresight, he recognized the final destination. Just as today, we talk about “horsepower,” harking back

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started to put that mechanism under strain. Today, markets already provide immense rewards to some people but leave many others with very little. And now, technological unemployment threatens to become a more radical version of the same story, taking place in the particular market we rely upon the most: the labor market

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in the economy, the idea of human capital helps us to think clearly about the challenge that lies ahead. THE CHALLENGE OF TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT Looked at in this light, technological unemployment is what happens when some people find themselves with human capital that is of no value in the labor market—that is, when

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different rates, pouring into the pockets of some but barely trickling to others. And this resemblance is not a coincidence. The phenomena of inequality and technological unemployment are very closely related. Most societies have decided to slice up their economic pies by using the market to reward people for whatever capital they

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the “inequality” in income inequality.) Exploring how inequality works today is useful because it should help alleviate any residual skepticism about the looming threat of technological unemployment in the future. Right now, most societies share out prosperity by rewarding people in the marketplace for the capital that they own, both human and

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Today’s growing inequalities show that this approach is already creaking: a few people own immensely valuable capital, but many more have little of value. Technological unemployment, as noted before, is just a more radical version of this same story; one where the market mechanism fails completely, and many people are left

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They determine how this economic prosperity is shared across society. Inequality, then, is not inevitable. And the same is true for the economic imbalances that technological unemployment would bring about. We have the power to shape and constrain these economic divisions—if we want to. THE DISTRIBUTION PROBLEM When Keynes first wrote

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about technological unemployment, the economic atmosphere was utterly miserable. It was 1930, the Great Depression had begun, and a prolonged period of economic gloom was descending across

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the leisure that technological progress will have won them, how everyone might “live wisely and agreeably and well.”54 For that reason, the prospect of technological unemployment did not worry him at all. Yet in another sense, Keynes made a serious miscalculation. In his relaxed reflections, he took something significant for granted

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respond is the focus of the rest of the book. PART III THE RESPONSE 9 Education and Its Limits When confronted with the threat of technological unemployment, the most common response from those who think about the future of work—commentators and economists, politicians and policymakers—is that we need more education

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technological progress. As we have seen, there will be no “big bang” moment where everyone suddenly finds themselves without work to do. The effects of technological unemployment are likely to be stuttering and uneven. Important, too, there will be some people who escape the harmful effects of task encroachment, who continue to

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work from a purely economic perspective, where it only matters because it provides an income. This perspective is helpful because it makes the threat of technological unemployment very clear: by doing away with work, automation will deprive people of their livelihoods. But for some, like the anxious mom at the seaside,

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.  See, for instance: Wassily Leontief, “Technological Advance, Economic Growth, and the Distribution of Income,” Population and Development Review 9, no. 3 (1983): 403–10; “Is Technological Unemployment Inevitable?,” Challenge 22, no. 4 (1979): 48–50; Wassily Leontief, “National Perspective: The Definition of Problems and Opportunities” in The Long-Term Impact of Technology

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, also from the World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?page=2. Joseph Stiglitz does this calculation as well, when thinking about John Maynard Keynes and his prophecies. See Joseph Stiglitz, “Toward a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflections on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in Lorenzo Pecchi and

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1855, the data is for the UK, rather than Britain. 24.  Tyler Cowen, “Industrial Revolution Comparisons Aren’t Comforting,” Bloomberg View, 16 February 2017. 25.  John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), pp. 368–69. 26.  Data extracted from OECD. Stat, https://stats.oecd.org/, on April 2019

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capable machines on those tasks that, until very recently, were considered necessarily human ones” is explored in Susskind, “Technology and Employment”; and “A Model of Technological Unemployment,” Oxford University Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series No. 819 (2017). 10.  Daniel Bell, “The Bogey of Automation,” New York Review of Books, 26 August

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Dominance,” Financial Times, 15 March 2018. 101.  “Tsinghua University May Soon Top the World League in Science Research,” The Economist, 17 November 2018. 6. FRICTIONAL TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT   1.  Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, p. 364.   2.  Homer, Odyssey, book XI.   3.  Economists often make a distinction between “structural” unemployment and “frictional” unemployment. As

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far as I can see, this distinction between the two types of technological unemployment is a new one.   4.  This is men between the ages of twenty and sixty-four; Nicholas Eberstadt, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis

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Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), p. 23. 42.  Lowrey, Give People Money, p. 15. 7. STRUCTURAL TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT   1.  Chris Hughes, Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 82.   2.  The argument of this chapter runs through my

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doctorate, Susskind, “Technology and Employment.” Parts of the argument can be found in my articles “A Model of Technological Unemployment” and “Automation and Demand,” Oxford University Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series No. 845 (2018) as well.   3.  But not completely irrelevant. Recall the

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.” Paul Samuelson, quoted in Hagen Krämer, “Bowley’s Law: The Diffusion of an Empirical Supposition into Economic Theory,” Papers in Political Economy 61 (2011). 28.  John Maynard Keynes, “Relative Movements of Real Wages and Output,” Economic Journal 49, no. 93 (1939): 34–51; Nicholas Kaldor, “A Model of Economic Growth,” Economic Journal 67

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Monga, et al. “Building High-Level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning.” Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning (2012). Leontief, Wassily. “Is Technological Unemployment Inevitable?” Challenge 22, no. 4 (1979): 48–50. ________. “National Perspective: The Definition of Problems and Opportunities.” In The Long-Term Impact of Technology on Employment

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Our Children.” NBER Reporter 4 (2013). Susskind, Daniel. “Automation and Demand.” Oxford University Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series No. 845 (2018). ________. “A Model of Technological Unemployment.” Oxford University Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series No. 819 (2017). ________. “Re-Thinking the Capabilities of Technology in Economics.” Economics Bulletin 39, no. 1 (2019

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automation on feedback finance industry flexibility flying shuttle Ford, Henry Fourier, Charles freckle machine free markets free time freight delivery Freud, Sigmund Frey, Carl frictional technological unemployment identity mismatch and impacts of insufficient demand and overview of place mismatch and skills mismatch and Furman, Jason The Future of the Professions (Susskind and

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and unskill-bias and inequality in capital income current trends in distribution problem and future and between labor and capital in labor income overview of technological unemployment and types of capital and inferiority assumption Information Communication Technology information highway inheritance taxes innovation, importance of “In Praise of Idleness” (Russell) Instagram Institute of

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, John F. Keynes, John Maynard advanced guard and age of leisure and changing facts and distribution problem and labor to capital ratio and process of technological unemployment and technological unemployment and timing and Khan Academy Khanin, Grigorii al-Khwarizmi, Abdallah Muhammad ibn Musa killer robots knitting machine Krugman, Paul Kurzweil, Ray labor. See also

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Russia Sparta Spence, Michael spinning jenny Spotify Standard Oil Company state. See Big State; government state bonus status steam engine Stiglitz, Joseph stock plans structural technological unemployment complementing force weakening and lump of labor fallacy and overview of remaining tasks and superiority assumption and timing of world with less work and substituting

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force ALM hypothesis and complementing force and defined education and frictional technological unemployment and misplaced anxiety and strengthening of task encroachment and Summers, Larry superintelligence superiority assumption supermanagers superstar firms Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) supply, price and

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cognitive capabilities and manual capabilities and overview of regional differences in skepticism and weakening complementing force and tasks, jobs vs. taxation Tay (chatbot) technological unemployment. See also frictional technological unemployment; structural technological unemployment future of inequality and Keynes and television Temple of Heaven Park Tennyson, Alfred territorial dividends Tesla Thebes A Theory of Justice (Rawls) Thiel

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) TV. See television Twitter two sigma problem Uber UBI. See universal basic income “Ulysses” (Tennyson) unattainable skills uncanny valley unconscious design underestimation unemployment. See also technological unemployment unemployment rate unions universal basic income (UBI) universal benefits unskill bias upheaval, change and upper class up-skilling Ure, Andrew valuation Van Parijs, Philippe Veblen

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of Misplaced Anxiety 2. The Age of Labor 3. The Pragmatist Revolution 4. Underestimating Machines PART II: THE THREAT 5. Task Encroachment 6. Frictional Technological Unemployment 7. Structural Technological Unemployment 8. Technology and Inequality PART III: THE RESPONSE 9. Education and Its Limits 10. The Big State 11. Big Tech 12. Meaning and Purpose

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time

by James Suzman  · 2 Sep 2020  · 909pp  · 130,170 words

machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work’. But none made the case as comprehensively as the twentieth century’s most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes. He predicted in 1930 that by the early twenty-first century capital growth, improving productivity and technological advances should have brought us to the foothills

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the potential of machines to liberate the peasantry from a life of labour, he invoked an embryonic version of the dream, later taken up by John Maynard Keynes, of technology leading us to a promised land. ‘Work’ is now used to describe all transfers of energy, from those that occur on a celestial

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laziest person in the world’ and quipped that his inventions were nothing more than labour-saving devices intended to spare him from future effort. Like John Maynard Keynes 150 years later, he also believed that human ingenuity might spare future generations from a life of hard labour. ‘If every Man and Woman would

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that it doesn’t much bother them why or what motivates different needs, as the relative value of those needs will be adjudicated by markets. John Maynard Keynes broke ranks with many of his colleagues in this respect when he made the case that automation would solve the economic problem. He argued that

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than people in equivalent jobs in countries like Denmark, France and Germany. Changes in weekly working hours in the UK, USA and France 1870–2000 John Maynard Keynes’s belief that ‘the standard of life in progressive countries’ in 2030 would be between ‘four and eight times as high’ as it was in

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United States’ were already sufficiently productive to meet the basic material needs of all their citizens and hence that the economic problem as defined by John Maynard Keynes had, more or less, been solved. He expressed this sentiment in his most famous book, The Affluent Society, which was published to great acclaim in

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capitalism in the former Soviet Republics, and the rise of the South East Asian ‘tiger economies’ spurred by China’s embrace of state capitalism. When John Maynard Keynes plotted the course to his economic promised land, he imagined that it would be the ‘strenuous purposeful money-makers’ – the ambitious CEOs and moneymen – who

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some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment,’ warned John Maynard Keynes when describing his post-work utopia. ‘This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at

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in September 2013, when Carl Frey and Michael Osborne from Oxford University published the results of a research project to assess the accuracy of John Maynard Keynes’s predictions about technological unemployment. The reason that the Oxford study caused such a stir was because Frey and Osborne concluded that not only were robots already queuing

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no moral costs, with the result that no CEO is going to lose sleep before having them uninstalled and dispatched for recycling or scrap. When John Maynard Keynes imagined his utopian future, he did not dwell on automation’s potential to exacerbate inequality. His utopia was one where, because everybody’s basic needs

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scale of human impact on our planet has shifted to asking whether the current geological era merits being redubbed the Anthropocene – the human era. In John Maynard Keynes’s economic utopia, there was no anthropogenic climate change. Nor was there ocean acidification or large-scale biodiversity loss. But if there were, it would

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consequences that may transform those gains into losses. The inadequacy of history as a guide to the future was one of the principal points that John Maynard Keynes made when he imagined that by 2030 technological advancement, capital growth and improvements in productivity would lead us to a land of ‘economic bliss’. As

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cities, but also that the key to living well depends on moderating our personal material aspirations by addressing inequality so that, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, we might ‘once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful’. Reflecting the growing uncertainty about our automated future and the

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easily harvest . . . over a three-week span or more and, without working very hard . . . more grain than the family could possibly consume in a year’. John Maynard Keynes’s belief that ‘the standard of life in progressive countries’ in 2030 would be between ‘four and eight times as high’ as it was in

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in September 2013, when Carl Frey and Michael Osborne from Oxford University published the results of a research project to assess the accuracy of John Maynard Keynes’s predictions about technological unemployment. Cooking not only makes meat more palatable; it also vastly extends the range of plant foods that we can eat. Many tubers, stalks

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machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work’. But none made the case as comprehensively as the twentieth century’s most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes. He predicted in 1930 that by the early twenty-first century capital growth, improving productivity and technological advances should have brought us to the foothills

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Takahashi, Mariko here ‘talent’, myth of here, here, here Tarahumara hunters here taxation here, here Taylor, Freerick Winslow here, here, here, here Taylorism here, here technological unemployment here television here Tenochitlán here termites here, here, here, here, here, here, here Thatcher, Margaret here theft, tolerated here theological conservatism here Thieme, Hartmut here

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

by Tim Wu  · 4 Nov 2025  · 246pp  · 65,143 words

9780593321249 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593321256 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524712952 (open-market) Subjects: LCSH: Multi-sided platform businesses. | Artificial intelligence—Economic aspects. | Technological innovations—Moral and ethical aspects. | Technological unemployment. Classification: LCC HD9999.M782 .W82 2025 | DDC 338.7—dc23/eng/20250327 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2024060501 Ebook ISBN 9780593321256 Cover

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the Pew Charitable Trust, suggested that 19 percent of jobs were at high risk of displacement.[16] In academic circles, this leads to the longstanding “technological unemployment” debate, a matter over which economic historians disagree. The Industrial Revolution in Europe is the most studied historic precedent and a source of very mixed

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the Great Depression hit and took Marshall’s perfect competition with it. The failure of the economy to return to equilibrium and the work of John Maynard Keynes undermined it.[*3] More economists began to assert that the classic theory of perfect competition was not descriptive of the actual economy. Economists like Joan

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

by Robert Skidelsky  · 13 Nov 2018

’s population (it went briefly up to 2 per cent in the 1850s). David Hume, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes towered over the economics of their day; Britain was the first modern gold-standard nation, the first commercial society, and the first industrial nation. The

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reality.2 The Cartesian distinction runs from David Hume to Milton Friedman, and underpins the axiomatic structure of mainstream economics. In the 1930s, the economist John Maynard Keynes challenged the classical dichotomy with what he called ‘the monetary theory of production’. He wrote, in 1933: [In the classical view] money . . . is not supposed

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radical volatility of prices, very different from the muted modulations of the previous century: post-war hyperinflation in some countries being followed by price collapses. John Maynard Keynes and Edwin Cannan debated the causes of the wartime and post-war inflations in a re-run of the Currency versus Banking School debates of

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the first time in history, human labour may be being made redundant faster than new human employment is being found for it; i.e. the ‘technological unemployment’ predicted by Wassily Leontief in 197931 may be turning into a reality. If this turns out to be the case, the income equalization which can

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century, economics students should take as exemplars thinkers like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes, whose greatness, for all their differences, lay in the fact that they were more than economists. Otherwise economics will simply die, and people will turn

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Affairs, 1 (3), Fall, pp. 17–30. Keynes, J. M. (1945), Letter to S. G. Macfarlane, 5 June 1945, reproduced in the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XXV II, 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1971 (1923)), The Collected Writings of

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John Maynard Keynes (IV) Tract on Monetary Reform. London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1971 (1930a)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (V) A Treatise on Money: The Pure Theory of Money. London: Macmillan. 442 Bi bl io g

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r a p h y Keynes, J. M. (1971 (1930b)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (VI) A Treatise on Money: The Applied Theory of Money. London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1973a (1936)), The Collected Writings of

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) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1973b), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XIII) The General Theory and After, Part I: Preparation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1973c), The Collected Writings

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of John Maynard Keynes (XIV) The General Theory and After, Part II: Defence and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1978), The

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Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (IX) Essays in Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1979), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXIX) The General Theory and After: A Supplement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal

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Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1980a), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXV) Activities 1940–1944: Shaping the Post-War World, The Clearing Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1980b),

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The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXVII) Activities 1940–1946, Shaping the Post-War World: Employment and Commodities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1981

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), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XIX) Activities 1922–1929: The Return to Gold and Industrial Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Keynes, J. M. (1982), The

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Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXI) Activities 1931–1939: World Crises and Policies in Britain and America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society . Keynes, J. M. (1983

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), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XI) Economic Articles and Correspondence: Academic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society. Khaldûn, I. (1967 (1377)), The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

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Works (I). Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 667–768. Leontief, W. (1952), Machines and man. Scientific American, 187 (3), pp. 150–60. Leontief, W. (1979), Is technological unemployment inevitable? Challenge, 22 (4), pp. 48–50. Lindbeck, A. (1976), Stabilization Policy in Open Economies with Endogenous Politicians. Seminar Paper 54, Institute for International Economic

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, Issue 70, pp. 27–48. Parker, G. and Barker, A. (2010), Osborne tells Commons recovery is on track. Financial Times, 29 November. Patinkin, D. (2008), John Maynard Keynes. In: S. N. Durlauf and L. E. Blume (eds.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Second Edition (IV). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 687–716. Peacock

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Economist as Saviour 1920–1937. London: Macmillan. Skidelsky, R. (1994 (1967)), Politicians and the Slump. London: Papermac. Skidelsky, R. (2000), John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom, 1937– 1946. London: Penguin. Skidelsky, R. (2003), John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. London: Penguin. Skidelsky, R. (2009), Keynes: The Return of the Master. London: Allen Lane. Skidelsky

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

by J. Bradford Delong  · 6 Apr 2020  · 593pp  · 183,240 words

best making? And how to resolve the squabbles over the answers to those questions? Throughout the long twentieth century, many others—Karl Polanyi, Theodore Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Vladimir Lenin, and Margaret Thatcher serve as good markers for many of the currents of thought, activism, and action—

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many and fortunes for a few. But how humans lived had not been transformed. And there were legitimate fears. As late as 1919 British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that while Malthus’s Devil had been “chained up and out of sight,” with the catastrophe of World War I, “perhaps we have

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a desirable option. The period from 1870 to 1914 was, in the perspective of all previous eras, “economic El Dorado,” or “economic Utopia,” as John Maynard Keynes put it, looking back from 1919.9 The resulting world of 1914 was an odd mix of modernity and antiquity. Britain burned 194 million tons

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that connected all were made of copper from Montana and insulated by rubber gathered by Chinese workers in Malaya and Indian workers in Bengal. As John Maynard Keynes would write in 1919, the upshot was that, for the globe’s middle and upper classes, by 1914 “life offered, at a low

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justified existing economic inequalities. One step further, and they were proposing that the superior races should be encouraged to breed, and others should not. As John Maynard Keynes was to remark a generation later, in the eyes of the social Darwinists, “socialist interferences became… impious, as calculated to retard the onward movement

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economic growth had shaken the world and transformed politics. And at the end of that transformation was a pronounced imperial and militaristic turn. In 1919, John Maynard Keynes would write, bitterly, that he, his peers, and his elders among the well-thinking, self-confident establishment had all shrugged off the warning signs

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one damned thing after another. Individuals’ visions, choices, and actions continued to matter. And not just the individuals who became dictators of great powers. John Maynard Keynes saw the war as a previously unimaginable horror. He saw his own participation in its planning, from his desk at the British Treasury, as contemptible

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powerfully—against the market presumption). And I will trace how they could be shotgun married to each other, with the blesser of the wedding being John Maynard Keynes. That, I believe, is the principal grand narrative, or at least it is mine. Could the clock have been turned back to 1914 and

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permanently but only as upon quicksand.” Wilson added, “Only a peace between equals can last.”10 But he let himself be ignored—“bamboozled” was John Maynard Keynes’s word for it—as he was outmaneuvered by the French and British premiers, Clemenceau and Lloyd George.11 They did not seek “indemnities.” They

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officers and the warrior-aristocrats who were now gone—and the people of the Central Powers. Those who had started the war had been, as John Maynard Keynes put it, “moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard” when they set things in motion that “overturned the foundations on which we all

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. One diner painted a grim picture of hobbled exports, unemployment, substantial downward pressure on wages, and waves of strikes. The guest was John Maynard Keynes. But hadn’t John Maynard Keynes burned his bridges with the British establishment by denouncing the British government’s negotiating position after the war in the strongest possible terms? Yes

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cry, Fire, Fire, in Noah’s Flood.”19 The Great Depression was the twentieth century’s greatest case of self-inflicted economic catastrophe. As John Maynard Keynes wrote at its very start, in 1930, the world was “as capable as before of affording for every one a high standard of life.”

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of course, that believes you can do these things.… Their number is negligible and they are stupid.41 In 1930, as the Great Depression started, John Maynard Keynes distracted an audience one evening with a talk on “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Suppose the problems of managing the economy to maintain full employment

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industrialization to draw on, Britain. And in Britain, large and visible sections of the working class were worse off in 1840 than in 1790. Technological unemployment was a powerful thing. The construction of dark satanic mills in Lancashire left rural weaving skills useless and populations impoverished. There was a window of

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enabler of international peace as well as of domestic prosperity. At the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, US Treasury Department official Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes from Britain had designed a system to try to make increased globalization work for good. There was to be a World Bank—an International Bank

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A functional market required competition—not monopolies bossed by technological and organizational visionaries.6 Second, Hayek had to be blessed by the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. The market economy could only work properly—could only direct resources to their “best” uses—if the spending was there to make enterprise profitable

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. John Maynard Keynes had written in 1936, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that his proposals for the “enlargement of the functions of government” that were

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that laissez-faire was dead, and that attempts to resurrect it were simply “stupid.” Milton Friedman and Eisenhower saw the same escape hatch that John Maynard Keynes had seen, and were just as eager to open and crawl through it. Indeed, the government programs that Eisenhower pointed to in his letter

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, economists might ask, why should anyone, including economists, care very much? This view is profoundly misguided. To understand why, we need only return to John Maynard Keynes’s assessment of the consequences of inflation during and after World War I: “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis

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, an initiative that grew into today’s European Union. And at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, Harry Dexter White from the United States and John Maynard Keynes from Britain designed a system to try to make increased globalization work for good. The three planned organizations to promote global economic cooperation were the

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right. But it is nevertheless disturbing that Obama’s address—delivered when the US unemployment rate was still 9.7 percent—went so strongly against John Maynard Keynes’s 1937 observation that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”30 The arithmetic always seemed clear

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. Here are two moments I see as important. Both come from about the long twentieth century’s midpoint: The first moment occurred in 1930 when John Maynard Keynes gave his speech “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (quoted in Chapter 7), in which he concluded that economic problems were not humanity’s most

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overshadowed by hopes and fears arising out of other wants and needs. The shotgun marriage of Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi, blessed by John Maynard Keynes, that helped raise the post–World War II North Atlantic developmental social democracy was as good as we have so far gotten. But it failed

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, and the job that the market economy did do was rejected and marked “return to sender.” Throughout the long twentieth century, many others—Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, and many others—tried to think up solutions. They dissented from “the market giveth…” constructively and destructively, demanding that the

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elite, it was in no wise progress toward any desirable utopia. Thus the world found itself in a position analogous to the one that John Maynard Keynes had described in 1924, when he critiqued Leon Trotsky’s assumption “that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of society have already

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Landes. Paul Krugman has been an immense influence, albeit mostly at a distance: the person who I think comes closest to wearing the mantle of John Maynard Keynes in our generation. For the tenth, let me cheat again: my colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, the finest collection of colleagues

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, First Essay on Population, London: Macmillan, 1926 [1798], Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/b31355250. The phrase “Malthus had disclosed a Devil” is from John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 8. 1. Globalizing the World 1. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population

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of Political Economy 113, no. 6 (December 2005): 1307–1340, http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/wage%20-%20jpe%20-2004.pdf. 3. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 8. 4. Consider the contrast between the material culture available to support the lifestyle of,

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–39. 31. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, New York: New Press, 1996, 5–25. 32. John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, London: Hogarth Press, 1926, n.p. 33. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review 148, no. 391 (June 1889):

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Sons, 1923, 33. 35. Arthur Conan Doyle, His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, New York: George H. Doran, 1917, 307–308. 36. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 22. 4. Global Empires 1. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The History of the Conquest of New

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Much shorter is Michael Howard, The First World War: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 16. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 7. 17. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, New York: Penguin, 2005. 6. Roaring Twenties 1. As proposed by the

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States to the Senate,” January 22, 1917, posted at University of Michigan–Dearborn, Personal Pages, www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~ppennock/doc-Wilsonpeace.htm. 11. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 37–55. 12. Keynes, Economic Consequences, 3. 13. Keynes, Economic Consequences, 3–4. 14. Jan

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of our golden fetters restored to us the control over our fortunes,” comes from John Maynard Keynes, “Two Years Off Gold: How Far Are We from Prosperity Now?,” Daily Mail, September 19, 1933, reprinted in John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 21, Activities, 1931–1939: World Crises and Policies in Britain and America,

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 285. 21. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, New York: Penguin, 2005, 217–249

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Economy, Philadelphia: Gregg and Elliot, 1843 [1803]. 2. John Stuart Mill, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy, London: John W. Parker, 1844 [1829]; John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan, 1936; William Baumol, “Retrospectives: Say’s Law,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 13, no. 1 (

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. Ralph G. Hawtrey, A Century of Bank Rate, London: Taylor and Francis, 1995 [1938], 145. 20. John Maynard Keynes, “The Great Slump of 1930,” Nation and Athenaeum, December 20 and 27, 1930, n.p. 21. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 251. 22. Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey Sachs, “Exchange

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. Eisenhower, Letter to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, November 8, 1954, available at Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-edgar-newton-eisenhower. 42. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, London: Macmillan, 1933, 326–329. 8. Really-Existing Socialism 1. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, New York: Random House, 1960

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the most important and most activist arm of the government. Henry Simons, Economic Policy for a Free Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. 7. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan, 1936, chap. 24. 8. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, American

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Macmillan, 1919, 220. 23. Keynes, Economic Consequences, 235–236. 15. The Neoliberal Turn 1. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 22. 2. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” reprinted in John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9, Essays in Persuasion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 328. 3. Gareth Dale

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Obama, January 27, 2010, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address. 30. John Maynard Keynes, “How to Avoid a Slump,” The Times, January 12–14, 1937, reprinted in John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 21, Activities, 1931–1939: World Crises and Policies in Britain and America, Cambridge: Cambridge University

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ed. and trans. C. Wright Mills and Hans Heinrich Gerth, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, 95. Conclusion: Are We Still Slouching Towards Utopia? 1. John Maynard Keynes wrote two important letters to Roosevelt in the 1930s, both pleading for him to be more Keynesian: to spend less energy on social democratic structural

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reform and more on simply returning to full employment. See John Maynard Keynes, “An Open Letter to President Roosevelt,” New York Times, December 31, 1933, www.nytimes.com/1933/12/31/archives/from-keynes-to-roosevelt-

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our-recovery-plan-assayed-the-british.html; John Maynard Keynes to President Franklin Roosevelt, February 1, 1938, facsimile on my website at https://delong.typepad.com/19380201-keynes-to-roosevelt.pdf. 2. Eric Hobsbawm,

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Mus, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books, September 5, 2016, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-flight-93-election. 9. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography, London: Macmillan, 1933, reprinted in John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. 10, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 66–67. 10. Francis Bacon and Tomasso Campanella, New Atlantis and

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City of the Sun: Two Classic Utopias, New York: Dover, 2018. 11. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan, 1919, 9, 12. 12. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [350 BCE],

Basic Economics

by Thomas Sowell  · 1 Jan 2000  · 850pp  · 254,117 words

as higher unemployment rates and longer periods of unemployment. One form of unemployment that has long stirred political emotions and led to economic fallacies is technological unemployment. Virtually every advance in technological efficiency puts somebody out of work. This is nothing new: By 1830 Barthélemy Thimonnier, a French tailor who had long

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same year,{550} we can reasonably conclude that the Norwegians had a significantly higher standard of living. But we need not pretend to precision. As John Maynard Keynes said, “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”{551} Ideally, we would like to be able to measure people’s personal sense

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officials thought they could or could not get away with politically. Many economists have pointed out what a dangerous power this gives to government officials. John Maynard Keynes, for example, wrote: “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”{567

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to avoid the political dangers that raising tax rates can create, governments around the world have for thousands of years resorted to inflation instead. As John Maynard Keynes observed: There is no record of a prolonged war or a great social upheaval which has not been accompanied by a change in the legal

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widespread hunger. In short, misconceptions of economics were both common and bipartisan. Nor were misconceptions of economics confined to the United States. Writing in 1931, John Maynard Keynes said of the British government’s monetary policies that the arguments being made for those policies “could not survive ten minutes’ rational discussion.”{595} Monetary

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likely to spend the money than those from whom it was taken, is there a net increase in spending for the country as a whole. John Maynard Keynes’ historic contribution to economics was to spell out the conditions under which this was considered likely, but Keynesian economics has been controversial on this and

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in the wake of a tax change. Behavior has changed too often, and too dramatically, to proceed on that assumption. As far back as 1933, John Maynard Keynes observed that “taxation may be so high as to defeat its object,” and that, “given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation

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. Chapter 26 THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. John Maynard Keynes{981} People have been talking about economic issues, and some writing about them, for thousands of years, so it is not possible to put a

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semantics. Say’s Law One of the fundamental concepts of economics, over which controversies raged in the early nineteenth century and were re-ignited by John Maynard Keynes in 1936, was what has been called Say’s Law. Named for French economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), though other economists had a role

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its major and lasting impacts an emphasis on trying to determine how and why such calamities happened and what could be done about them. {xliv} John Maynard Keynes’ 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, became the most famous and most influential economics book of the twentieth century. By mid

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other institutions. The Keynesian contribution did not vanish, however, for many of the concepts and insights of John Maynard Keynes had now become part of the stock in trade of economists in all schools of thought. When John Maynard Keynes’ picture appeared on the cover of the December 31, 1965 issue of Time magazine, it was

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} Similarly, in the twentieth century, Keynesian economics began to be developed and presented with concepts, definitions, graphs and equations found nowhere in the writings of John Maynard Keynes, as other leading economists extended the analysis of Keynesian economics to the profession in scholarly writings, and its presentation to students in textbooks, using devices

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events influence economics? The short answer to both questions is “yes” but the only meaningful question is—to what extent and in what particular ways? John Maynard Keynes’ answer to the first question was this: . . .the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are

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dismal science” by those unhappy with all the promising-sounding social theories and policy proposals that economists punctured as counterproductive. However, in the wake of John Maynard Keynes’ economic theories, which proposed useful roles for government intervention, there was in many quarters a sense that economists could do much more than provide insights

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economics when I was a graduate student at Columbia University in academic year 1958–59. {xliii} As discussed in Chapter 13 of Basic Economics. {xliv} John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930: “The world has been slow to realise that we are living this year in the shadow of one of the greatest economic

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catastrophes of modern history.” John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, 1952 edition, p. 135. {xlv} This theme is explored in my book A Conflict of Visions. {xlvi} As we have seen in

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, May 6, 2002, p. A5. {566} Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 139. {567} John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), p. 235. {568} James R. Harrigan, “Runaway Debt Inevitably Will Bring Inflation

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, 2011, p. R1. {576} Nelson D. Schwartz, “Financial Uncertainty Restores Glitter to an Old Refuge, Gold,” New York Times, June 13, 2010, p. A4. {577} John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), p. 86. {578} Judith Matloff, “Russians Replay ‘Bad Old Days’,” Christian Science Monitor, August 31, 1998, p

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. 92. {594} Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, Volume III: The Great Depression 1929–1941 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952), p. 50. {595} John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, p. 283. {596} Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism, p. 13. {597} Ibid., p. 14. {598} Ibid., pp. 16, 17. {599} Jack Ewing

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Revenue,” Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2007, p. A14. {693} Oliver Wendell Holmes, Collected Legal Papers (New York: Peter Smith, 1952), pp. 230–231. {694} John Maynard Keynes, The Means to Prosperity (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), p. 5. {695} Jed Graham, “Public Pension Plans Underfunded, Even with Rosy Forecasts,” Investor’s Business

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. Laski 1916–1935, edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953), Vol. I, p. 738. Chapter 26: The History of Economics {981} John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), p. 383. {982} Xenophon, “On the Means of Improving the

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. {1025} J.A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p. 43. {1026} Joseph A. Schumpeter, “Science and Ideology,” American Economic Review, March 1949, p. 359. {1027} John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, p. 383. {1028} George J. Stigler, Essays in the History of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History

by Derek S. Hoff  · 30 May 2012

sluggish birthrate with a sluggish economy in the 1930s and 1970s, and the coincidence of the Baby Boom with a healthy economy in the 1950s. John Maynard Keynes, one of the most important economists of all time and a major focus of this book, articulated perhaps the strongest argument that population growth aids

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of the Malthusian “zero population growth” movement. Rather, unease about population growth incorporated the innovative liberal economic ideas that prevailed at midcentury, particularly British economist John Maynard Keynes’s stress on government-sponsored mass consumption. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the birthrate declined meaningfully, and demographers projected an eventual drop in

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modern, post–World War II economic growth theory.146 A more traditional Malthusianism emanated from economists associated with Cambridge University, led by Harold Wright and John Maynard Keynes. As we will see, Keynes would break away from Malthusianism in the 1930s.147 The leading American theorist of the optimum population was Ohio State

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, for . . . it is inconceivable that technical advance can maintain the pace it set in what [naturalist Alfred Russel] Wallace called ‘the wonderful century’ and which [John Maynard] Keynes thinks may prove to have been ‘a magnificent episode’ in history. In the main, future improvements are to be ‘looked for in the fourth decimal

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not fundamentally alter, this consensus. Population experts updated Malthusianism by grafting it onto a revolutionary new set of economic ideas expounded by preeminent British economist John Maynard Keynes. In the 1930s, Keynes explained the depth and seeming permanence of the Great Depression by overturning the classical economists’ assumption that markets self-correct. He

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this pronatalist thread. In particular, they highlight the mid-1930s development of “secular stagnation” or “mature economy” doctrine.10 Proponents of stagnation theory, led by John Maynard Keynes and Harvard’s Alvin Hansen,11 claimed that a triumvirate of factors in Western economies augured dwindling capital accumulation, continued high unemployment, and perhaps even

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technology-based utopia, labor leaders, economists, and producers of popular culture lamented the machine’s alleged displacement of the worker.81 The prospect of reduced technological unemployment thus provided another point in favor of the stable population. Guy Irving Burch, founder of the Population Reference Bureau, a clearinghouse for demographic information as

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by population growth produces diminishing economic returns that trump economies of scale. Second, amid the sluggish birthrates and Depression of the 1930s, populationists, now echoing John Maynard Keynes and his American disciple Alvin Hansen, claimed that demographic growth was essential to economic recovery—that is, to the elimination of material scarcity. A third

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. Toward a “Market-Knows-Best Demography” In the 1930s, when the birthrate slumped in the industrialized nations and threatened to eventually snuff out population growth, John Maynard Keynes argued that higher birthrates would spur economic recovery. During the 1930s, American economists sympathetic to Keynes’s broader anti–laissez-faire project developed a new

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of Social Security has proven impossible politically, the aging paradigm has dominated American policy makers’ discussions of demography ever since.132 Epilogue I n 1923, John Maynard Keynes predicted that the “Problem of Population . . . is going to be not merely an economist’s problem, but, in the near future, the greatest of all

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. See Paul A. Samuelson, “Alvin Hansen as a Creative Economic Theorist,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 90 (February 1976): 24–31. 12. See note 17. 13. John Maynard Keynes, “Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population,” Eugenics Review 29 (April 1937): 16–17. Keynes also claimed that population growth was tangential to wage levels

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“an era of increasing population tends to promote optimism” (all quotations appear on p. 14). For additional discussion, see Toye, Keynes on Population; William Petersen, “John Maynard Keynes’s Theories of Population and the Concept of ‘Optimum,’ ” Population Studies 8 (March 1955): 228–46; and Vincent J. Tarascio, “Keynes on the Sources of

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the latter was steadily increasing. 79. “U.S. Census Errors Told at Congress,” New York Times, July 31, 1937. 80. A leading participant in the technological unemployment debate was William Ogburn, an eminent sociologist at the University of Chicago firmly entrenched in population circles and a founding officer of the PAA. 81

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. Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 82. Guy Irving Burch, “No Cause for Alarm: An Answer to Dr. Dublin,” Birth Control Review 15

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Office Files, Staff Memoranda, Box 63A, Folder “Heller, Walter W., 1961”). 20. See Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 8; and Henry J. Aaron, Politics and the Professors: The Great Society in Perspective (Washington

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the resultant modest uptick in Americans’ acceptance of state capacity likely will shelve privatization proposals until Republicans control both Congress and the presidency. Epilogue 1. John Maynard Keynes, “Preface,” in Harold Wright, Population (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1923), vi–vii. 2. Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon, “The Greatest Century That

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

by Robert J. Shiller  · 14 Oct 2019  · 611pp  · 130,419 words

Frequency of Appearance of Gold Standard in Books, 1850–2008, and News, 1850–2019   159 13.1 Frequency of Appearance of Labor-Saving Machinery and Technological Unemployment in Books, 1800–2008   175 14.1 Percentage of Articles Containing the Words Automation and Artificial Intelligence in News and Newspapers, 1900–2019   197 15

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economy as driven only by abstract economic forces suggests that the economy operates in a moral vacuum, that there is no criticism of their leadership. John Maynard Keynes: Narrative Economist Kristol’s dismissal of opinion polls notwithstanding, some of the most famous economic forecasts in world history appear to be based substantially on

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observations of narratives and worries about their human consequences. In his 1919 book Economic Consequences of the Peace, Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that Germany would become deeply embittered by the heavy reparations imposed by the Versailles treaty ending World War I. Keynes was not the only

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and influence economic and political events. We illustrated the discussion with several real-world examples, including Frederick Lewis Allen’s insights into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’s analysis of the narrative origins of World War II, the Bitcoin narrative, and the Laffer curve narrative. In this part of the book, we

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confidence, as they did in the past. In this chapter, we consider a number of technology narratives, often using the terms labor-saving machinery or technological unemployment, that went epidemic and then faded (Figure 13.1), including the Luddite event in 1811, the Swing Riots in 1830, the depression scare of 1873

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hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.2 FIGURE 13.1. Frequency of Appearance of Labor-Saving Machinery and Technological Unemployment in Books, 1800–2008 Narratives of losing one’s job to a machine have a long history, with mutations creating different epidemics. Source: Google Ngrams

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to earn their keep, and the new jobs probably required moving to crowded urban areas. In describing their fears, they did not use the words technological unemployment, computers, or artificial intelligence, but they did have their own terms for the phenomenon, including labor-saving, as in labor-saving appliances, labor-saving

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labor saving machine,” apparently meaning that the modern trust adopts such machines in its inhuman effort to dispense with labor.15 Machines, Robots, and Future Technological Unemployment The notion of a world without labor became more vivid with E. M. Forster, the English novelist famous for such classics as A Room with

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appeared in the English language to describe the effects of labor-saving inventions. The phrase was technological unemployment. This phrase appeared first in 1917, but it started its epidemic upswing in 1928. The count for technological unemployment skyrockets in the 1930s in Google Ngrams into an epidemic curve much like the Ebola epidemic curve

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in Figure 3.1. The technological unemployment curve peaked in 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression. A parallel epidemic occurred with the term power age, which is now mostly gone.

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which agricultural people fled from the farms. (Less than 2% of the US workforce is in agriculture today.) Technological unemployment became a new and persistent worry. It is curious that the narrative epidemic of technological unemployment began in 1928, a time of prosperity well before the Great Depression. Still, 1928 was a time of

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heightened concern about unemployment, which was blamed entirely on technological unemployment and not connected in public talk to any weakness in the US economy. Philip Snowden, former and future chancellor of the Exchequer in the United

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wrote in the New York Times in 1928 that the United States, then the leader in developing labor-saving devices, had a unique problem of technological unemployment: But if other countries are compelled to follow America in specialization and in the displacement of human labor, the problem of unemployment in these countries

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other narratives that took form in the late 1920s and went viral in the Great Depression of the 1930s, efficiency was associated with technological unemployment. How did the epidemic of technological unemployment fears start? In March 1928, US senator Robert Wagner stated his belief that unemployment was much higher than recognized, and he asked

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and 1950s. In the article, readers are told that Slichter noted several causes of unemployment but pointed out that “at present the most serious is technological unemployment.” Specifically, “The reason we have this unemployment is because we are eliminating jobs through labor-saving methods faster than we are creating them.”20 These

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words, alongside the new official reporting of unemployment statistics, created a contagion of the idea that a new era of technological unemployment had arrived, and the Luddites’ fears were renewed. The earlier agricultural depression, with its associated fears of labor-saving machinery, began to look like

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a change in the news media’s interest in such innovations because of public concern about technological unemployment? The likely answer is “a little of both.” Underconsumption, Overproduction, and the Purchasing Power Theory of Wages Unlike the technological unemployment narrative, the labor-saving machines narrative was strongly connected to an underconsumption or overproduction theory

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Great Depression, but academic economists never seriously embraced the theory, which had never been soundly explained. Often the theory was presented as an adjunct to technological unemployment: underconsumption suddenly became a problem in the 1930s because of the nation’s newfound ability to produce more than it needed. But other accounts of

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agency was “redistributing purchasing power to the masses” so as to help them spend more and thereby deal with underconsumption. He explained why he thought technological unemployment had suddenly become so important: Why does our nation seem to need this supplement to the market mechanism, after 158 years? You have the answer

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and have increased the power of individuals controlling these concentrations.30 In other words, Davis saw the concentration of business as amplifying the problem of technological unemployment. The massive unemployment set off serious social problems. For example, in the United States it caused the forced deportation (then called repatriation) of a

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to the imminent collapse of our industrial and economic system. Business contracts were even held up because of the fear engendered by technocracy.38 The technological unemployment narrative appears to have saturated the population by sometime in the 1930s. Afterward, references to it did not need to use the phrase

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technological unemployment because everyone understood the concept. For example, a long 1936 New York Times article deploring the tragic effects of long-term unemployment on the human

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the unemployed people described “have been superannuated less by age than by newly invented machines.”39 The Narrative Turns to World War II Though the technological unemployment narrative faded after 1935 (as revealed by Google Ngrams), it did not go away completely. Instead, it continued to exert some influence in the

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constellation of machines narratives then that we explore in the next chapter. Chapter 14 Automation and Artificial Intelligence Replace Almost All Jobs The narrative of technological unemployment as causing a problem for the indefinite future did not disappear with World War II. In fact, it repeatedly mutated and took on a different

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prices should fall to 1913 levels no longer seemed realistic. The end of World War II was also a distraction that temporarily reduced attention to technological unemployment. Instead, a constellation of economic narratives after World War II began to suggest that it was all right to spend money now that the war

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overall optimism? The answer must lie in good part in a Great Depression narrative that still had intermittent power in the postwar period: the same technological unemployment narrative but in mutated form. The Automation Recession Narrative The same “zero hour” for the labor-saving machinery economic narrative that appeared in 1929 reappeared

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mutations in the economic narrative shifted attention from the muscles being replaced by electrical machines to the brain being replaced by artificial intelligence. The basic technological unemployment narrative is the same, but the examples have a wider scope. First, giant locomotives and electrical power equipment economized on human muscle power. After

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data processing began to run whole business operations. The new narrative was of a more wholesale replacement of human involvement in production than in the technological unemployment narrative of the 1920s and 1930s. The year 1956 saw the first “automation strike … fomented by fear of the push-button age.”6 Stories

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times it has not succeeded in producing a universal basic income in any country. The mutating technology/unemployment narrative tends to attract public attention when a new story creates the impression that the problems generated by technological unemployment are reaching a crisis point. A celebrated 1932 book by Charles Whiting Baker, Pathways Back to

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lens of other narratives that were of epidemic proportions in the 1930s, the confidence narratives (chapter 10 above), the frugality narrative (chapter 11 above), the technological unemployment narrative (chapter 13 above), and the 1929 stock market crash narrative (chapter 16 above). Boycotts and Profiteers during the Great Depression of the 1930s References

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has six compartments, but future models of economic narratives might well benefit from even more compartments. For example, a model for the spread of the technological unemployment narrative (see chapter 13) might include separate compartments for unemployed and infected and unemployed and uninfected, employed and infected and employed and uninfected, as well

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represent narrative constellations in which multiple narratives support one another by contagion. Such models could also represent the interaction of economic narratives, such as the technological unemployment narrative, with economic status, such as unemployment. Structural macroeconomic models commonly include simple univariate autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models to represent error terms

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April 16, 1928, p. 22. 21. Chase, 1929, p. 209 22. Chase, 1929, pp. 215–16. 23. Chase, 1929, p. 323. Chase used the phrase “technological unemployment” (p. 212), but only rarely. 24. “Steno in the Future May Be a Robot, Show Indicates,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 12, 1929, p. 45. 25

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Change as Informational Cascades.” Journal of Political Economy 100(5):992–1026. Bix, Amy Sue. 2000. Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Blanc, Louis. 1851. Plus de Girondins. Paris: Charles Joubert. Blei, David M., Andrew Y. Ng, and Michael I. Jordan.

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narrative during, 158–59; information cascades and, 300; as narratives in themselves, 112; nineteenth-century worldviews and, 116–17; psychologically based economic narrative of, 118; technological unemployment narrative during, 176 The Desk Set (film), 201 devaluation: entering English language in 1914, 159; as positive terminology, 172–73; of US dollar in 1933

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random events affecting, 75; repeats of, with unpredictable timing, 271; self-fulfilling prophecies and, 74; sizes and time frames of, 88–89, 292–93; on technological unemployment, 183–85, 294, 295; with varying contagion rates and recovery rates, 295; volatility and, 5; on wage-price spiral, 258, 259f. See also compartmental models

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112; revulsion against excesses of 1920s during, 235–36; robot tax discussed during, 209; seen as stampede or panic, 128; technocracy movement and, 193–94; technological unemployment narrative and, 183, 184; today’s downturns seen through narratives of, 134–35, 264; underconsumption narrative during, 188–90; women’s writing about concerns during

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and, 181–82; underconsumption or overproduction theory and, 187–89, 191–92; unemployment and, xiv, 9, 130, 177–81, 187–88, 191–92. See also technological unemployment narrative labor unions: associated by public with organized crime, 260; automation and, 200, 202; boycotts used by, 241; trends in public support for, 258–59

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31, 40; within narrative constellations, 86, 107; randomness in, 31, 40; of recurrent narratives, 107, 109–10, 238; self-fulfilling prophecies derived from, 74; of technological unemployment narrative, 196, 199 mutation of narratives: “Happy Birthday to You” and, 98–99; from hypnosis to autosuggestion, 122 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 4, 7–8, 108–9

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9 and, 273; labor-saving machinery narrative and, 181–82; military uses planned for, 195; in movies, 203–4; product line failing in 1980s, 203; technological unemployment narrative and, 186. See also artificial intelligence narrative; automation narrative robot tax, 209 Rockefeller, John D., 236 Rollaboard, 38, 39 Romer, Christina, 307n3 Roosevelt, Franklin

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taxpayer revolt around 1978, 50 tax rates, of limited value in understanding economic events, 74–75 Taylor, Zachary, 110 teach-in, 33 technocracy, 192–94 technological unemployment narrative, 174, 175f, 183–86; automation with broader scope than, 200; concentration of business and, 190; during depressions, 176; economic effects of narrative itself,

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in Germany and, 195; robotics and, 209; technology raising specter of, 8–9, 130; underconsumption theory and, 187–91. See also labor-saving machinery narrative; technological unemployment narrative unemployment rate, first measurements by US government, 131, 184, 185 unfair behavior, human eagerness to punish, 36 universal basic income, 209–10 universals: anthropologists

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become, 31, 40, 64–65, 286; Roosevelt’s quote about fear, 128; sit-ins and, 32–33; about stock market boom and crash, 229; about technological unemployment, 185; about wage-price spiral, 259–60 visual images: changed in mutated narrative, 108; memory aided by, 45, 46–47; power of Laffer curve narrative

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narrative during, 137; monetary policy and, 73; optimistic narratives after, 198; Pearl Harbor attack and, 81–82; positive market reaction to beginning of, 94, 308n6; technological unemployment narrative and, 194–95, 196; “victory vacations” shortly after, 198; worldwide depression preceding, 112 wrestling matches, fake, 84–85 Xi Jinping, 151 Yandex’s Alice

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)

by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig  · 15 Mar 2020

York University and at the London School of Economics. Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University. His three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) won five prizes and his book on the financial crisis—Keynes: The Return of the Master—was published in September 2010. He

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point—or soon will— when the advent of intelligent machines is simply going to destroy existing jobs faster than it creates new jobs. If so, technological unemployment would turn from its relatively benign past process into a virulent involuntary one. There are several issues worth discussing, keeping those two views in mind

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good outcome. Both David Graeber and Rachel Kay favour reducing human work, while Irmgard Nübler focuses on how technological unemployment can be mitigated and job growth maintained. David Graeber argues that the future of technological unemployment predicted by J.M. Keynes has in fact come to pass—but that we have compensated for the

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race redundant materially and spiritually—both as producers of wealth and producers of meaning? For an optimistic answer to this question, let me turn to John Maynard Keynes. In his 1930 essay, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, Keynes thought that technological progress would produce so much extra wealth that in about 100 years

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Future, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21134-9_2 9 10 R. Skidelsky We are being afflicted with a new disease … namely technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses

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ever more precarious. So the old question is being posed ever more urgently: are machines a threat or a promise? Quoted from Robert Skidelsky ed. John Maynard Keynes: The Essential Keynes, 80. Italics in original. 2 2 The Future of Work 11 Work in History The western concept of work starts with the

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from process innovation and competition between firms) leads to additional demand for products, triggering product innovation and employment in new lines of production. 3. Initial technological unemployment leads to a reduction in wages, but these reduced wages in turn increase demand for labour and induce a reverse shift back to more labour

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. New York: Macmillan and Co. (2nd ed., 1952). Schumpeter, J. (1954). History of Economic Analysis. New York, Abingdon and Oxon: Routledge. Skidelsky, R. (Ed.). (2015). John Maynard Keynes: The Essential Keynes. London: Penguin Classics. Part I Work in the Past 3 Patterns and Types of Work in the Past: Part 1 Richard Donkin

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before the 1960s or even before Vonnegut; it harkens back at least to the Depression; even arguably to the Victorian age. Keynes coined the phrase “technological unemployment” in the 1930s as one of the main causes of the mass unemployment of the time. As a result, some argue why are we worried

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the time Keynes was predicting that we should have a 15-hour week—many, if not most, of the jobs were indeed eliminated (Keynes 1930). Technological unemployment did happen. We could be living just as he predicted. But instead we made up new forms of employment to keep people busy which were

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scientists actually does invent a teleportation device or warp drive, society will benefit more than we can count. I would make a radical suggestion: that technological unemployment has already happened, that we are in a state of collective denial, effectively, we have decided that rather than opt for collective liberation we’re

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hours and holidays, trade union pressure for a shorter working week and business initiative. This reduction in working hours was so marked that in 1930 John Maynard Keynes made the famous prediction that in around 100 years’ time we would all be working a 15-hour week. Keynes argued that with technological progress

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and unlearning the old ways of doing things. Mechanization, automation and most recently robotization increase productivity, however, this phase is also characterized by unintended consequences: technological unemployment and anxiety, high and rising inequality (unequal distribution of productivity gains between labour and the owners of capital and skills), financial bubbles and crises as

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-routine, 126, 127, 129, 131 simplification, 91, 92 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 30 Technological determinism, 5 Technological progress, 9, 18, 59, 89, 93, 96, 131, 176 Technological unemployment, 2, 6, 10, 16, 160, 173, 192 Technology, 2–5, 7, 9, 16–19, 27–30, 35, 57, 59, 61, 62, 75, 83–96, 110

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