John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

ALSO BY ROBERT SKIDELSKY Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009) John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (2004) John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946 (2000) 2002 Arthur Ross Book Award Gold Medal 2001 Lionel Gelber Prize The World After Communism: A Polemic for our Times (1995) Interests and Obsessions: Historical Essays (1993) John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937 (1992) John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920 (1983) Oswald Mosley (1975) English Progressive Schools (1969) Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–1931 (1967) ALSO BY EDWARD SKIDELSKY Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (2009) Copyright © 2012 Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky Production Editor: Yvonne E.

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Evidently, its persuasive power declines in conditions of abundance, when cheapness is no longer the main consideration. Notes INTRODUCTION 1. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 293. 2. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 182. 3. W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 37. 4. Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 11. 5. Charles Baudelaire, Journaux intimes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1938), p. 61. 6. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 374. 7.

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.: Digireads.com, 2009; first publ. 1759), p. 40; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Prometheus Books, 1920), p. 1; Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Macmillan, 1932), p. 16. 10. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, p. 332. CHAPTER 1. KEYNES’S MISTAKE 1. Quoted in Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920–1937 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 72, 235. 2. For the essay as a whole see John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 321–32. It is reprinted from Keynes’s 1931 Essays in Persuasion. For the earlier outings, see Skidelsky, Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, p. 634, n. 53. 3. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), pp. 188–9. 4.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman
Published 2 Sep 2020

Even more importantly, it is now far from certain whether or not the service sector will be able to accommodate all of those whose work will be determined superfluous to requirements by the next tide of automation, whose waves are already licking against the shores of this last refuge of working men and women in the post-industrial age. 15 The New Disease ‘We are being afflicted with a new disease of which 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 which we can find new uses for labour,’ he added. It was a sensible clarification for his 1930s audience. People had worried about the possibility of their trades or livelihoods being elbowed out by new technologies and ways of working ever since the Industrial Revolution shifted into second gear.

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The rapid expansion of services is also why despite the widespread automation of many once commonplace roles in many countries, from ticket sellers at train stations to checkout attendants in supermarkets, until recently discussion about the potential of automation to cannibalise the workplace remained largely confined to a few technology hubs, corporate boardrooms and academic journals. That all changed 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 at the factory gates but that they had fixed their beady little robot-eyes on nearly half of all existing jobs in the United States.

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Instead it now seems likely that several distinctive Homo sapiens lineages that shared a common ancestor around half a million years ago evolved in parallel with one another, and appeared near-simultaneously around 300,000 years ago in North Africa, southern Africa and the East African Rift Valley, and that all people today are made up of a mosaic of genetic features inherited from all of them. That all changed 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, leaves and fruits that are indigestible – or even poisonous – raw are both nutritious and flavoursome when cooked. Eating uncooked nettles, for example, is a recipe for pain.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

productivity theory. Yale Professor Irving Fi Cambridge professor Alfred Marshall 1947) created the first p (1842-1924) helped transform eco- and developed the qu£ T H E G E N E R A L T H E O R Y OF E M P L O Y 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 m i s t and s t a t e s m a n , published his influential General Theory in 1936: "I believe myself to be writing a book which will largely revolutionise the way the world thinks about economic problems."

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Essays in Persuasion. New 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. 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. 1959. "Review of Ricardian Economics."

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Siegel, Jeremy J. 2005. The Future for Investors. New York: Crown/Business. Simon, Julian L., ed. 1995. 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. 1992. Dissent on Keynes: A Critical Appraisal of Keynesian Economics. New York: Praeger. . 2001.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

Among other awards, he has received the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University. He teaches sociology at New 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 was made a member of the House of Lords in 1991 (he sits on the cross-­ benches) and elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994. He is also the co-author of How Much is Enough?

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We hope this book will contribute to that debate. 2 The Future of Work Robert Skidelsky A society, wrote Jan Patočka, is decadent if it encourages a decadent life, ‘a life addicted to what is inhuman by its very nature’.1 It is in this spirit that I want to explore the impact of technology on the human condition, and especially on work. Is technology making the human 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 or even less, we would be able to reduce working hours to just 15 a week, or 3 a day. This process, he warned, was unlikely be smooth. 1 Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 97.

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The headlines tell us that robots are gobbling up human jobs at an unprecedented rate—that up to 30 per cent of today’s work will be automated within 20 or so years. And the jobs themselves are becoming 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 ‘disdain for work’ of the ancient world. Working for a living was despised. The good life was one devoted to politics in the Greek conception and to self-cultivation in the Roman.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

Antoin Murphy, “Money in an Economy Without Banks – the Case of Ireland,” The Manchester School (March 1978), pp. 44-45. 9. Donal Buckley, “How six-month bank strike rocked the nation,” Independent (December 29, 1999). 10. Umair Haque, op. cit. 11. Roger Bootle, “Why the economy needs to stress creation over distribution,” The Telegraph (October 17, 2009). 12. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in: John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York, 1963), pp. 358-373. 13. Alfred Kleinknecht, Ro Naastepad, and Servaas Storm, “Overdaad schaadt: meer management, minder productiviteitsgroei,” ESB (September 8, 2006). 14. See: Tony Schwartz and Christine Poratz, “Why You Hate Work,” The New York Times (May 30, 2014). http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hate-work.html?

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European Tunnel Vision & the Curious Case of the Missing Left,” SPERI Paper No.9 (February 2014). http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-content/up-loads/2013/01/SPERI-Paper-No.9-The-Social-Bases-of-Austerity-PDF-579KB.pdf 23. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), last paragraph. 24. Quoted in: Burgin, The Great Persuasion, p. 217. 25. John Maynard Keynes, General Theory, last paragraph. Acknowledgments No book is ever written alone, but never before have I had such a wealth of support. My thanks firstly to the members of The Correspondent, who provided input and tips on articles and books, as well as pointing out various errors.

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The widespread nostalgia, the yearning for a past that never really was, suggests that we still have ideals, even if we have buried them alive. True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well. We have to do what great thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes were already advocating 100 years ago: to “value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.”31 We have to direct our minds to the future. To stop consuming our own discontent through polls and the relentlessly bad-news media. To consider alternatives and form new collectives. To transcend this confining zeitgeist and recognize our shared idealism.

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012

The oscillating Malthusian model of stagnation—higher incomes produce a population surge, but the excess of people drives incomes down, stunting population until incomes rise and the process starts all over—says little about most economies since 1800.11 When examining the American experience, enthusiasts of population growth point to the coincidence of a 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 the economy, and his stance was psychological: businesspeople tend to think that a bumper crop of babies is beneficial in the long run, and therefore introduction 5 they may invest accordingly.

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This consensus did not disappear, as the prevailing wisdom suggests, only reemerging briefly in the late 1960s in the form 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 the total population. Historians 12 introduction widely but incorrectly assume that the falling birthrate, given its concurrence with the Great Depression, led to a universal advocacy of population growth as an economic virtue.

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Swede Knut Wicksell 68 chapter 2 (whom we last saw in jail) may have been the first to use the term “optimum population.”145 In the 1920s, several well-known British economists centered in London pursued optimum theory, including Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins; the latter would emerge as a leading figure in 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’s A. B. Wolfe.148 In scholarly collections such as Louis Dublin’s Population Problems (1926) as well as in more popular forums, Wolfe demanded that public policy seek the optimum population, rather than merely prevent “absolute overpopulation,” through measures “which will secure such adjustment between population and natural resources as will enable us to live as well as possible.”149 Operating from the Malthusian scarcity perspective, Wolfe rejected the assumptions of those he deemed “anti-Malthusian optimists” that migration and invention held the dual keys to avoiding the Malthusian squeeze.150 On the question of migration, Wolfe joined the end-of-frontier chorus and suggested, “Only inferior lands, limited in extent, remain for settlement.”151 Much more original, during a decade of unbridled optimism about the benefits of technology, was Wolfe’s insistence on the limits of technical innovation.

The Classical School
by Callum Williams
Published 19 May 2020

They were philosophers more than they were hard scientists. The book ends with Alfred Marshall largely because in his work you start to see a break with the classical way of doing things: Marshall loved his equations, and he fumbled his way towards testing his theories with empirical data. After Marshall came John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman–and the emergence of modern economics. Some histories of economic thought read more like hagiographies than critical examinations. But I will show that most of the people in this book made big intellectual mistakes. Historians generally caution against using the benefit of hindsight to judge the people of the past.

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Daniel Defoe reckoned that wealth increased as the value of products that could be exported similarly increased. As he put it, “nothing that is consumed at home is an advantage to the national wealth”. And Samuel Pepys remarked that “the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must down”. John Maynard Keynes argued that “both economic theorists and practical men did not doubt that there is a peculiar advantage to a country in a favourable balance of trade, and grave danger in an unfavourable balance, particularly if it results in an efflux of the precious metals”. It is hard to say why mercantilist ideas took hold around this time.7 It may have been because the 1600s were a period of rapid growth in overseas trade, as naval technology improved.

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Eli Heckscher, writing in the 1930s, characterises the classical political economists, reasonably fairly, as believing that the “desired results” were “expected to follow from the untrammelled forces of economic life” (see, for instance, Chapter 10 on Jean-Baptiste Say). The mercantilists did not believe this. They thought that “the desired results were to be effected ‘by the dextrous management of a skilled politician’”.11 In other words, you need state intervention to reach full employment. In this regard the mercantilists appear to have pre-empted John Maynard Keynes, who argued in favour of extra government spending during times of poor economic growth and high unemployment. Indeed, in his General Theory (1936), Keynes referred approvingly to mercantilist doctrine. What could be done, in the mercantilist view, to create lots of jobs? Just like Simonde de Sismondi (Chapter 12) and Alfred Marshall (Chapter 20), mercantilists worried about the propensity of the rich to hoard their wealth rather than spend it.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

To adapt the 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 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 described it as arising “due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour,” but offered very few specifics.

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Will there be enough work for everyone to do in the twenty-first century? This is one of the great questions of our time. In the pages that follow, I will argue that the answer is “no” and explain why the threat of “technological unemployment” is now real. I will describe the different problems this 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 might push people out of work.

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The “$80.7 trillion pie” is the $80.738 trillion global GDP in current US dollars for 2017, from the World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD. The “7.53 billion people” is the global population in 2017, 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 Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economics Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 20.  

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

Describing the 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 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.

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Irving Kristol, writing in 1977, expresses the typical economist’s view succinctly, dismissing public opinion polls purporting to measure business confidence: It is all supremely silly. Business confidence—as represented by the willingness to invest in new plant and equipment—is not a psychological phenomenon but an economic one. It is what Mr. Carter and what Mr. Burns do that counts, not what they say. John Maynard Keynes may have believed—and some of his disciples obviously still believe—that the propensity to invest is governed by the high or low “animal spirits” that prevail among businessmen. But then, Keynesian economists have always had a poor opinion of the intelligence of businessmen, whom they represent as temperamental children, to be paternalistically “managed.” … What governs business confidence are the prospects for profitable investment.

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In most cases, the communication was probably much more elementary and human. Economic historian Warren Young suspects that the contagion of the IS-LM diagram had something to do with its resemblance to the intersection of supply and demand that is perhaps the most famous image in all of economics.10 In addition, the IS-LM model was a formalization of John Maynard Keynes’s theory. Keynes was a brilliant writer, but as we have seen, many narratives are associated with celebrities. Keynes himself was a colorful figure and a celebrity in his own right: he hobnobbed with the Bloomsbury group of artists and intellectuals, among other celebrities (including the writer Virginia Woolf, who was embarking on her own epidemic of fame, which did not peak at least until near the end of the twentieth century, long after her death in 1941).

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

China frequently uses workers from home on foreign projects, to take advantage of lower costs and avoid the employment conditions of the host country. Conflicts, sometimes violent, with the local workforce are common. Workers, irrespective of profession and skill, now face what John Maynard Keynes termed technological unemployment. The process was championed as reducing low-skilled monotonous jobs and increasing employment mobility, as well as providing greater employment and lifestyle choices. Economists lauded the new knowledge/bioengineered/clean and green (delete as required) economy. The displaced workers would become highly educated and skilled, finding new, intellectually challenging and highly paid jobs.

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Ralph Mannheim, Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power, Houghton Mifflin, 1944, excerpted in Fritz Ringer, The German Inflation of 1923, Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 170. 2 See Michael Mackenzie, Dan McCrum, and Stephen Foley, “Bond Markets: A False Sense of Security,” Financial Times, 18 November 2012. 3 See Ralph Atkins and Martin Sandbu, “FT Interview Transcript: Jens Weidmann,” Financial Times, 13 November 2011. 4 See Ben McLannahan, “Japan Bonds Swing Wildly after BoJ Move,” Financial Times, 5 April 2013. 5 John Maynard Keynes, quoted in Robert Sidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937, Macmillan, 1992, p. 62. 6 Greg Smith, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” New York Times, 14 March 2012. 7 Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, University of California Press (1935) 1994, p. 109. 8 “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: The Role of Investment Banks,” Senate Hearing 111-674, vol. 4, 27 April 2010. www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111shrg57322/html/CHRG-111shrg57322.htm. 9 Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, 5 April 2010. 10 Liam Vaughan and Jesse Westbrook, “Barclays Big-Boy Breaches Mean Libor Fixes Not Enough,” Bloomberg, 29 June 2012. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-29/barclays-big-boy-breaches-mean-libor-fixes-not-enough. 11 Martin Arnold, “HSBC Shares Drop after Full-Year Profits Fall,” Financial Times, 23 February 2015. 12 Ferdinand Pecora, Wall Street under Oath, Simon & Schuster, 1939, p. 130. http://books.google.com.au/books?

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David Roche and Bob McKee, New Monetarism: New Edition, An Independent Strategy Publication, 2008. ——, Democrisis: Democracy Caused the Debt Crisis. Will It Survive It? An Independent Strategy Publication, 2012. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, Penguin, 2003. Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, Princeton University Press, 2013. David Wessel, In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic, Scribe Publications, 2010. Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis, Penguin, 2014.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

He described unemployment as something close to a mirage: “the army of the unemployed is no more unemployed than are firemen who wait in fire-houses for the alarm to sound, or the reserve police force ready to meet the next call.”14 The creative forces of capitalism, in short, required a supply of ready labor, which came from people displaced by previous instances of technological progress. John Maynard Keynes was less confident that things would always work out so well for workers. His 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” while mostly optimistic, nicely articulated the position of the second camp—that automation could in fact put people out of work permanently, especially if more and more things kept getting automated.

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We’re making things here in the U.S. that we’re shipping over to China. . . . We just need to make sure that we’ve . . . got the infrastructure in place to be able to handle the increased work.”25 There’s an interesting historical wrinkle in discussions about infrastructure investment. The legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, whose name is attached to a school of thought that advocates stimulus spending, famously suggested in 1936 that during recessions the government should put money in bottles, bury the bottles deep in old coal mines, then sell the rights to dig them up.26 Doing so, he argued only partly in jest, would “be better than nothing” because it would create demand during periods when labor and capital would otherwise go unused.

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John Bates Clark, Essentials of Economic Theory as Applied to Modern Problem of Industry and Public Policy, (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 45. 14. W. M. Leiserson, The Problem of Unemployment Today 31, Political Science Quarterly (1916), http://archive.org/details/jstor-2141701, p. 12. 15. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963), p. 358. 16. Linus Pauling, The Triple Revolution (Santa Barbara, CA: Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, 1964), http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/peace/papers/1964p.7-02.html. 17. Wassily Leontief, “National Perspective: The Definition of Problems and Opportunities,” The Long-Term Impact of Technology on Employment and Unemployment (National Academy of Engeneering, 1983): 3–7. 18.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

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 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 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.

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M. (1978), The 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 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), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (XXVII) Activities 1940–1946, Shaping the Post-War World: Employment and Commodities.

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London: Macmillan. Keynes, J. M. (1973a (1936)), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (VII) 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 of John Maynard Keynes (XIV) The General Theory and After, Part II: Defence and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

Arthur Burns, “Progress Towards Economic Stability,” American Economic Review 50, no. 3 (March 1960): 1–19. 22. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: 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, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

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The phrase “golden fetters,” as in, “It was not disaster which had befallen us, but a happy release; that the snapping 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, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 285. 21. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, New York: Penguin, 2005, 217–249. 22. Skidelsky, Keynes; P. J. Grigg, Prejudice and Judgment, London: Jonathan Cape, 1948, 183.

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Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address,” White House, President Barack 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 Press, 1982, 390. 31. Ben Bernanke, “The Near- and Longer-Term Prospects for the U.S. Economy,” August 26, 2011, archived at Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER), https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/statements-speeches-ben-s-bernanke-453/near-longer-term-prospects-us-economy-9116; Cf.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

“Capitalist production,” he warned, “develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the laborer.”27 In 1930, John Maynard Keynes contemplated “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”: We are being afflicted with a new disease of which 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. 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 for labour.28 Keynes foresaw only “a temporary phase of maladjustment.”

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It’s the kind of advice that any household should heed: if you can trim your spending to avoid running up your credit cards, you’ll be in a much healthier state. But when it comes to governments, the rules are not the same as for households. Governments have options that households do not. They can issue bonds, and they can increase the money supply. They can stimulate demand. The disciples of the legendary British economist John Maynard Keynes argue against the Austrian school. Pointing to the Great Depression, these economists advocate for reviving a sluggish economy with borrowed cash. Keynesians argue fiscal stimulus can prevent painful and damaging depression and insolvency. Keynes recognized the paradox of thrift. When one household owes more than it can manage, prudent families cut spending and increase savings as much as possible.

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Uncle Sam printed money and ramped up borrowing. Every dollar printed or borrowed eventually landed in someone’s pocket or bank account. In some circles this monetary action is anathema, but most economists agree that monetary and fiscal stimulus in the thirties arrested a devastating deflation. The painful lesson was clear, and John Maynard Keynes spelled it out in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, his epic tome that shaped economic strategies for battling deflation and depression. He endorsed massive monetary and fiscal stimulus that put money in the hands of consumers. Spending lifted revenues for businesses, which then hired more workers.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
by Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 23 Jan 2012

Creative Destruction: The Economics of Accelerating Technology and Disappearing Jobs We are being afflicted with a new disease of which 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. 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 for labour. —John Maynard Keynes, 1930 The individual technologies and the broader technological acceleration discussed in Chapter 2 are creating enormous value. There is no question that they increase productivity, and thus our collective wealth.

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. … Today, all … sectors of the economy … are experiencing technological displacement, forcing millions onto the unemployment roles.” Coping with this displacement, he wrote, was “likely to be the single most pressing social issue of the coming century.” The end-of-work argument has been made by, among many others, economist John Maynard Keynes, management theorist Peter Drucker, and Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief, who stated in 1983 that “the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”

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But there’s a limit to this adjustment. Shortly after the Luddites began smashing the machinery that they thought threatened their jobs, the economist David Ricardo, who initially thought that advances in technology would benefit all, developed an abstract model that showed the possibility of technological unemployment. The basic idea was that at some point, the equilibrium wages for workers might fall below the level needed for subsistence. A rational human would see no point in taking a job at a wage that low, so the worker would go unemployed and the work would be done by a machine instead. Of course, this was only an abstract model.

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

The idea that machines are about to eliminate the need for human work has been around for a long time, and it has been proven wrong again and again—enough times to earn the nickname the “Luddite fallacy” or “lump-of-labor fallacy.” In the early nineteenth century, Nottingham textile workers destroyed their looms to demand better work and better wages. (No need.) During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes surmised that technological advances would put an end to long hours spent in the office, in the field, or at the plant by 2030. (Alas, no.) In 1964, a group of public-intellectual activists, among them three Nobel laureates, warned the White House that “the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine” would foster “a separate nation of the poor, the unskilled, the jobless.”

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The Starship Enterprise exists not to fight or colonize or extract, but to explore. Esteem and respectability become social proxies for wealth. The universe is one of artisans, scholars, religious thinkers, and philosophers. Economists have long pondered such worlds of abundance. Indeed, John Maynard Keynes wrote a famed 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” predicting that such economies would be in reach by the year 2030: Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes—those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows.

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agriculture went from employing 40 percent: David Rotman, “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs,” MIT Technology Review, June 12, 2013. textile workers destroyed their looms: Richard Conniff, “What the Luddites Really Fought Against,” Smithsonian Magazine, Mar. 2011. an end to long hours: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358–73. “the combination of the computer”: Linus Pauling et al., “The Triple Revolution” (Santa Barbara, CA, The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, 1964), http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/​coll/​pauling/​peace/​papers/1964p.7-01.html.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

In the professions, though, our general view is that this (often nostalgic) preference for the old ways of working will be too high a price to pay, especially if the quality of service is demonstrably lower than that provided by a machine. 7.3. Technological unemployment? In 1930, speculating about ‘the economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, John Maynard Keynes introduced the concept of ‘technological unemployment’.23 The basic idea is simple—that new technologies might put people out of work. The question to which we now turn is whether there will be technological unemployment in the professions in the very long term. The short answer is, ‘there will’. We can find no economic law that will somehow secure employment for professionals in the face of increasingly capable machines.24 However, it is uncertain how extensive the job-loss will be.

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David Musson has been an ongoing source of encouragement and of wise counsel; and we are grateful also at OUP to Kim Behrens, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, Phil Henderson, and Clare Kennedy for their enthusiasm and professionalism. Thank you also to Jeff New for his superb copy-editing. The epigraph by John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), © The Royal Economic Society, published by Cambridge University Press, is reproduced with permission. Alan Susskind reviewed the entire manuscript. His observations and his ongoing support were very much appreciated. At the same time, Werner Susskind merits special mention for keeping us fully supplied with relevant articles from the BMJ.

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Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot. John Stuart Mill The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes Contents List of Boxes and Figure Introduction PART I. CHANGE 1. The Grand Bargain 1.1 Everyday conceptions 1.2 The scope of the professions 1.3 Historical context 1.4 The bargain explained 1.5 Theories of the professions 1.6 Four central questions 1.7 Disconcerting problems 1.8 A new mindset 1.9 Some common biases 2.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

By contrast, economists at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris undertook a similar exercise and estimated that only 9 percent of jobs are truly threatened. These empirical disagreements mirror the overhyped rhetoric that always seems to accompany a new wave of technological change. In the 1930s, the English economist John Maynard Keynes worried aloud that “we are being afflicted with a new disease of which 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.” Two decades later, the Harvard economist Wassily Leontief opined, “I do not see that the new industries can employ everybody who wants a job.” But for everyone worried about mass unemployment, there are those with a more optimistic take.

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only 9 percent of jobs are truly threatened: “Automation and Independent Work in a Digital Economy,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, May 2016, https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/Policy%20brief%20-%20Automation%20and%20Independent%20Work%20in%20a%20Digital%20Economy.pdf. “technological unemployment”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963), 358–83. Harvard economist Wassily Leontief: Charlotte Curtis, “Machines vs. Workers,” New York Times, February 8, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/08/arts/machines-vs-workers.html.

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“stultifying utilitarianism”: Farhad Manjoo, “The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable,” New York Times, May 28, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/personaltech/the-soylent-revolution-will-not-be-pleasurable.html. “Imagine a meal”: Sam Sifton, “The Taste That Doesn’t Really Satisfy,” New York Times, May 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/technology/the-taste-that-doesnt-really-satisfy.html. “The ideas of economists”: John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, vol. 7, The General Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 383. “tool for solving”: Thomas H. Cormen et al., Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 5. George Dantzig: George B. Dantzig, “Linear Programming,” Operations Research 50, no. 1 (February 2002): 42–47, https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.50.1.42.17798.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

Productivity Growth Versus Compensation Growth SOURCE: US Bureau of Labor Statistics.14 A Bear Market for Labor’s Share, and a Raging Bull for Corporations Early in the twentieth century, the British economist and statistician Arthur Bowley delved into decades of national income data for the United Kingdom and showed that the fraction of national income going to labor and capital respectively remained relatively constant, at least over long periods. This apparently fixed relationship ultimately became an accepted economic principle known as “Bowley’s Law.” John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most famous economist of all time, would later say that Bowley’s Law was “one of the most surprising, yet best established facts in the whole range of economic statistics.”17 As Figure 2.3 shows, during the postwar period, the share of US national income going to labor moved in a fairly tight range, just as Bowley’s Law would have predicted.

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More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.”15 I think there are good reasons to be concerned about a similar failure of the economists’ mathematical models as the exponential advance of information technology increasingly disrupts the economy. Adding to the problem is that many of these models employ simplistic—and in some cases seemingly absurd—assumptions about the way consumers, workers, and businesses behave and interact. John Maynard Keynes may have said it best, writing nearly eighty years ago in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the book that arguably founded economics as a modern field of study: “Too large a proportion of recent ‘mathematical’ economics are merely concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.”16 Complexity, Feedback Effects, Consumer Behavior, and “Where Is That Soaring Productivity?”

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Taylor is a very highly regarded economist, known especially for the “Taylor Rule,” a monetary policy guideline used by central banks (including the Federal Reserve) to set interest rates. 16. Robert H. Frank and Ben S. Bernanke, Principles of Economics, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw Hill/Irwin, 2007), pp. 596–597. 17. John Maynard Keynes, as quoted in David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 294. 18. Labor Share Graph, Data Source: FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: Nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Share, Index 2009=100, Seasonally Adjusted [PRS85006173]; US Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics; https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PRS85006173; accessed April 29, 2014.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl
Published 7 May 2018

Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (Oxford University Press 2005), 109. epilogue 1. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 21. 2. Ibid., 325. 3. President John F. Kennedy, News Conference 24 (14 February 1962), https://www. jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/Press-Conferences/ News-Conference-24.aspx, archived at https://perma.cc/LDS6-Y8X7 4. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 325. 5.

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For the industry to operate to everyone’s benefit, however, we need to ensure that platforms can no longer arbitrage around existing rules and have to bear the cost of their operations. Employment law is the key to equitable conditions for all workers, and equal competition amongst businesses new and old. * * * * * * Epilogue Amidst the economic depression of the 1930s, Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes penned a note about the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. Where others saw stagnation and decline, he predicted prosperity and development. Unprecedented technological improvements in manufacture and transport were key to this vision. In the long term, the resulting productivity gains would bring manifold improvements in living standards for all.

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In the short term, however, ‘the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve’:1 We are being afflicted with a new disease of which 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. 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 for labour.2 Similar fears have been voiced throughout the past century. President Kennedy, for example, regarded maintaining full employment ‘as the major domestic challenge, really, of the ’60s . . . when automation, of course, is replacing men’.3 Reality, however, couldn’t be further from vision of ‘three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week’.4 What happened?

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

By the last decade of the twentieth century, a disproportionate share of the Nobel Prizes in economics were going to economists of the Chicago School, whether located on the University of Chicago campus or at 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 the first time that someone no longer living was honored in this way. There was also an accompanying story inside the magazine: Time quoted Milton Friedman, our leading non-Keynesian economist, as saying, “We are all Keynesians now.”

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{xlii} Marshall’s Principles of Economics was still being used as a textbook in 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 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 Chapter 17, during the Great Depression of the 1930s successive American administrations of both political parties sought to maintain high wage rates per unit of time as a way of maintaining labor’s “purchasing power”—which depends on the aggregate earnings of workers.

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Despite all the problems with comparisons of national output between very different countries or between time periods far removed from one another, Gross Domestic Product statistics provide a reasonable, though rough, basis for comparing similar countries at the same time—especially when population size differences are taken into account by comparing Gross Domestic Product per capita. Thus, when the data show that the Gross Domestic Product per capita in Norway in 2009 was more than double what it was in Italy that 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 of well-being but that is impossible. The old saying that money cannot buy happiness is no doubt true. However, opinion polls around the world indicate some rough correlation between national prosperity and personal satisfaction.{552} Nevertheless, correlation is not causation, as statisticians often warn, and it is possible that some of the same factors which promote happiness—security and freedom, for example—also promote economic prosperity.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

We need, however, to also recognize and manage the negative impacts it can have, particularly with regard to inequality, employment and labour markets. 3.1.2 Employment Despite the potential positive impact of technology on economic growth, it is nonetheless essential to address its possible negative impact, at least in the short term, on the labour market. Fears about the impact of technology on jobs are not new. In 1931, the economist John Maynard Keynes famously warned about widespread technological unemployment “due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”.22 This proved to be wrong but what if this time it were true? Over the past few years, the debate has been reignited by evidence of computers substituting for a number of jobs, most notably bookkeepers, cashiers and telephone operators.

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http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2015/february/economic-growth-information-technology-factor-productivity/ 21 The economist Brad DeLong makes this point in: J. Bradford DeLong, “Making Do With More”, Project Syndicate, 26 February 2015. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/abundance-without-living-standards-growth-by-j--bradford-delong-2015-02 22 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” in Essays in Persuasion, Harcourt Brace, 1931. 23 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?”, Oxford Martin School, Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, University of Oxford, 17 September 2013. http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf 24 Shelley Podolny, “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?”

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There are roughly two opposing camps when it comes to the impact of emerging technologies on the labour market: those who believe in a happy ending – in which workers displaced by technology will find new jobs, and where technology will unleash a new era of prosperity; and those who believe it will lead to a progressive social and political Armageddon by creating technological unemployment on a massive scale. History shows that the outcome is likely to be somewhere in the middle. The question is: What should we do to foster more positive outcomes and help those caught in the transition? It has always been the case that technological innovation destroys some jobs, which it replaces in turn with new ones in a different activity and possibly in another place.

The Lights in the Tunnel
by Martin Ford
Published 28 May 2011

Keynesian Grandchildren While few contemporary economists seem particularly concerned about the seemingly inevitable transition to an automated economy, one legendary economist did have remarkable insight into the future. In 1930, as the world plunged into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”52 In his essay, Keynes coined the term “technological unemployment,” writing: We are being inflicted with a new disease of which some readers many not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—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 for labour.* *[ Today, when economists discuss the causes of the Great Depression, they tend to focus almost exclusively on the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.

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Not Much”, New York Times, August 30, 2005, web: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/science/30profile.html 51 See Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, a book based on an article in Wired Magazine, October 2004. Web: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html 52 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” (written in 1930), Essays in Persuasion, New York, W.W. Norton, 1963. Web: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf p. 195 footnote, Einstein’s view on technological unemployment, see: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2007, p.403. Chapter 5: The Green Light 53 For more on the challenges of addressing poverty, see: William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002.

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While there is little double that the overly restrictive policies of the Fed prolonged the Depression and perhaps turned a run of the mill recession into a disaster, it should not be forgotten that there was a widespread belief at the time that the technological unemployment (and the resulting plunge in consumer demand) that Keynes spoke of played an important role. Even Albert Einstein expressed this opinion when asked for his take on the causes of the Depression during a visit to the United States in 1933. ] Keynes recognized that, in 1930, technological unemployment would be a temporary phenomenon and that the economy would eventually absorb the excess workers. The main thrust of his essay was to attempt to look much further into the future.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

It was he who claimed to see the contours of a new world at the precise moment industrial capitalism burned at its brightest. That is not to say Marx was unique in thinking capitalism would end, nor that it would transition to something else. Indeed in this respect he was joined by, among others, two thinkers of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes and Peter Drucker, who despite being critics of his held similar views on how capitalism might lead to a system beyond it. By placing Marx alongside both thinkers, examining how each viewed the relationship of scarcity to capitalism and utopia, we can begin to create a clearer picture of what he meant by communism.

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So as information, labour, energy and resources become permanently cheaper – and work and the limits of the old world are left behind – it turns out we don’t just satisfy all of our needs, but dissolve any boundary between the useful and the beautiful. Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism. Post-Capitalism without Communism: J. M. Keynes Marx was far from alone in claiming that capitalism creates the conditions for a society beyond it. Indeed, he was joined by the most influential economist of the twentieth century: John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was by no means a radical, let alone a revolutionary. And yet in 1930, in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash and the start of what would become the Great Depression, he penned the most optimistic tract of his age, Letter on the Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren. In this short, self-assured essay Keynes outlined a new society which he viewed as not only desirable, but inevitable.

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For Fukuyama the end of history signalled a world defined by economic calculation and ‘the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands’. And yet the present moment, defined by challenges such as rising temperatures, technological unemployment, income inequality and societal ageing – to name just a few – poses questions which extend beyond mere technical competence. If Fukuyama’s words were naive in 1992, then in the decade that followed the financial crisis of 2008 they became positively ridiculous. Indeed, he admitted as much in a book he published on identity in 2018.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

“The fact is, that monopoly…” is from Thelwall (1796, 21), and a partial version is in Thompson (1966, 185). Chapter 1: Control over Technology It is useful to briefly review the historical debates surrounding the notion of technological unemployment and David Ricardo’s views on machinery, which are discussed in this chapter. The idea of technological unemployment resulting from improvements in production methods is often attributed to John Maynard Keynes (1930 [1966]). In reality, this idea significantly predates Keynes. Several authors in the eighteenth century worried about labor-displacing technological change. Thomas Mortimer wrote about this possibility in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution (Mortimer 1772).

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Nevertheless, the burdens of knowledge were not seen as insurmountable by a generation becoming confident that technology could solve all problems. Humanity was wise enough to control the use of its knowledge, and if there were social costs of being so innovative, the solution was to invent even more useful things. There were lingering concerns about “technological unemployment,” a term coined by the economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930 to capture the possibility that new production methods could reduce the need for human labor and contribute to mass unemployment. Keynes understood that industrial techniques would continue to improve rapidly but also argued, “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 for labour.”

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Robust postwar US growth did not immediately guarantee that these technologies would benefit workers. The sharing of prosperity was contested from the day World War II came to an end. Ensuring that economic growth benefited a broad cross section of society took hard work, as we explain next. Clash over Automation and Wages Concerns about technological unemployment voiced by John Maynard Keynes, discussed in Chapter 1, were perhaps even more relevant in the decades following World War II. Machine tools continued to improve, and striking advances in numerically controlled machinery built on and perfected the ideas that dated back to Jacquard’s loom. Designed by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1804, this loom was one of the most important weaving automation devices of the nineteenth century, performing tasks that even skilled weavers found challenging.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

They were protesting against increasing automation, which they claimed was resulting in layoffs and an inhumane increase in what managers expected of workers.3 In other words, we’ve seen the ‘rise of the robots’ before. Anxieties like these usually crop up during periods of rapid technological change. And it’s not just the workers themselves. The economist John Maynard Keynes popularised the idea of ‘technological unemployment’ in 1928, when he noted, ‘The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption’ – that is, the ability to find work for workers.4 Now we have entered the Exponential Age, new technology appears to be challenging workers’ raison d’être once again.

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There was a century where workers lagged behind the gains; an uncomfortable century, even if it worked out in the end.82 ‘Worked out in the end’ are five very easy words to write. But they represent decades of catch-up – papering over lives where incomes didn’t grow, and quality of life fell relative to the strength of the economy. As John Maynard Keynes put it, ‘In the long run we are all dead.’83 In the meantime, there will be pernicious chasms in the labour market, between the changes wrought by new technology and the norms and laws that govern the workplace. But it is not too late to redesign the economy to close this widening gap. As so often in the Exponential Age, even as disruptive new technologies take off, remoulding our economy and society in the process, so too do new ideas about how we might adapt.

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CHAPTER 5: LABOUR’S LOVES LOST 1 Larry Elliott, ‘Millions of UK Workers at Risk of Being Replaced by Robots’, The Guardian, 24 March 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/24/millions-uk-workers-risk-replaced-robots-study-warns>. 2 Alex Williams, ‘Will Robots Take Our Children’s Jobs?’, New York Times, 11 December 2017 <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/style/robots-jobs-children.html>. 3 ‘Labor: Sabotage at Lordstown?’, Time, 7 February 1972 <http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,905747,00.html> [accessed 3 April 2021]. 4 John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), pp. 321–332 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-59072-8_25>. 5 Creative Destruction Lab, ‘Geoff Hinton: On Radiology’, 24 November 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ> [accessed 24 February 2021]. 6 Paul Daugherty, H.

Basic Income And The Left
by henningmeyer
Published 16 May 2018

income and, in the case of Europe, how such a Second, if there is large-scale technological unem‐ system would be compatible with the European ployment, re-allocating the remaining work should Union’s freedom of movement and non-discrimina‐ be a first step. It might not be the 15-hour work tion rules. In many countries, moreover, it would week that John Maynard Keynes envisaged for his not be easy at all to abolish current pension grandchildren but where possible such a policy systems – also an effect of basic income – as these would make sense and be a first re-balancing tool. embrace strict legal entitlements. Third, public policy-makers should be thinking about job guarantee schemes that would comple‐ A Handful Of Alternatives For all these reasons, the basic income does not look like a suitable policy response to the threat of tech‐ nological unemployment.

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The current use of social policy to control the individual’s contact with the labour market atomises individuals and NO NEED FOR BASIC INCOME: FIVE POLICIES TO DEAL WITH THE THREAT OF TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT segments society. Basic income has the potential to BY HENNING MEYER (27 MARCH 2017) enable a new set of more direct relationships among citizens, and a more balanced relation of citizens with the state. The potential threat of technological unemployment is one of the most hotly debated economic issues of our times: in boardrooms and trade union offices but also increasingly amongst policy-makers. The catch-all term ‘digital’ may have been added to numerous political concepts in recent years but beyond such branding there has been very little debate of substance about what a comprehensive policy response to this threat should be.

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Universal Basic Income: A Disarmingly Simple Idea – And Fad 10. Unconditional Basic Income Is A Dead End 11. Basic Income Is A Tonic Catalyser: A Response To Anke Hassel 12. Basic Income And Institutional Transformation 13. No Need For Basic Income: Five Policies To Deal With The Threat Of Technological Unemployment 14. Citizen’s Income: Both Feasible And Useful 15. UBI: A Bad Idea For The Welfare State 16. What Is An Unconditional Basic Income? A Response To Rothstein v 1 5 AUTHORS 12 21 28 37 45 Louise Haagh is a Reader in Politics at the Univer‐ sity of York, co-editor of the academic journal Basic 52 Income Studies and chair of the Basic Income Earth Network.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

The basic plot, if you will allow a simplification, in much of the intellectual history of the world centers around the battle between new discoveries and old dogma, and the former tends to win over the latter – not immediately, not in the short run, perhaps not even in the medium term, but in the long run new discoveries often do win. However, in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes noted, we are all dead. Political romanticism better suits a historian of ideas than a scholar of contemporary politics and economics. The judgment about the Danes in 1066 and All That, the humorous version of English history, does not apply to economic policy: you cannot be both “right and very romantic.”14 Innovation delayed is innovation denied.

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Political leaders worried that with the seemingly unlimited productive capabilities of the new machines being developed, there would not be the same amount of demand for labor in the future. Richard Bellman, mathematician and father of dynamic programming, concluded in 1964 that technological advances thus far implied that it would take only 2 percent of the working population to produce what was needed for the American population. The British economist John Maynard Keynes had previously expressed a similar sentiment, arguing that technological development would result in an abundance of leisure time as Westerners would only have to work 15 hours a week.8 Bellman went much further and predicted that his 2 percent scenario would happen within 25 years from the time of writing, and would be more likely to occur within 10 years.9 Futurist Herman Kahn – the founder of the Hudson Institute, and famous for inspiring Kubrick’s character of Dr.

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Wired, May 22, 2009. At http://archive.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all. Kelly, Thomas, “Sunk Costs, Rationality, and Acting for the Sake of the Past.” Noûs, 38.1 (2004): 60–85. Keynes, John Maynard, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930). In John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. Norton, 1963. Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy. Harvard Business School Press, 2005. Klein, Naomi, No Logo. Fourth Estate, 2010. Kleiner, Morris M., “Reforming Occupational Licensing Policies.” Hamilton Project Discussion Paper 2015-1. Brookings, Mar. 2015.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

In some ways, it rendered the utopian vision of progress more vivid, more necessary. The more we saw machines as our foes, the more we yearned for them to be our friends. “We are being afflicted,” wrote the great British economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, “with a new disease of which 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.” The ability of machines to take over jobs had outpaced the economy’s ability to create valuable new work for people to do. But the problem, Keynes assured his readers, was merely a symptom of “a temporary phase of maladjustment.”

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Levasseur, “The Concentration of Industry, and Machinery in the United States,” Publications of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 193 (1897): 178–197. 16.Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (Ware, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 1051. 17.Quoted in Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 117–118. 18.Ibid., 50. 19.Ibid., 55. 20.John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–373. 21.John F. Kennedy, “Remarks at the Wheeling Stadium,” in John F. Kennedy: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President (Washington, D.C.: U.S.

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Although Brynjolfsson and McAfee were anything but technophobes—they remained “hugely optimistic” about the ability of computers and robots to boost productivity and improve people’s lives over the long run—they made a strong case that technological unemployment was real, that it had become pervasive, and that it would likely get much worse. Human beings, they warned, were losing the race against the machine.24 Their ebook was like a match thrown onto a dry field. It sparked a vigorous and sometimes caustic debate among economists, a debate that soon drew the attention of journalists. The phrase “technological unemployment,” which had faded from use after the Great Depression, took a new grip on the public mind. At the start of 2013, the TV news program 60 Minutes ran a segment, called “March of the Machines,” that examined how businesses were using new technologies in place of workers at warehouses, hospitals, law firms, and manufacturing plants.

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
by Richard D. Wolff
Published 1 Oct 2012

The establishment prefers to wait rather than to pay the costs of a government intervention sufficient to overcome the crisis. Capitalism, it insists, will eventually produce an economic upturn. An alternative, though predictable and inadequate, program has come from the still-small but growing coterie of Keynesians. They have been reinvigorated by this crisis much as John Maynard Keynes’s intervention, their inspiration, was produced by the 1930s crisis. They want a much bigger government fiscal stimulus paid for by bigger temporary budget deficits. They insist that the rising national debt can easily be offset later, once robust economic growth resumes. They are quite confident that a bigger stimulus will solve what they see as the problem: returning to a “normal” capitalism from a crisis-ridden capitalism.

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Its oscillations take many names, from downturns, busts, deflations, contractions, recessions, and depressions to upturns, booms, inflations, expansions, and prosperity. Professional economists have had to admit that capitalism displays endemic “business cycles” but keep hoping that something might be done to prevent them or at least to keep them from undermining the system. Many economists have built on the work of John Maynard Keynes to assert that the proper exercise of monetary and fiscal policies by government can realize that hope. Politicians have taken that assertion another step. In the United States, every president who presided over a cyclical downturn promised that his economic interventions (his mix of monetary and fiscal policies) would not only end that downturn but would ensure that we would not have another in the future.

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The extent to which worker-directors are also rotated through management functions would further differentiate a WSDE-based economy from capitalism. To take a final example, consider that an economic system built upon WSDEs might well be generally concerned about slipping back toward a capitalist system. To that end, it would seek to avoid crises or cycles of the sorts caused in capitalism by overproduction, underconsumption, technological unemployment, and so on. It would work to overcome the social problems created under capitalism when an enterprise discovers a new way to produce output with less labor input, encounters a loss of public desire for its products, or finds that it has overestimated the demand for its output. One way to accomplish this would be to create a fund (by surplus distributions from WSDE boards) and a government agency to administer it.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu
Published 15 Jun 2020

Getting these protections right—so that they favour those at risk of precarity or market exclusion, rather than those who dominate them—can also improve productivity and benefit the whole economy. 8 Macroeconomic Policy for the Left Behind The remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the so-called boom to last. The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom. —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, 19361 The end of belonging in Western economies started many decades ago. It was the product of deep, slow-moving forces—above all, technological change—and a permanent improvement will require equally long-term policies. But a programme for a new economics of belonging should start by ensuring that misguided short-term policies do not add to the chronic problems—a sort of Hippocratic do-no-harm oath for economic policy makers.

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Poor macroeconomic policy can on its own directly undermine the economic social contract. The costs of mismanaged aggregate demand fall disproportionately on those on the margins of the economy, hurting the already left behind or adding new victims to their ranks. That is what happened after the downturn triggered by the global financial crisis of 2008. As John Maynard Keynes insisted more than eighty years ago, macroeconomic policy must aim to make good economic times last as long as possible and, conversely, to end recessions as fast as can be done. For a short moment in April 2009, world leaders lived up to this standard. Assembled for a summit in London, they committed to a coordinated stimulus of their economies, using both government budgets and central bank policies to reverse the collapse in economic activity and get the global economy back to growth.

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David Mardiste, “Embracing Uber, Estonia Shows Tax Needn’t Be an Issue,” Reuters, 9 June 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-estonia-uber/embracing-uber-estonia-shows-tax-neednt-be-an-issue-idUSKCN0YV1PS. 33. “Now You Can Pay Your Taxes in One Click,” e-Estonia, April 2017, https://e-estonia.com/now-you-can-pay-your-taxes-in-one-click/. 34. See “About Entur,” Entur, accessed 6 December 2019, https://www.entur.org/about-entur/. Chapter 8. Macroeconomic Policy for the Left Behind 1. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, chap. 22. 2. Martin Sandbu, “The Left Behind Have Most to Lose from Timid Macroeconomic Policy,” Financial Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/5322ec9a-1008-11e9-acdc-4d9976f1533b. For the United Kingdom, see Cara Pacitti and James Smith, A Problem Shared?

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

Many, though not all, of the old guard in the commercial arena can’t imagine how economic life would proceed in a world where most goods and services are nearly free, profit is defunct, property is meaningless, and the market is superfluous. What then? Some are just beginning to ask that question. They might find some solace in the fact that several of the great architects of modern economic thinking glimpsed the problem long ago. John Maynard Keynes, Robert Heilbroner, and Wassily Leontief, to name a few, pondered the critical contradiction that drove capitalism forward. They wondered whether, in the distant future, new technologies might so boost productivity and lower prices as to create the coming state of affairs. Oskar Lange, a University of Chicago professor of the early twentieth century, captured a sense of the conundrum underlying a mature capitalism in which the search for new technological innovations to advance productivity and cheapen prices put the system at war with itself.

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He saw, however, an inherent contradiction in the organizational logic of mass production that limited its promise. Gandhi reasoned that “if all countries adopted the system of mass production, there would not be a big enough market for their products. Mass production must then come to a stop.”48 Like Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Wassily Leontief, Robert Heilbroner, and other distinguished economists, he argued that the capitalists’ desire for efficiency and productivity would result in an unyielding drive to replace human labor with automation, leaving more and more people unemployed and without sufficient purchasing power to buy the products being produced.

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But this aside, the Johns Hopkins study of 42 countries revealed that contrary to the view of many economists, approximately 50 percent of the aggregate revenue of the nonprofit sector operating on the Commons already comes from fees for services, while government support accounts for only 36 percent of the revenues, and private philanthropy for only 14 percent.43 I expect that by midcentury, if not much sooner, a majority of the employed around the world will be in the nonprofit sector on the Collaborative Commons, busily engaged in advancing the social economy, and purchasing at least some of their goods and services in the conventional marketplace. The traditional capitalist economy will be managed by intelligent technology attended by small professional and technical workforces. John Maynard Keynes’s futurist essay, written more than 80 years ago for his grandchildren and alluded to in chapter 1, envisioned a world where machines have freed up human beings from toil in the marketplace to engage in deep cultural play on the Commons in the pursuit of more lofty and transcendent goals. It might prove to be his most accurate economic forecast.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power, the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonising the economy, space travel, robot economies – all the traditional touchstones of science fiction – in order to prepare for a day beyond capitalism. Neoliberalism, as secure as it may seem today, contains no guarantee of future survival. Like every social system we have ever known, it will not last forever. Our task now is to invent what happens next. Notes INTRODUCTION 1.John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963); George Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mark Dery, ‘Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R.

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, Organization, 2013, at sagepub.com. 58.Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 115–17; Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, p. 76. 59.Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend, p. 133. 60.Hunnicutt, Work Without End, p. 1. 61.Ibid., p. 155. 62.Ibid., pp. 147–9. 63.Paul Lafargue, ‘The Right to Be Lazy’, in Bernard Marszalek, ed., The Right to Be Lazy: Essays by Paul Lafargue (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), p. 34. 64.John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963); Hunnicutt, Work Without End, p. 155. 65.Marx, Capital, Volume III, p. 820. 66.Hunnicutt, Work Without End, Chapter 7. 67.A handful of EU countries – most notably France – have reduced the working week to as little as thirty-five hours, but the overall trend has been to maintain a forty-hour working week.

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In a third situation, labour-saving technologies can be of such general use that they diffuse across the entire economy, dampening the overall demand for labour.24 In this circumstance, even if new industries are created, they will require increasingly less labour because these technologies have a wide range of applicability.25 If any of the above conditions hold, then technological change can lead to increased unemployment. As we will see, there are good reasons to believe a number of these conditions do hold. But while technological unemployment is the most prominent reason today for swelling surplus populations, it is not the only one. Another mechanism that actively changes the size of the surplus is one we have already noted: primitive accumulation.26 This is not just an origin story of capitalism, but also an ongoing process that involves the transformation of pre-capitalist subsistence economies into capitalist economies.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

They were slicing up the mortgages and gluing them back together into structured products called “Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities”—RMBS in the jargon—that they sold to other financial institutions, who often had no idea of what they contained. By 2007 the mortgage-backed securities market was worth $6.9 trillion, from $3 trillion in 2000. This euphoria had little to do with hard-nosed analysis of the “real” value of homes. Some eighty years ago the great British economist John Maynard Keynes provided a subtle explanation of how investors can take prices badly astray. In his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes compared picking stocks to a reverse beauty contest in which investors didn’t have to choose the most beautiful face but the face that was most popular among other investors.

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The description of new high-tech mortgages and the boom of mortgage-backed securities is in Jane Dokko, Brian Doyle, Michael Kiley, Jinill Kim, Shane Sherlund, Jae Sim, and Skander Van den Heuvel, “Monetary Policy and the Housing Bubble,” Federal Reserve Board, Finance and Economics Discussion Series, December 22, 2009. Keynes’s description of the reverse beauty contest is in John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2006), p. 140. Charles Prince’s view of dancing is reported in Michiyo Nakamoto and David Wighton, “Citigroup Chief Stays Bullish on Buy-outs,” Financial Times, July 9, 2007. 233-236 Should We Pop Them?

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The tally of countries that have escaped banking crises is by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, “Banking Crises: An Equal Opportunity Menace,” NBER Working Paper, December 2008. 236-239 What Rationality?: Eugene Fama’s quote is in Douglas Clement, “Interview with Eugene Fama,” The Region, Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota, December 2007. Keynes’s quote is in John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965), p. 161. Robert Shiller’s theory is described in George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 240-246 Economics for a New World: Limits to the assumption of human rationality and self-regard are discussed in Herbert Gintis, “Five Principles for the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences,” Working Paper, May 13, 2008.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

It’s important to be clear that the Depression was the result of a massive failure of the financial system and not due to the automation of work that was proceeding apace in the nation’s factories. Still, the potential threat to jobs that automation also posed had certainly been noted. John Maynard Keynes, most famously, diagnosed in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” what he called a “new disease” in the world’s largest economies. He called it “technological unemployment” and explained that it was “due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” And a clever YouTube video, “No Humans Need Apply,” points out that it wouldn’t be that difficult for automation to lead to the same levels of unemployment—about 25 percent in the United States—found in the Depression.

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And it can let you keep your job, while making it a better one. Whatever Happened to the Fifteen-Hour Workweek? If you were reading this book half a century ago, you might be very surprised to find us referring to augmentation as something that would help you retain your work, not be rid of it. In 1928, John Maynard Keynes penned an essay he titled “Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren,” which argued that decades of productivity and technology improvements would leave those progeny with a new kind of problem: figuring out what to do with their vast leisure time. He wrote: “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won.”9 Keynes expected that by now we’d all be working about fifteen hours per week.

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Maddy Myers, “Google Glass: Inspired by Terminator,” Slice of MIT, May 30, 2013, https://slice.mit.edu/2013/05/30/google-glass-inspired-by-terminator/. 7. David Scott, remarks at the opening of the Computer Museum, June 10, 1982, transcript accessed October 29, 2015, http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/ech/agc_scott.pdf. 8. David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 9. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Norton, 1963), 358–73. 10. David H. Autor, “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth,” prepared for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s economic policy symposium on “Reevaluating Labor Market Dynamics,” September 3, 2014, http://economics.mit.edu/files/9835. 11.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

But rule changes will not be enough in and of themselves. The other correlated parts that have to change to reduce cultural lag are our systems of governance, beliefs, habits, cultural norms, and values. Almost a century ago John Maynard Keynes foresaw many of the economic and cultural challenges we are now facing. Keynes was deeply worried about a new societal dysfunction—technological unemployment (what he called job loss due to automation).6 He knew then, just as we know now, how difficult it would be for people who were threatened by change to adapt to it, and he accurately foresaw the stresses that rapid increases in productivity would exert on our value system.

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“Gilgamesh and Civilization,” Chamelionfire1, December 17, 2013, https://chameleonfire1.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/gilgamesh-and-civilization/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 5. “Fintech, the Incredible Growth of P2P (Peer to Peer) in China,” Marketing to China, September 22, 2017, https://www.marketingtochina.com/fintech-incredible-growth-p2p-peer-peer-china/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 6. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Marxists.org, 1930, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm (accessed June 28, 2019). 7. Ibid. 8. “What Does Voluntary Compliance Mean, in Regard to Taxes?,” Optima Tax Relief, July 29, 2014, https://www.optimataxrelief.com/voluntary-compliance-mean-regards-taxes/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 9.

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In quite a few years—in our own lifetimes I mean—we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed. For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve…. We are being afflicted with a new disease … namely, technological unemployment…. … I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day…. … This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race…. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Despite Wiener’s early efforts to play a technological Paul Revere, after the automation debates of the 1950s and 1960s tailed off, fears of unemployment caused by technology would vanish from the public consciousness until sometime around 2011. Mainstream economists generally agreed on what they described as the “Luddite fallacy.” As early as 1930, John Maynard Keynes had articulated the general view on the broad impact of new technology: “We are being afflicted with a new disease of which 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. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor. But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment.”21 Keynes was early to point out that technology was a powerful generator of new categories of employment.

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News & World Report, February 24, 1964, http://21stcenturywiener.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Machines-Smarter-Than-Man-Interview-with-Norbert-Wiener.pdf. 20.Defense Science Board, “The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems,” U.S. Department of Defense, July 2012, http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/AutonomyReport.pdf. 21.John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1963), 358–373. 22.Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Putnam, 1995), xvii. 23.John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?

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A 2014 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed the trend, and yet Henry Siu, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the authors of the report, clung to the conventional Keynesian view on technological unemployment. He explained: “Over the very long run, technological progress is good for everybody, but over shorter time horizons, it’s not that everybody’s a winner.”1 It is probably worth noting that Keynes also pointed out that in the long run, we are all dead. Indeed, Keynes’s actuarial logic is impeccable, but his economic logic is now under assault. There is an emerging perspective among technologists and some economists that Keynesian assumptions about technological unemployment—that individual jobs are lost but the overall amount of work stays constant—no longer hold true.

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

,” New Left Review, no. 87, S2, May–June 2014. 6 Emre Tiftik et al., “Global Debt Monitor: Sustainability Matters,” Institute of International Finance, January 13, 2020, quoted in John Plender, “The Seeds of the Next Debt Crisis,” Financial Times, March 3, 2020. 7 Data on economic growth rates from World Bank, World Development Indicators, last updated April 2020. 8 Dan McCrum, “Lex in Depth: The Case against Share Buybacks,” Financial Times, January 29, 2019. 9 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion, Harcourt Brace, 1932; The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Harcourt, 1964 [1936], pp. 320–6; 374–7. See Geoff Mann, In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution, Verso, 2017. 10 Keynes, General Theory, 376.

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Would we be able to adapt our institutions to realize the dream of human freedom that a new age of intelligent machines might make possible? Or would that dream turn out to be a nightmare of mass technological unemployment? In two New Left Review articles published in 2019, I identified a new automation discourse propounded by liberal, right-wing, and left analysts alike. Asking just these sorts of questions, automation theorists arrive at a provocative conclusion: mass technological unemployment is coming and can be managed only by the provision of universal basic income, since large sections of the population will lose access to the wages they need to survive.

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However, over the past decade, this talk has crystalized into an influential social theory that purports not only to analyze current technologies and predict their future, but also to explore the consequences of technological change for society at large. The automation discourse rests on four principal propositions. First, it argues, workers are already being displaced by ever more advanced machines, resulting in rising levels of “technological unemployment.” Second, this displacement is a sure sign that we are on the verge of achieving a largely automated society, in which nearly all work will be performed by self-moving machines and intelligent computers. Third, although automation should entail humanity’s collective liberation from toil, we live in a society where most people must work in order to live, meaning this dream may well turn out to be a nightmare.4 Fourth, therefore, the only way to prevent a mass-unemployment catastrophe—like the one unfolding in the United States in 2020, although for very different reasons—is to institute a universal basic income (UBI), breaking the connection between the size of the incomes people earn and the amount of work they do.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

As we saw in chapter 1, the word “computer” originally meant a person who does calculations, but the days when offices were filled with battalions of young (usually male) human computers are long gone. The humble PC has also removed the need for legions of (usually female) secretaries. The fear that automation would lead to mass unemployment is not new. In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote “We are being afflicted with a new disease of which 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. 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 for labour.” (19) Decades later, in the late 1970s, a powerful BBC Horizon documentary called Now the Chips are Down alerted a new generation to the idea (and showcased some truly appalling ties.) (20) Up to now the replacement of humans by machines has been a gradual process.

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Throughout, Surviving AI remains clear and jargon-free, enabling newcomers to the subject to understand why many of today’s most prominent thinkers have felt compelled to speak out publicly about it. David Wood, chair, London Futurists Artificial intelligence is the most important technology of our era. Technological unemployment could force us to adopt an entirely new economic structure, and the creation of superintelligence would be the biggest event in human history. Surviving AI is a first-class introduction to all of this. Brad Feld, co-founder Techstars The promises and perils of machine superintelligence are much debated nowadays.

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It wasn’t and couldn’t have been predicted in advance, but in hindsight what could be more logical than our most powerful technology, AI, becoming available to most of us in the form of a communication device? Thirty years ago we didn’t know how the mobile phone market would develop. Today we don’t know how the digital disruption which is transforming so many industries will evolve over the next thirty years. We don’t know whether technological unemployment will be the result of the automation of jobs by AI, or whether humans will find new jobs in the way we have done since the start of the industrial revolution. What is the equivalent of the smartphone phenomenon for digital disruption and automation? Chances are it will be something different from what most people expect today, but it will look entirely natural and predictable in hindsight.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

Research centers are springing up all over the world to understand what is likely to happen.16 The titles of Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future17 and Calum Chace’s The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism18 do a pretty good job of summarizing the concern. Although, as will soon become evident, I am by no means qualified to opine on what is essentially a matter for economists,19 I suspect that the issue is too important to leave entirely to them. The issue of technological unemployment was brought to the fore in a famous article, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” by John Maynard Keynes. He wrote the article in 1930, when the Great Depression had created mass unemployment in Britain, but the topic has a much longer history. Aristotle, in Book I of his Politics, presents the main point quite clearly: For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others . . . if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.

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If the GDP growth phases in over ten years or twenty years, it’s worth $9,400 trillion or $6,800 trillion, respectively—still nothing to sneeze at. On an interesting historical note, I. J. Good, who popularized the notion of an intelligence explosion (this page), estimated the value of human-level AI to be at least “one megaKeynes,” referring to the fabled economist John Maynard Keynes. The value of Keynes’s contributions was estimated in 1963 as £100 billion, so a megaKeynes comes out to around $2,200,000 trillion in 2016 dollars. Good pinned the value of AI primarily on its potential to ensure that the human race survives indefinitely. Later, he came to wonder whether he should have added a minus sign. 57.

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Other leading economists have also sounded the alarm, including Nobel laureates Robert Shiller, Mike Spence, and Paul Krugman; Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum; and Larry Summers, former chief economist of the World Bank and Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton. Those arguing against the notion of technological unemployment often point to bank tellers, whose work can be done in part by ATMs, and retail cashiers, whose work is sped up by barcodes and RFID tags on merchandise. It is often claimed that these occupations are growing because of technology. Indeed, the number of tellers in the United States roughly doubled from 1970 to 2010, although it should be noted that the US population grew by 50 percent and the financial sector by over 400 percent in the same period,22 so it is difficult to attribute all, or perhaps any, of the employment growth to ATMs.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

Samuelsonian thought describes modern economists of the so-called mainstream—modeling exclusively with “constrained maximization,” in which the only virtue acknowledged is prudence.9 Not every worthy economist is Samuelsonian. An embattled countersquad of economic thinkers, with quite varied politics, has in the twentieth century included Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, John Maynard Keynes, John H. Clapham, Frank Knight, Eli Heckscher, Gunnar Myrdal, Antonio Gramsci, Luigi Einaudi, Joan Robinson, Kenneth Boulding, Ronald Coase, Paul Sweezy, Alexander Gerschenkron, John Kenneth Galbraith, George Shackle, Robert Heilbroner, Theodore Schultz, Albert Hirschman, Bert Hoselitz, Bruno Leoni, Noel Butlin, James Buchanan, Thomas Schelling, Robert Fogel, Amartya Sen, Elinor Ostrom, Israel Kirzner, and Vernon Smith.

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In any case, surely, we do not want lofty disdain for the bourgeoisie and their betterments, or ignorant hatred of their liberal defenders, to be preordained by the rhetoric since Marx of the very word “capitalism,” or by the various agreed fables about it and about its defenders. 12 “Accumulate, Accumulate” Is Not What Happened in History The new economy of betterment that started to take hold in seventeenth-century Holland and eighteenth-century England and early nineteenth-century Belgium, northern France, and the United States was not mere accumulation, which as I’ve noted is as ancient as the fashioning of the Acheulean hand axes in bulk by Homo erectus and earlier by Homo habilis (that is, “tool-making human”) from a little after 2 million years BCE. Our ancestors accumulated arrow points and animal-skin clothing, or they starved or froze to death. But their accumulation did not make for a Great Enrichment. Accumulated capital becomes unusually, nonroutinely profitable only if it embodies betterment, innovism. As John Maynard Keynes pointed out, the return on capital could be driven down by investment to zero in a generation if there were no betterment.1 Because he thought that by the 1930s betterments had been exhausted—as some during the 2010s have come to believe again—he thought that savings (which depend on income, he claimed, not on profit) would henceforth exceed profitable investments (which depend on the allegedly exhausted betterments), leading to perpetual unemployment unless the government substituted social investment for private.

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Ideas, not institutions, made the modern world. 44 The Rhetorical Change Was Necessary, and Maybe Sufficient We humans live, that is, by words as much as by bread. Such a claim is “weak” in the mathematician’s sense of being very general, like Chebyshev’s inequality, and not the sharpest result one can imagine, yet hard to dispute. The claim that ideas are powerful asserts merely what few would deny, when reminded by common sense. The economist John Maynard Keynes remarked famously at the height of a material catastrophe in 1936 that “madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”1 His scientific opponent the economist Ludwig von Mises made the same point after the Second World War’s material catastrophe: “The history of mankind is the history of ideas. . . .

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

As we’ll see in the next chapter, this great money river is accessible only to a small part of our population, and relentlessly directs capital away from the real economy. Why do productive and nonproductive investments get the same capital gains treatment? Holding a stock for a year is not the same as working for decades to create the company that it represents a share of, or investing in a new company with no certainty of return. John Maynard Keynes recognized this problem eighty years ago during the depths of the Great Depression that followed the speculative excesses of the 1920s, writing in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.

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As we will see in the next chapter, the question of whether the next wave of automation will leave enough jobs for humans is deeply rooted in outdated maps of what counts as paid work, and what we take for granted and expect to be provided for free. 14 WE DON’T HAVE TO RUN OUT OF JOBS AT THE OUTSET OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION, JOHN MAYNARD Keynes penned a remarkable economic prognostication: that despite the ominous storm that was then enfolding the world, mankind was in fact on the brink of solving “the economic problem”—that is, the quest for daily subsistence. The world of his grandchildren—the world of those of us living today—would, “for the first time . . . be faced with [mankind’s] real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

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v=F7vJDtwidWU. 269 including knowledge work: Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 271 lack of aggregate consumer demand: Bill Gross, “America’s Debt Is Not Its Biggest Problem,” Washington Post, August 10, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-debt-is-not-its-biggest-problem/2011/08/10/gIQAgYvE7I _story.html. 271 “on the demand, rather than the supply, side”: Robert Summers, “The Age of Secular Stagnation: What It Is and What to Do About It,” Foreign Affairs, February 15, 2016, retrieved from http://larrysummers.com/2016/02/17/the-age-of-secular-stagnation/. 271 “Only around 15%”: Rana Foroohar, “The Economy’s Hidden Illness—One Even Trump Failed to Address,” LinkedIn Pulse, November 12, 2016, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/economys-hidden-illness-one-even-trump-failed-address-rana-foroohar. 272 “the job is likely to be ill-done”: John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964), 159. 272 “long-term prospects and to those only”: Ibid., 160. 272 each additional year that an asset is held: Fink, “I write on behalf of our clients . . .” 272 such as that proposed by Thomas Piketty: Michelle Fox, “Why We Need a Global Wealth Tax: Piketty,” CNBC, March 10, 2015, http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/10/why-we-need-a-global-wealth-tax-piketty.html. 273 “it’s good for business”: Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.”

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

To get there, the “this time is different” assumption will need to be ironclad. We will get to that in a moment. ASSUMPTION 2: Too many jobs will be destroyed too quickly. The “jobs will be destroyed too quickly” argument is an old one as well. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes voiced it by saying, “We are being afflicted with a new disease . . . 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 for labour.” In 1978, New Scientist repeated the concern: The relationship between technology and employment opportunities most commonly considered and discussed is, of course the tendency for technology to be labour-saving and thus eliminate employment opportunities—if not actual jobs.

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With the Internet, research tasks that used to take days now just take minutes, or even seconds. In a thousand different ways, we have made our workplaces vastly more efficient. So the question is, Why do we still work forty hours a week. Why not fifteen?” I offer up fifteen hours in particular because of a famous prediction made by the economist John Maynard Keynes in a 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In the essay, Keynes points out that for thousands of years, up until 1700, there was no real change in humans’ standard of living. He attributed this to the lack of technical advance and the failure of capital to accumulate.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

Of course we do see gluts in sectors of the economy, but an adherent of Say's Law would argue these are the unintended consequences of interventions in free markets, usually by governments. This law became a major tenet of classical economics, but it was rejected emphatically by British economist John Maynard Keynes, and is not widely accepted today. But many economists would accept a broader interpretation of the law which states that reducing the cost of a significant product or service will free up money which was previously allocated to it. This money can then be spent to buy more of the item, or other items, thereby raising demand generally, and creating jobs.

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AI researchers and others hastened to warn us (rightly) not to throw the baby of AI out with the bathwater of unfriendly superintelligence, and the debate is now more nuanced. Technological unemployment and the economic singularity So for me at least, the term “singularity” no longer seems so awkward. And it seems reasonable to apply it to another event which is likely to take place well before the technological singularity. I call this event “the economic singularity”. There is a lot of talk in the media at the moment about technological unemployment – the process of people becoming unemployed because machines can do any job that they could do, and do it cheaper, faster and better.

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Nevertheless we must try to peer into the hazy future if we are to prepare ourselves for it. In this book I will argue that technological unemployment is not happening yet (or at least, not much), that it will happen in the next few decades, and that it can be a very good thing indeed – if we prepare for it, and manage the transition successfully. Naturally, there are challenges. As we will see, a lot of people believe that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a silver bullet that will solve the problem of technological unemployment. UBI is a guaranteed income paid to all citizens simply because they are citizens. It may take some time for the idea of UBI to be accepted, especially in the USA, where resistance to anything that smacks of socialism is often fierce – almost visceral.

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)
by Unknown
Published 7 Jun 2012

This disturbance seems to be attributable to the loss of structural elasticity. A structure suita­ ble to simplified mechanisms, lighter, so to speak ( the old world had not accumulated as many innovations as the new), is no longer adapted to the exigencies of growth of a world no longer young. In an altogether different field, John Maynard Keynes has also shown in his work, General Theory, that technical progress is an The Technological Society ( 151 indispensable factor in the economy. The economic world cannot remain stationary. It is unceasingly called on to evolve. In particu­ lar, the importance of technical progress is central to the theory of investment.

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Certain semipublic corporations finance the operations, but it is clear that the state demands its quid pro quo. If the state is to pay for statistical research, it must get something in return; assistance in directing national affairs. The state requires the economist, on the basis of statistics, to seek out methods of intervention either directly or by subtle means such as those advocated by John Maynard Keynes. When the great private corporations or the state ask the economist for a method to influence reality, they are addressing the economist’s own invincible longing, which in the beginning engendered the improvement of these scientific means. Suppose that we have ac­ cumulated enormous quantities of facts, have encompassed the whole of reality, and possess the means to follow the mechanism of economic phenomena and even to a certain degree to predict them.

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Whatever the remedies or proposed reforms for resolving injustice and incoher­ ence in the modern economy, everything occurs through the agency of the plan. The plan in itself is no solution. But it is the indispensa­ ble instrument of all solutions. Even if one starts with Knut Wicksell or John Maynard Keynes, one meets again and again the urgency of planning. In Mumford’s proposals to release man from the clutches of tech­ nique, there is an interesting project for an economic regionalism on a world-wide plane. But this regionalism can, in fact, only be based on the exceedingly complete and rigid planning of produc­ tion and distribution.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Employers had to reduce their workers’ nominal wages in order to keep themselves competitive and support the interest on their debts. And employees received declining nominal wages. Again this was a recipe for conflict: workers focused on the fact that their wages were being cut rather than on the fact that their money would go further (John Maynard Keynes later called this “the stickiness of nominal wages”), and employers had yet more incentive to replace uppity workers with obedient machines. PRICES AND WAGES 1860 – 1905 The protests were also driven by something more nebulous than deflation: anxiety about the sheer scale of change.

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The American growth machine was humming, America’s potential rivals were tearing themselves apart, and in 1928, America elected a new president who looked eminently qualified to act as a national snake charmer. Herbert Hoover had spent his life amassing perhaps the best résumé of any new president to date, as a mining engineer, international businessman, and star member of America’s great and good. John Maynard Keynes commended his “knowledge, magnanimity, and distinterestedness.” Sherwood Anderson noted that he had “never known failure.” As head of food relief during and after the Great War, he had saved as many as 2 million people from starvation; as secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge, he had been a powerful force in both administrations—“secretary of everything,” as one newspaper called him; “secretary of commerce and undersecretary of all the other departments,” as a Washington wag put it.28 He did invaluable work improving the operation of America’s internal market by standardizing the sizes for the parts of all machines.

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“The Plan presupposes that we desire to restore a Europe which can and will compete with us in the world markets,” Allen Dulles, the CIA director, wrote, referring to the Marshall Plan, “and for that very reason will be able to buy substantial amounts of our products.”8 The U.S. share of world trade in manufactured goods increased from 10 percent in 1933 to 29 percent in 1953, providing millions of jobs for American workers. There was no doubt as to who was in charge of the new world. John Maynard Keynes was the moving spirit behind the Bretton Woods meeting, and by far the most intellectually distinguished figure there, but America’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, and his deputy, Harry Dexter White, made the key decisions: the conference attendees bowed to Keynes but listened to Morgenthau and White.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

Out of this unwillingness, these people have set out to devise technical systems that are more capable than we are ourselves, along any axis or dimension of evaluation you might care to mention: systems that are stronger and faster than we are; that have finer perception and greater endurance; that never, ever succumb to boredom, fatigue or disgust; and that are capable of operating without human oversight or guidance, indefinitely. We are, of course, talking about using robots and automated systems to replace human labor. The great twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes had foreseen much of this early on, coining the expression “technological unemployment” sometime around 1928.1 He saw, with almost clairvoyant perspicacity, that societies might eventually automate away the jobs much of their labor force depended on, and his insight is borne out in recent United States government estimates that an American worker making less than $20 an hour now has an 83 percent chance of losing their job to automation.2 But what Keynes concluded—that the eclipse of human labor by technical systems would necessarily compel a turn toward a full-leisure society—has not come to pass, not even remotely.

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“An Open Letter to The DAO and the Ethereum Community,” June 18, 2016, steemit.com/ethereum/@chris4210/an-open-letter-to-the-dao-and-the-ethereum-community. 36.Emin Gün Sirer, “Thoughts on The DAO Hack,” Hacking, Distributed, June 17, 2016. 37.Mike Hearn, “The Future of Money (and Everything Else),” Turing Festival 2013, August 23, 2013. 38.Anne Amnesia, “Unnecessariat,” More Crows Than Eagles, May 10, 2016, morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/. 7Automation 1.John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” Nation and Athenaeum, Vol. 48, Issues 2–3, October 11 and 18, 1930. 2.Economic Report of the President, February 2016. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 2016. 3.Tim O’Reilly, “Managing the Bots That Are Managing the Business,” MIT Sloan Management Review, May 31, 2016; Charlotte McEleny, “McCann Japan hires first artificially intelligent creative director,” The Drum, March 29, 2016. 4.Jason Mick, “Foxconn Billionaire Hints at Robotic Apple Factory, Criticizes Dead Employees,” DailyTech, June 30, 2014. 5.An advertisement for Columbia/Okura palletizing robots touts, even ahead of their “surprising affordability,” the fact that they “eliminate costly stacking-related injuries.” 6.International Labor Organization.

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“Guaranteed Income’s Moment in the Sun,” Remapping Debate, April 24, 2013, remappingdebate.org; Rutger Bregman, “Nixon’s Basic Income Plan,” Jacobin, May 5, 2016. 51.Will Grice, “Finland Plans to Give Every Citizen 800 Euros a Month and Scrap Benefits,” Independent, December 6, 2015; Tracy Brown Hamilton, “The Netherlands’ Upcoming Money-for-Nothing Experiment,” Atlantic, June 21, 2016. 52.John Danaher, “Will Life Be Worth Living in a World Without Work? Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life,” Science and Engineering Ethics, forthcoming, philpapers.org/archive/DANWLB.pdf 53.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. 54.Amos Zeeberg, “Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese,” Nautilus, June 1, 2016. 8Machine learning 1.Rob Kitchin, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and their Consequences, London: Sage Publications, 2014. 2.Daniel Rosenberg, “Data Before the Fact,” in Lisa Gitelman, ed., “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. 3.These questions are explored in greater depth in the excellent Critical Algorithm Studies reading list maintained by Tarleton Gillespie and Nick Seaver of Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective: socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/critical-algorithm-studies. 4.Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. 5.For those inclined to dig deeper into such subjects, Andrey Kurenkov’s history of neural networks is fantastic: andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-neural-nets-and-deep-learning. 6.Alistair Barr, “Google Mistakenly Tags Black People as ‘Gorillas,’ Showing Limits of Algorithms,” Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2015. 7.Aditya Khosla et al., “Novel dataset for Fine-Grained Image Categorization,” First Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2011, vision.stanford.edu/aditya86/ImageNetDogs; ImageNet, “Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2012,” image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012. 8.David M.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

It was a line from The Simpsons, although it seemed strangely appropriate given what had happened. It read: ‘I for one welcome our new robot overlords.’ A World of Technological Unemployment Ken Jennings’ crack was as neat a summary as you could hope for when it comes to dealing with one of the perceived dark sides of Artificial Intelligence. Forget leather jacket-wearing Austrian robots trying to take over the world, the real imminent threat AI systems pose relate to our jobs. The phrase ‘technological unemployment’ was first coined by a British economist named John Maynard Keynes in 1930. In a speculative essay entitled ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, Keynes predicted that the world was on the brink of a revolution regarding the speed, efficiency and ‘human effort’ involved with a wide variety of industries.

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To do this, he or she used a long stick (usually a bamboo) to tap on the bedroom window of clients; not moving on to the next house until they were positive that the occupant was awake. Needless to say, knocker-ups were permanently disadvantaged when the French inventor Antoine Redier patented an adjustable mechanical alarm clock in 1847. Not all technological unemployment has been quite so obscure as the lonely death of the knocker-up. The economist Gregory Clark has convincingly argued that the working horse was one of the biggest victims of the invention of the internal combustion engine. According to Clark, there were 3.25 million working horses in England in 1901.

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Speaking at an event called the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, at the California Institute of Technology, McCulloch told the assembled audience: As the Industrial Revolution concludes in bigger and better bombs, an intellectual revolution opens with bigger and better robots. The former revolution replaced muscles by energy, and was limited by the law of the conservation of energy, or of mass-energy. The new revolution threatens us, the thinkers, with technological unemployment, for it will replace brains with machines limited by the law that entropy never decreases. These machines, whose evolution competition will compel us to foster, raise the appropriate question: ‘Why is the mind in the head?’ McCulloch’s last point is the most pertinent one. The Industrial Age leaders of industry assumed it was their intelligence that would protect them from technological replacement.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

But they can happen because income will not necessarily always be fully spent. In practice, in a money economy there are always fluctuations of this sort.7 In normal conditions, such ups and downs are minor and temporary. In really serious economic conditions, however, demand can stay depressed for a considerable period of time. John Maynard Keynes explained how this could happen, and he laid out what could be done to overcome such depressions if and when they occurred. In these conditions, Keynes advocated government and central bank action to restore aggregate demand to normal. Until the depression in Japan in the 1990s, and more recently the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/9 and the subsequent Great Recession that enveloped most of the developed world, these depressionary conditions and Keynes’s advice about how to deal with them were widely regarded as quaint, a sort of historical curiosum of concern only for those interested in economic history, and particularly in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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As we move into the AI economy, these two strands of opinion about work are very much in evidence. Accordingly, if we are on the brink of an age of abundance without the need for work, this is variously seen as liberating and terrifying. You will already have noticed the high regard in which I hold John Maynard Keynes on the subject of macroeconomics, which he more or less invented. You may be surprised, though, to find him playing a major role here in the discussion about the balance between work and leisure. Mind you, as will soon become clear, his thinking on this subject is very far from being the last word.

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The employment of human labor definitely is taxed, not just through the imposition of income taxes on employees but also through employment taxes, such as National Insurance in the UK and social security taxes in other countries, on both employees and employers. Without a corresponding tax on robots and AI, the argument runs, the tax system is being far from neutral. It is actually encouraging the substitution of robots and AI for human labor.11 Accordingly, the tax system could be worsening the problems of technological unemployment, depressed wages, and increased inequality. Even if you do not buy the mass impoverishment case, which I don’t, the implication would still be diminished income for society as a result of a distorted allocation of resources. But what is neutral and not neutral in the tax system depends critically upon whether you regard the robots and AI systems that may replace human workers as “artificial workers” or items of capital investment.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

This criticism of the promise of automation, articulated by one of its early victims, holds true today. Today the promise is that robotics and algorithms will take on the “dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs” that no human wants to do. Automation should be a blessing, we are told. And have been told and told. In fact, the influential economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that improvements in machinery and, subsequently, productivity would lead us to a fifteen-hour workweek at most. If automation could be harnessed for the “common benefit,” as Booth argues, that might be a plausible outcome. Instead, it has consistently played out as Mellor has feared; labor-saving technology has accelerated the accumulation of capital among an ever-shrinking pool of elites.

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.… The first effects of these new mechanical combinations were to increase individual wealth, and to give a new stimulus to further inventions. 25. “dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs” Bernard Marr, “The 4 Ds of Robotization: Dull, Dirty, Dangerous and Dear,” Forbes, October 16, 2017. 26. a fifteen-hour workweek John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931; New York: Norton, 1963). 27. His life read like an epic poem Florence Ashton Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2 vols., London, 1889), 21–22. 28. Life had always been like this Tom Furniss, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 29.

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Philadelphia: Thomas Wardle, 1840. Mueller, Gavin. Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right about Why You Hate Your Job. London and New York: Verso, 2021. Munger, Mike. “Division of Labor,” EconLib, n.d., www.econlib.org/library/Enc/DivisionofLabor.html. Noble, David. Progress without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995. Noble, David. “Present Tense Technology: Technology’s Politics.” Democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal and Radical Change, vol. 4, no. 2 (1983), 8–24. Oakes, James. Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Similarly, the Bank of England recently suggested that up to 15 million British jobs might be unnecessary within a generation. I don’t take these predictions all that seriously. Many of these applications are still young. Every new technological revolution unleashes similar speculation, and it is often wide of the mark. Even our wisest heads get it wrong – back in the 1930s John Maynard Keynes believed that the UK was witnessing ‘technological unemployment’, as the ability of machines to take over jobs outpaced the economy’s ability to generate new ones. We’ve had tech-led disruption before, and we have usually found new (and often better) jobs. After all, machines tend to drive up productivity, which in turn stimulates more investment and demand.3 A recent analysis of the American workforce between 1982 and 2012 found that employment grew in several areas where computers were used (gaming, graphic design and programming).4 And in many instances, productivity gains driven by technology won’t mean fewer jobs, but rather improvements in current ones.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

Tay had been hijacked by Internet trolls engaged in a long-standing video-game ritual called griefing, in which the trolls compete for attention, as blogger Anil Dash has explained to the New York Times: “Once a target is identified, it becomes a competition to see who can be the most ruthless, and the ones who feel the most powerless will do the most extreme thing just to get noticed and voted up.” Peter Lee, who led the artificial intelligence group at Microsoft Research, vowed to “work toward contributing to an internet that represents the best, not the worst, of humanity.” That might be harder than he thinks. In 1930 the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that in the future we would have to worry about “technological unemployment… due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” It could be that in the next ten years we will have arrived at the point where Keynes’s prophecy comes true. A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University suggested that 47 percent of US jobs are at high risk of being automated.

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But the New Yorker writer Tad Friend confronted Andreessen with our present reality: “When I brought up the raft of data suggesting that intra-country inequality is in fact increasing, even as it decreases when averaged across the globe—America’s wealth gap is the widest it’s been since the government began measuring it—Andreessen rerouted the conversation, saying that such gaps were ‘a skills problem,’ and that as robots ate the old, boring jobs humanity should simply retool.” Characterizing Keynes’s “technological unemployment” as just a “skills problem” seems shortsighted. The notion that a fifty-year-old autoworker replaced by a robot is going to retrain himself as a software coder and apply for work at Google seems to be a pipe dream that only someone as rich and insulated as Marc Andreessen could conceive.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

When a material fails, these latent properties are lost – rubber loses its elasticity, metal loses its strength – and the potential is gone. Kirkaldy’s big idea was that to understand potential fully – its limits, how it can be lost, how it can be protected – we need to collect and examine fragments of failure. The final motivation for studying extremes comes from an idea set out in 1928 by the economist John Maynard Keynes. Concerned that society was in the grip of a bout of pessimism about the economy, Keynes set out a largely optimistic long-term vision. Part of his argument was that we can get a glimpse of the future today, if we know where to look. The trick was to identify a sustained trend – a path most people are following – and look at the lives of those experiencing the extremes of that trend.

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But Glasgow unravelled, losing everything as it became Britain’s most troubled city, a dubious honour it retains today. In each of these places vast potential – whether natural, human or industrial – has somehow gone to waste, with economics often at the core of the problem. Finally, I visited three places John Maynard Keynes would have looked at if he were alive today and following his own advice on how to take a peek at the economic future. As 2020 approaches, it seems the world is again in the grip of economic pessimism. Across the globe, most countries face three trends: ageing populations, the flux caused by new technology, and a rise of inequality.

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CHAPTER 8: TALLINN NOTES Wassily Leontief The quote at the start of the chapter on p. 263 is from an essay, ‘Machines and Man’, written by Harvard economist Wassily Leontief for an issue of Scientific American devoted to automatic control of machines – see Leontief (1952). The two fears from technology: unemployment and division On the risk that technological progress will lead to mass unemployment, see Keynes (1930) and Leontief (1952), and for a survey of the history of these kinds of concerns, see Mokyr et al. (2015). The prediction of 30 per cent automation – 44 per cent for the low skilled – is from PwC (2018); see also Muro et al. (2019) for a Brookings Institution report on the US.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

Part of this understanding in America is a high level of commitment to work—educated Americans are working longer hours than they did 30 years ago, and many are expected to be available via email on nights and weekends, even as working hours have dropped in other developed countries. Four in 10 Americans reported working more than 50 hours per week in a recent Gallup survey. This wasn’t always the case; Americans workweeks were actually getting shorter up until 1980. John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, famously predicted in 1930 that, given the continued growth in productivity and progress, by 2030 the Western standard of living would be four times higher and we would be working only 15 hours per week. He was right on the standard of living and very wrong on our work hours.

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The fortunate among us have left him behind, but we understand his appeal all too well. He’s still there waiting—ready to take over in case our lives fall apart. FIFTEEN THE SHAPE WE’RE IN/DISINTEGRATION The progress of a few fortunate decades can too easily be swept away by a few years of trouble. —RYAN AVENT The challenges of job loss and technological unemployment are among the most significant faced by our society in history. They are even more daunting than any external enemy because both the enemy and the victims are hard to identify. When a few hundred workers get replaced or a plant closes, the people around them notice and the community suffers.

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Membership in organizations like the PTA, the Red Cross, labor unions, and recreational leagues has declined by between 25 and 50 percent since the 1960s. Even time spent on informal socializing and visiting is down by a similar level. Our social capital has been declining for a long time, and there is no sign of a reversal. All of these things make addressing technological unemployment harder. We no longer believe we’re capable of turning things around without something dramatic changing. Among the things being questioned is our capitalist system. Among young people, polls show a very high degree of sympathy for other types of economies, in part because they’ve witnessed capitalism’s failures and excesses these past years.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

Even more surprising is that in these models the operations of banks are not taken into consideration, although they do look at microeconomic data pertaining to large companies and households in aggregate. This approach to macroeconomic theory is a relatively recent phenomenon and coincidentally began being applied in the late 1970s. Prior to this period, work done by prominent economists such as John Maynard Keynes, Irving Fisher, and Henry Calvert Simons, focused profoundly on the way money was made. While the reasons for this divergence in academic disciplines is the subject for a book in economic history, this approach of using the EMH and the RET while subtracting the role of banking was the primary reason why a number of economists did not see the crisis coming.

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Thus, as the definition of capitalism begins to involve the democratic state to a greater degree, we should also use this opportunity to see how we can address the problems of technological unemployment, education, productivity changes, inequality, and ageism. One solution pathway could lie with helicopter money and universal basic income. Helicopter Drops and Universal Basic Income Refresh your memory and think about the last time you heard these “keywords ”: technological unemployment, income inequality, stagnant wages, poverty, regulatory gridlock. If you are a regular follower of the news, then the chances are that you may have heard these terms almost on a weekly basis.

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It also investigates if these changes could offer sovereign states a new way to produce money and looks at alternatives other than inflation and interest rates to govern monetary policy. Finally, it reviews different scenarios of how this new structure can be used to implement innovative policies, such as overt money finance and universal basic income, which could help address issues such as income inequality and technological unemployment that currently threaten most economies. While the purpose of the book it to shed more light on the implications of the widespread use of Blockchain technology, the growing diversity within the currency space cannot be fully excluded from the discussion. As the blockchain gains more traction in formal financial circles, its first manifestation in the form of Bitcoin is increasingly being excluded from the dialogue.

The End of Work
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 28 Dec 1994

At the depth of the depression, the British economist John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which was to fundamentally alter the way governments regulate economic policy. In a prescient passage, he warned his readers of a new and dangerous phenomenon whose impact in the years ahead was likely to be profound: "We are being afflicted with a new disease of which 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: This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor."27 Trickle-dnwn Technology and Market Realities 25 By the 1930s, many mainstream economists were suggesting that increased efficiency and rising productivity, brought on by laborsaving technology, was only exacerbating the economic plight of every industrial nation.

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Nearly $46 out of every $100 of new capital went to the military economy.55 Even with the addition of a permanent military-industrial complex, the postwar boom was threatened by continued technological unemployment in the 1950S and 1960s resulting from breakthroughs in automation. New products-especially television and consumer electronics-helped cushion the blow and provide jobs for workers displaced by machines in other industries. The service sector also grew significantly, in part to fill the vacuum left by millions of women leaving the home to work in the economy. Government spending continued to provide jobs as well, dampening the effect of technological unemployment. In 1929 government spending was only 12 percent of the gross national product.

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ll The failure to adequately address the question of technological unemployment is partially the fault of organized labor. The voice of millions of working Americans, the labor movement waffled repeatedly on the issue of automation, only to eventually cast its lot with management, to the detriment of its own constituency. The father of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, who perhaps more than any other human being was in a position to clearly perceive the long-term consequences of the new automation technologies, warned of the dangers of widespread and permanent technological unemployment He wrote, "If these changes in the demand for labor come upon us in a haphazard and ill-organized way, we may well be in for the greatest period of unemployment we have yet seen."12 Weiner became so fearful of the high-tech future he and his colleagues were creating that he wrote an extraordinary letter to Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, pleading for an audience.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

But, as mentioned above, strong doubts have emerged as to the possibility and desirability of sustained growth in rich countries and about its ability to provide a solution to unemployment. A basic income offers an alternative solution that does not rely on an insane rush to keep pace with productivity growth. The time Â�will come, John Maynard Keynes wrote, when growth Â�will no longer be the path to follow, when “our discovery of means of economizing the use of Â�labour” Â�will be “outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” Â� And then “we Â�shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter—to make what work there Â� 57 is still to be done to be as widely shared as posÂ�siÂ�ble.”

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“OrÂ�gaÂ�nized Â�labor feared any likely increase in cheap Â�labor stimulated by the removal of work disincentives,” as Desmond King writes.24 It is also evident in the reservations expressed by Michel Jalmain, a national secretary of the CFDT (the French DemoÂ�cratic Confederation of Â�Labor, one of France’s main labor unions), that a basic income would amount to subsidizing, at the community’s expense, firms that offer precarious and poorly-Â�paid jobs.25 And it is analogous to what John Maynard Keynes saw as the main reason for the British trade Â�unions’ opposition to universal child benefits: “I believe that the trade Â�union movement is actively hostile on the express ground that it fears such allowances would be what I wish them to be, namely, an alternative to higher wages. It would be much better that a man with heavy Â�family burdens to support should receive assistance out of taxation, which is thrown on profits generally, than that an attempt should be made to raise wages paid by his employer to a disproportionate level.”26 This fear is more serious.

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Even so, Â�there are two considerations that make this aveÂ�nue unpromising. One of them is well formulated by labor Â� leader Andy Stern. Â�Because of the importance he attaches to work in giving purpose to our lives, he writes, “it was only natuÂ�ral that my initial thought for a solution to the coming tsunami of technological unemployment would be to guarantee a job for Â�every American who wants one.” However, further reflection made him change his mind: “Inevitably, a handful of Â�people in a government agency would end up deciding the value of a parÂ�ticÂ�uÂ�lar job or category of work for the entire country at the expense of individual differences and choice.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

To be fair, other schools too focus on particular issues, but the Schumpeterian school exhibits a narrower focus than most. The Keynesian School One-sentence summary: What is good for individuals may not be good for the whole economy. Born in the same year as Schumpeter and sharing the honour of having a whole school named after him is John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). In terms of intellectual influence, there is no comparison between the two. Keynes was arguably the most important economist of the twentieth century. He redefined the subject by inventing the field of macroeconomics – the branch of economics that analyses the whole economy as an entity that is different from the sum total of its parts.

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It takes time for people to search for new jobs and for companies to find the right people. The result is that some people end up spending some time unemployed in the process. This is known as frictional unemployment. Some skills are not wanted any more: technological unemployment Then there is unemployment due to the mismatch between the types of workers demanded and the available workers. This is usually known as technological unemployment or structural unemployment. This is unemployment that we have seen in movies like Roger and Me, the first movie made by Mike Moore, in which he documents the consequence of the closure of a GM car factory in his town, Flint, Michigan, or in The Full Monty, in which six unemployed steel workers in Sheffield, UK, after a draining period of unemployment, launch themselves as a male stripper group.

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In reality, smooth transitions almost never happen, if you leave things to the market alone. Even with systematic government subsidies and institutional supports for retraining and relocation (e.g., a bridging loan to buy a house where the new job is before the current one is sold), as used in the Scandinavian countries, it is a struggle to eliminate technological unemployment. Governments and unions create unemployment: political unemployment Believing in the modern version of Say’s Law, many Neoclassical economists have argued that, except in the short run, the law of supply and demand ensures that everyone who wants to work will find a job at the going wage rates.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

THE AUTOMATION DEBATE In the years since I co-founded DeepMind, no AI policy debate has been given more airtime than the future of work—to the point of oversaturation. Here was the original thesis. In the past, new technologies put people out of work, producing what the economist John Maynard Keynes called “technological unemployment.” In Keynes’s view, this was a good thing, with increasing productivity freeing up time for further innovation and leisure. Examples of tech-related displacement are myriad. The introduction of power looms put old-fashioned weavers out of business; motorcars meant that carriage makers and horse stables were no longer needed; lightbulb factories did great as candlemakers went bust.

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Brian, 56 artificial capable intelligence (ACI), vii, 77–78, 115, 164, 210 artificial general intelligence (AGI) catastrophe scenarios and, 209, 210 chatbots and, 114 DeepMind founding and, 8 defined, vii, 51 gorilla problem and, 115–16 gradual nature of, 75 superintelligence and, 75, 77, 78, 115 yet to come, 73–74 artificial intelligence (AI) aspirations for, 7–8 autonomy and, 114, 115 as basis of coming wave, 55 benefits of, 10–11 catastrophe scenarios and, 208, 209–11 chatbots, 64, 68, 70, 113–14 Chinese development of, 120–21 choke points in, 251 climate change and, 139 consciousness and, 74, 75 contradictions and, 202 costs of, 64, 68 current applications, 61–62 current capabilities of, 8–9 cyberattacks and, 162–63, 166–67 defined, vii early experiments in, 51–54 efficiency of, 68–69 ego and, 140 ethics and, 254 explanation and, 243 future of, 78 future ubiquity of, 284–85 global reach of, 9–10 hallucination problem and, 243 human brain as fixed target, 67–68 hyper-evolution and, 109 invisibility of, 73 limitations of, 73 medical applications, 110 military applications, 104, 165 Modern Turing Test, 76–77, 78, 115, 190, 210 narrow nature of, 73–74 near-term capabilities, 77 omni-use technology and, 111, 130 openness imperative and, 128–29 potential of, 56, 70, 135 as priority, 60 profit motive and, 134, 135, 136 proliferation of, 68–69 protein structure and, 88–89 red teaming and, 246 regulation attempts, 229, 260–61 research unpredictability and, 130 robotics and, 95, 96, 98 safety and, 241, 243–44 scaling hypothesis, 67–68, 74 self-critical culture and, 270 sentience claims, 72, 75 skepticism about, 72, 179 surveillance and, 193–94, 195, 196 synthetic biology and, 89–90, 109 technological unemployment and, 177–81 Turing test, 75 See also coming wave; deep learning; machine learning arXiv, 129 Asilomar principles, 269–70, 272–73 ASML, 251 asymmetrical impact, 105–7, 234 Atlantis, 5 Atmanirbhar Bharat program (India), 125–26 attention, 63 attention maps, 63 audits, 245–48, 267 Aum Shinrikyo, 212–13, 214 authoritarianism, 153, 158–59, 191–96, 216–17 autocomplete, 63 automated drug discovery, 110 automation, 177–81 autonomy, 105, 113–15, 166, 234 Autor, David, 179 al-Awlaki, Anwar, 171 B backpropagation, 59 bad actor empowerment, 165–66, 208, 266 See also terrorism B corps, 258 Bell, Alexander Graham, 31 Benz, Carl, 24, 285 Berg, Paul, 269–70 BGI Group, 122 bias, 69–70, 239–40 Bioforge, 86 Biological Weapons Convention, 241, 263 biotech.

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See disinformation/misinformation Mitchell, Melanie, 73 Model T, 24 Modern Turing Test, 76–77, 78, 115, 190, 210 Mojica, Francisco, 129–30 Montreal Protocol (1987), 45, 263 Moore, Gordon, 32–33, 35 Moore’s Law, 32–33, 67, 81, 108 Motorwagen, 24 Mumford, Lewis, 29, 217 mutually assured destruction, 43 N nanotechnology, 101 narrow path, defined, viii National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences (China), 122 nation-state fragility amplifiers, vii, 11 AI and, 166–67 authoritarianism and, 158–59 bad actor empowerment and, 165–66, 168 cyberattacks and, 160–63 democracies and, 158, 185 disinformation and, 169–73 fragility and, 152–54 globalization and, 155–56 inadvertent, 173–77 military applications and, 167–69 power and, 163–64 technological unemployment and, 177–81 nation-states containment and, 143, 159 economic inequality and, 153–54 equilibrium of, 147 functions of, 158 importance of, 151–52 regulation and, 230–31 technology symbiosis with, 156–58 trust and, 152–53 See also geopolitics; governments; nation-state fragility amplifiers Neuralink, 91 neural networks, 59, 64 See also deep learning 1984 (Orwell), 196 Nobel, Alfred, 35 Nordhaus, William, 30–31 North Korea, 44, 161 NotPetya, 161–62, 163 Noyce, Robert, 32 nuclear technology arms race rhetoric and, 126 catastrophe and, 205 containment of, 42–45, 264–65 development of, 41–42 ego and, 141 safety and, 241 NVIDIA, 130, 250, 251 O Odin, 82 offensive vs. defensive capabilities, 157, 234 off-grid living, 198 off switches, 244–45 omni-use technology, 105, 110–12 AI and, 111, 130 containment and, 233 contradictions and, 202 power and, 182 regulation and, 229–30 OpenAI, 62, 64, 69, 251 openness imperative, 127–29 opioids, 36 Oppenheimer, J.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions. Classical economists derided rental income as unproductive and undeserved, and poured scorn on rentiers. John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the mid-twentieth century, famously dismissed the rentier as ‘the functionless investor’ who gained income solely from ownership of capital, exploiting its ‘scarcity value’. He concluded in his epochal General Theory that, as capitalism spread, it would mean the euthanasia of the rentier, and, consequently, the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcity-value of capital … [W]hilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital … I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work.2 Eighty years on, the rentier is anything but dead; rentiers have become the main beneficiaries of capitalism’s emerging income distribution system.

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Some are utopian, such as the postcapitalism of Paul Mason, imagining an era of free information and information sharing.17 Some are decidedly dystopian, where the robots – or rather their owners – are in control and mass joblessness is coupled with a ‘panopticon’ state subjecting the proles to intrusive surveillance, medicalised therapy and brain control. The pessimists paint a ‘world without work’.18 With every technological revolution there is a scare that machines will cause ‘technological unemployment’. This time, the Jeremiahs seem a majority. Fortunately, we are still in the early stages, when collective action can assert democratic control. Whether or not they will do so in the future, the technologies have not yet produced mass unemployment. Although measured unemployment is higher than a few decades ago, this must be seen in the context of population growth and globalisation, in which the world’s labour supply has more than tripled.

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So, while technology is not necessarily destroying jobs, it is helping to destroy the old income distribution system, creating a rental wedge between profits, which are growing and becoming more concentrated, and wages, which are falling and becoming more volatile and uncertain. The threat is technology-induced inequality, not technological unemployment. THE SECOND GILDED AGE Today, we are living in a Second Gilded Age – with one significant difference. In the first, which ended in the Great Crash of 1929, inequality grew sharply but wages on average rose as well. The Second Gilded Age has also involved growing inequality, but this time real wages on average have stagnated or fallen.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
by Christopher Steiner
Published 29 Aug 2012

McAfee, wrote, “Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine.”3 The median worker, the average white-collar accountant, the MIT pair warn, should prepare to be replaced. Academics have made such predictions before. When machines began taking over manufacturing tasks in the 1920s and 1930s, John Maynard Keynes sounded the alarm for a “new disease” he termed “technological unemployment,” which happens when jobs can’t be replaced as fast as they’re eliminated by automation.4 Keynes’s warning was blown off as hyperbolic when it didn’t prove out. But perhaps his theory was simply ninety years early. Since the end of the recession in June 2009, according to Brynjolfsson and McAfee, corporations have spent 26 percent more on technology and software but haven’t raised their payrolls at all.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
Published 15 Nov 2015

Within the existing structures of capitalist society, the displacement of workers by mechanisation and productivity growth is obviously a grave cause for concern. It leads to forced unemployment (often called ‘technological unemployment’), spelling poverty and social exclusion for thousands of people. However, the elimination of human labour by developments in production technology has also been celebrated by the ‘end of work’ authors, because it opens up the theoretical possibility of a huge expansion of free-time. There have been many versions of this core idea. We find one such version in a famous essay by John Maynard Keynes, for whom the promise of greater freedom from work seemed like a realistic and relatively imminent possibility.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Though there have clearly been episodes when workers have suffered hardships as technology has advanced, fears over end-of-work scenarios have always been overblown, as has the idea that we would all give up work and live a life of fulfillment and leisure. In the 1930 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes famously declared that mechanization was progressing at a rate greater than at any other time in history. Our discovery of ways to replace people with machines, he suggested, was outrunning the pace at which new uses for labor could be found—which he held would lead to widespread technological unemployment. Keynes’s essay was a reflection of the productivity boom of the 1920s, which did indeed come with some adjustment problems that sparked a revival of the machinery question (see chapter 7).

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In the early 1930s, discussions of machines stealing citizens’ jobs were featured in radio talk shows, films, and academic conferences, and the Committee on Labor of the House of Representatives even held several hearings on the subject.3 The return of machinery angst cannot be explained in complete isolation from the Great Depression, which certainly exacerbated and prolonged concerns about technological unemployment. Yet the latter was not the cause of the former. As the economic historian Gregory Woirol has pointed out, “The honor of starting the technological unemployment debates belongs to Secretary of Labor James J. Davis.”4 In a 1927 speech, two years before the outbreak of the Great Depression, Davis was the first to take note of the technological challenges facing labor: For a long time it was thought impossible to turn out machines capable of replacing human skill in the making of glass.

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However, his later analysis suggested the opposite: mechanization, he found, had been a key factor in unemployment.12 As economists today still struggle to isolate the share of nonemployment attributable to technology, it should be no surprise that research efforts of the 1930s faced similar challenges. At the time, Leo Wolman, who served in the National Recovery Administration during the Great Depression, pointed at several empirical issues limiting progress in studies of technological unemployment, of which many seemed hard to overcome.13 Despite statistical challenges, the emerging consensus among contemporary economists was that there was technological unemployment, albeit of temporary nature. The likes of Paul H. Douglas, Alvin Hansen, and Rexford G. Tugwell all argued that labor market rigidities were impeding the process by which workers would be reabsorbed into new jobs: the expense of moving between locations, the human drags of retraining, and the psychological pressures of job loss made adjustment costly and hard.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America
by Jamie Bronstein
Published 29 Oct 2016

Hoover also requested that unions hold the line on wage increase requests, that employers not cut their payrolls, and that state governors consider undertaking infrastructure projects.7 But Hoover was neither willing nor able to compel businesses to hire workers, nor states to spend money, and even the economist John Maynard Keynes had not, by Hoover’s term in office, fully developed his theory that government spending could “prime the pump” for economic recovery.8 Although businesses could not be compelled, workers could. Beginning in 1931, Hoover’s Secretary of Labor, William Doak, responded to unemployment by seeking out migrants without a legal immigration status through a series of government-sponsored raids on low-wage industries.

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On the other hand, she advocated for black state directors of black NYA activities (although she tolerated the payment of disproportionately low salaries).39 Like McLeod Bethune, the New Deal adjusted to the South’s ongoing commitment to white supremacy. BEYOND THE NEW DEAL The New Deal was an experiment in the use of government tools to solve economic problems, but Roosevelt encountered pressure from more radical suggestions for redistribution of income. Some who called for change pointed to technological unemployment; in the modern economy, some lost jobs were just not coming back, as the tractor could do a job faster than the hoe. Others argued that economic growth was hindered by lack of economic distribution.40 For example, the philosopher John Dewey headed the People’s Lobby, one of many groups to argue that the Great Depression had been caused by underconsumption as workers could not afford to purchase consumer goods.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

Accountants, many legal and medical professionals, financial analysts and stockbrokers, travel agents—in fact, a large fraction of white-collar jobs—will disappear as a result of sophisticated machine-learning programs. We face a future in which factories churn out goods with very few employees and the movement of goods is largely automated, as are many services. What’s left for humans to do? In 1930—long before the advent of computers, let alone AI—John Maynard Keynes wrote, in an essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” that as a result of improvements in productivity, society could produce all its needs with a fifteen-hour workweek. He also predicted, along with the growth of creative leisure, the end of money and wealth as a goal: We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value.

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The message, in other words, does not adequately convey the stakes of the game. Wiener primarily warned of the social risks—risks stemming from careless integration of machine-generated decisions with governance processes and misuse (by humans) of such automated decision making. Likewise, the current “serious” debate about AI risks focuses mostly on things like technological unemployment or biases in machine learning. While such discussions can be valuable and address pressing short-term problems, they are also stunningly parochial. I’m reminded of Yudkowsky’s quip in a blog post: “[A]sking about the effect of machine superintelligence on the conventional human labor market is like asking how US-Chinese trade patterns would be affected by the Moon crashing into the Earth.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

If the answer is a job that can either be done by a computer with artificial intelligence or a robot equipped with one, you might want to think about a new career path. Futurists and technology leaders offer a sunnier view: all this displacement could simply be a way station to a period of technological bliss. John Maynard Keynes, the father of modern economics, predicted in 1930 that we would reach the point where machines do all the work we don’t want to do, and man simply spends his time basking in idle thought. We will welcome our Terminators with open arms as they fix us cocktails. Or, for those who don’t want to spend all day philosophizing, disruption will only create more opportunities for employment.

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“There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress,” wrote economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their groundbreaking 2012 book Race Against the Machine, which highlighted the growing gap between technological progress and job creation. “The threat of technological unemployment is real.” Brynjolfsson and McAfee are not technophobes gripped by a fear of progress. They point to previous disruptions in labor during the technological leaps of the industrial and mechanized ages, and show how these eventually led to greater middle-class wealth and job creation, as productivity increased.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

In 1930—just after the word robot was invented, just as Aldous Huxley was imagining the dystopia of Brave New World and just before H. G. Wells depicted the utopia of The Shape of Things to Come—their friend John Maynard Keynes saw the economic future.*1 “We are being afflicted with a new disease,” he wrote in a speculative essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” a disease of which “readers will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” It would become a bigger and bigger problem, the founder of macroeconomics warned, and in about a century—that is, around 2030—it would finally require a major rethink of how we organize economies.

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One of the main challenges will be changing what Harari calls the moral viewpoint. We need to think of his scary wolf, AI and robots, not necessarily as a terrifying predator. Instead, they can be like the gray wolves that we tamed thousands of years ago and turned into humans’ best friend—dogs. Technological unemployment and its approaching endgame are indeed an existential threat, but they’re also a potentially grand existential opportunity. And taking advantage will first require a shift by the United States to some kind of economic democracy, taking the power away from big business and the rich to write all the rules only to serve themselves.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
by David Graeber
Published 14 May 2018

No one seems to feel free to say what they really feel about such matters—at least in public. It was plausible, but I didn’t really know. In a way, I wrote the piece as a kind of experiment. I was interested to see what sort of response it would elicit. This is what I wrote for the August 2013 issue: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen.

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on the political ramifications of bullshitization and consequent decline of productivity in the caring sector as it relates to the possibility of a revolt of the caring classes Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 18. See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 19. “Money in Film: Businessmen Are Always the Villains,” The Economist, October 16, 2015, https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/10/money-film. EPILOGUE 1. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Prospects for our Grandchildren” in Essays in Persuasion, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963): 358–73. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ INDEX The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page.

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Before we end this chapter, we need to discuss three issues. First, to what extent should some of the support beyond the Beveridge level of care, for those who have not saved money or paid for insurance, be decided and administered by the community? Second, should we prepare for increasing technological unemployment with schemes like a universal basic income? Third, how do we pay for the entitlements that have already been committed to, as well as the outstanding government debt, even before we embark on creating new entitlements? COMMUNITY-DETERMINED ADDITIONAL SUPPORT The basic level of economic support in case of unemployment, disability, or old age should have no conditions attached.

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It is to give every adult in the country a universal basic income (UBI), which will be enough to live a decent life, with no questions asked. The difference from the basic support we discussed above is that UBI would be set at much higher levels, and paid to everyone regardless of need. There is an ongoing debate about whether those who fear technological unemployment are too pessimistic, underestimating the ability of markets and human ingenuity to find productive uses for unemployed humans. History suggests the optimists have been right thus far, but this time could be different. UBI, in principle, is extremely simple. Each adult would get a monthly check for themselves and their dependents.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
Published 14 Jul 2019

The Luddites were not against technology per se; they just wanted the machines to be used by skilled workers paid a good wage to make high-quality goods, rather than by unskilled workers to make poor-quality goods at low wages. The global destruction of jobs in the 1930s led John Maynard Keynes to coin the term technological unemployment. In both cases, and several others, employment levels eventally recovered. The mainstream economic view for most of the 20th century was that technological employment was at most a short-term phenomenon. Increased productivity would always lead to increased wealth and increased demand, and thus net job growth.

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The problem of creating an expressive formal language for probabilistic information has taxed some of the greatest minds in history, including Gottfried Leibniz (the co-inventor of calculus), Jacob Bernoulli (discoverer of e, the calculus of variations, and the Law of Large Numbers), Augustus De Morgan, George Boole, Charles Sanders Peirce (one of the principal logicians of the 19th century), John Maynard Keynes (the leading economist of the 20th century), and Rudolf Carnap (one of the greatest analytical philosophers of the 20th century). The problem resisted these and many other efforts until the 1990s. Thanks in part to the development of Bayesian networks, there are now mathematically elegant and eminently practical formal languages that allow the creation of probabilistic models for very complex domains.

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In 7th century BCE Greek mythology, a robot named Talos was built by Hephaistos, the Greek god of metallurgy, to protect the island of Crete. The legend is that the sorceress Medea defeated Talos by promising him immortality but then draining his life fluid. Thus, this is the first example of a robot making a mistake in the process of changing its objective function. In 322 BCE, Aristotle anticipated technological unemployment, speculating “If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.” In the 3rd century BCE an actual humanoid robot called the Servant of Philon could pour wine or water into a cup; a series of valves cut off the flow at the right time.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Post–World War II Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for Eastern Europe Today, ed. Rudiger Dornbusch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity; Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal”; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1930). By 2014, a Standard and Poor’s report concluded that income inequality impedes economic growth and destabilizes the social fabric, a fact that Henry Ford had long ago acknowledged with his five-dollar day.

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For example, a 2004 white paper from the Kansas City Federal Reserve singles out “voice recognition” as a significant threat to future employment rates: “Advances in voice recognition technology, expert systems, and artificial intelligence may eventually allow computers to handle many customer service jobs and perhaps even routine x-ray screening.” See C. Alan Garner, “Offshoring in the Service Sector: Economic Impact and Policy Issues,” Economic Review 89, no. 3 (2004): 5–37. Frey and Osborne’s much-cited 2013 study of technological unemployment sounded the same theme: “Moreover, a company called SmartAction now provides call computerisation solutions that use ML technology and advanced speech recognition to improve upon conventional interactive voice response systems, realising cost savings of 60 to 80 percent over an outsourced call center consisting of human labour.”