technological unemployment

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel  · 24 Mar 2026  · 348pp  · 103,246 words

heartening symposium, for the Army seems to feel it necessary to supplement its military mission with a peaceful one—as if it might otherwise face technological unemployment. It is interesting to hear high-ranking Army officers talking about the need for community development and civic action when so many social scientists talk

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide

by Ha-Joon Chang  · 26 May 2014  · 385pp  · 111,807 words

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

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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

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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

The End of Work

by Jeremy Rifkin  · 28 Dec 1994  · 372pp  · 152 words

post-market era I Jeremy Rifkin. p. cm. "A Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam book." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87477-779-8 1. Technological unemployment. I. Title. HD6331.R533 1995 94-12394 CIP 33l·13' 7042-dc20 Design by Lee Fukui Printed in the United States of America 1 2

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assess the impact of the new technology revolution on both industrialized and developing nations. We will pay particular attention to the disturbing relationship between increased technological unemployment and the rising incidence of crime and violence around the world. Just outside the new high-tech global village lie a growing number of destitute

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of Work 5 The ranks of the unemployed and underemployed are growing daily in North America, Europe, and Japan. Even developing nations are facing increasing technological unemployment as transnational companies build state-of-the-art high-tech production facilities all over the world, letting go millions of laborers who can no longer

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of making and moving goods and providing services. This realization led the editors of Newsweek to ponder the unthinkable in a recent issue dedicated to technological unemployment. "What if there were really no more jobs?" asked Newsweek. 32 The idea of a society not based on work is so utterly alien to

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proposition has provided the operating rationale for economic policy in every industrial nation in the world. Its logic is now leading to unprecedented levels of technological unemployment, a precipitous decline in consumer purchasing power, and the specter of a worldwide depreSSion of incalculable magnitude and duration. The notion that the dramatic benefits

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that it was unable to see the negative dynamic that was careening the economy into a major depression. In order to compensate for the rising technological unemployment brought about by the introduction of new laborsaving technologies, American corporations poured millions of dollars into advertising and marketing campaigns, hoping to convince the still

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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

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the fear is expressed that our industrial equipment is so efficient that permanent overproduction ... 26 THE TWO FACES OF TECHNOLOGY has occurred and that consequently technological unemployment has become a permanent factor."3o Labor leaders at the time turned to the notion of matching productivity gains with a reduction in hours worked

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civilization itsel£"31 By 1932 organized labor had shifted the argument for reduced hours from quality of life concerns to economic justice. Labor leaders viewed technological unemployment as "a natural result of increased efficiency, economic surpluses, and limited markets."32 They argued that if the nation were to avoid widespread and permanent

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to bailout the ailing economy. It came in the form of the New Deal and a new approach to solving the twin problems of widespread technological unemployment and ineffective consumer demand in America. THE NEW DEAL Just months after being elected to office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted the first in a

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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

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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. By 1975 total government spending was more than 33.2 percent of

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Great Society programs in the 1960s provided jobs for many of the nation's poor, again mitigating the negative impact of rising productivity and growing technological unemployment. The Cold War and the Vietnam War led to an accelerated flow of government dollars into defense industries, insuring an expanding economy Trickle-down Technology

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coming century make it far less likely that either the marketplace or public sector will once again be able to rescue the economy from increasing technological unemployment and weakened consumer demand. Information and telecommunication technologies threaten a loss of tens of millions of jobs in the years ahead and the steady decline

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FOR WHAT? The Clinton administration has pinned its hopes on retraining millions of Americans for high-tech jobs as the only viable means of reducing technological unemployment and improving the economic well-being of American workers. The White House is seeking more than $3.4 billion in federal funds to upgrade existing

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government spending has been the only viable means "to cheat the devil of ineffective demand" says economist Paul Samuelson. 69 Technological innovation, rising productivity, growing technological unemployment, and ineffective demand have characterized the American economy since the 1950S, forcing the federal government to adopt a strategy of deficit spending to create jobs

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attention away from the growing plight of a large new black underclass that had become the first casualty of automation and the new displacement technologies. Technological unemployment has fundamentally altered the sociology of America's black community. Permanent joblessness has led to an escalating crime wave in the streets of America's

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irresponsibly exaggerated, principally by social scientists who seem to be engaged in a competition in ominousness."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

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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

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the battle over technology is being fought has grown dramatically to encompass the whole United States economy and much of the global marketplace. Issues surrounding technological unemployment, which a generation ago touched primarily the manufacturing sector of the economy, affecting poor black workers and blue collar laborers, are now being raised in

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us .--. as throwaway people."47 : Depressed wages, a frenetic pace set at the workplace, the rapid rise in part-time contingent work, increased long-term technological unemployment, a growing disparity in income between the haves and the have-nots, and the dramatic shrinking of the middle class are placing unprecedented stress on

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and sociologists in the mentalhealth problems of the unemployed. A spate of studies conducted over the past decade have found a clear correlation between rising technological unemployment and increased levels of depression and psychotic morbidity.48 Dr. Thomas T. Cottle, a clinical psychologist and sociologist affiliated with the Massachusetts School of Professional

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that the Third Industrial Revolution is going to mean a few high-techjobs for the new class of elite knowledge workers and growing long-term technolOgical unemployment for millions of others. The clear trend, says Shaiken, is "a continuation of the extensive polarization of incomes and the marginalization of millions of people

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back in 1963 when the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution advocated the scheme as a way to deal with the dual threat of technological unemployment and growing poverty. It should be emphasized that at the time there was no thought of tying a social income to a reciprocal agreement to

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again, by a growing number of academicians, politicians, and labor and civil rights leaders in search of solutions to the twin problems of long-term technological unemployment and rising poverty levels. But, unlike earlier schemes which would have required little or nothing in return from the recipients, today!> reformers are linking the

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powerful vested interests within the business community are likely to resist value-added sales taxes, the alternatives of taxing income or leaving the problem of technolOgical unemployment unattended are even more onerous. By imposing a targeted valueadded tax, and then using the revenue exclusively to build up the third sector and ease

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new technologies. Global markets are also likely to continue to expand, but not nearly fast enough to absorb the overproduction of goods and services. Rising technological unemployment and declining purchasing power will continue to plague the global economy, undermining the capacity of governments to effectively manage their own domestic affairs. Already, central

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. 285-286. 2. Jones, Barry, Sleepers Wake! Technology and the Future of Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 2$ Standing, Guy, "The Notion of Technological Unemployment," International Labour Review, March/April1984, p. 131, 3. McLellan, David, tr., Marxs Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (New York: Harpers, 1977) pp. 162-163

Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk

by Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak and Paul Swartz  · 8 Jul 2024  · 259pp  · 89,637 words

have large impact; even 0.25 percentage points would be significant, particularly when accumulated over time. We also reject the doomsaying conclusion that so-called technological unemployment is on its way. That story has not held up over the very long run, it hasn’t held up with automation over the last

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with Daniel Susskind, the author of A World without Work, in the fall of 2020.9 We were surprised that Susskind focused on so-called technological unemployment but didn’t acknowledge its corollary: technology’s deflationary nature and thus positive impact on real incomes and thus its creation of new demand and

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new jobs. We believe the world-without-work narrative is a false alarm.10 Technological unemployment is not a new fear. Decades ago, the concern was captured well by a possibly apocryphal but nevertheless enlightening conversation between Henry Ford II and

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). The new incomes were often spent on goods—but typically on services—that were barely known at the time the disruptive technology arrived. Put simply, technological unemployment is a long-standing narrative that has never delivered. We don’t seek to downplay challenges and difficulties. Particularly when disruption occurs quickly it will

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be painful for many. Adjustment and retraining efforts are warranted, but the fears of overwhelming technological unemployment are not well founded in our view. Just consider the march of automation in production over the last few decades that coexists with generational lows

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in unemployment since the late 2010s. A thought experiment can highlight additional problems with the idea of technological unemployment. What if we are wrong and technology’s impact is far bigger and faster, ushering in an era of enormous labor slack? If that happened

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that large and sustained boosts to trend growth are a high bar. An acceleration of 50 bps would be significant. Be skeptical of narratives of technological unemployment.  The idea that technological progress creates mass unemployment has a long history that has failed to play out. Recall that technology’s impact is through

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slowly) in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. * * * We’re aware of alternative views. For some, a new machine age will cause technological unemployment—the opposite of the labor-market tightness we think will prevail.2 But the presumed link between technological progress and labor-market slack stands on

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direction of causality is the reverse: tight labor markets first nudge and then force firms to adopt laborsaving technology (chapters 7 and 8). Predictions of technological unemployment are an evergreen feature of pundits’ commentary. But despite the march of automation in recent decades, the US unemployment rate has still declined to near

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the spark for productivity growth   8.2   The 1990s productivity boost: 30 years in the making, 100 basis point uplift lasting 10 years   8.3   Technological unemployment? Rather, technology lowers labor costs and prices, boosting real incomes and spending, which creates new employment PART TWO FINANCIAL ECONOMY Good Strains and Systemic Risks

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negative bias toward, 10 postpandemic, 5–6 recoveries and, 54 risk assessment vs., 44 skepticism toward, 10, 23–27 on stimulus failure, 124–125 on technological unemployment, 92, 99–101, 102, 245–246 on trade, 220–223, 226–228 dot-com bubble, 40–41, 185, 202 stimulus and, 106, 107f, 110, 111f

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism

by Calum Chace  · 17 Jul 2016  · 477pp  · 75,408 words

to date 37 3.5 – Exponential future 46 3.6 – What people do 52 3.7 – Related technologies 55 3.8 – The poster child for technological unemployment: self-driving vehicles 67 3.9 – Who's next? 74 3.10 – Jobs or no jobs 84 3.11 – What's the problem? 93 3

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in the future. Technological Singularity will change everything, but its first manifestation will come in the domain of economics, most likely in the shape of technological unemployment. Calum Chace’s “The Economic Singularity” does a great job of introducing readers of all levels to the future we are about to face. Chace

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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

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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. There is

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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

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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

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work for many or most people. We will start in section 3.1 by looking at the most popular books to argue the case for technological unemployment; we will see how they shy away from the logical conclusion of their arguments. We will also hear support for their argument from a couple

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time. 3.1 – Prophets of change Martin Ford Martin Ford is the author of perhaps the best book published so far about artificial intelligence causing technological unemployment. “The Lights in the Tunnel” (2009) provoked fierce debate, and his follow-up, “Rise of the Robots” (2015) fleshed out his arguments, and responded to

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, many middle-class Americans do feel squeezed, having been obliged to accept part-time work, or having missed out on wage rises. This suggests that technological unemployment has not yet begun to really bite, but we might be seeing the early warning signs.[xxxii] Ford pauses to review the prospects for disruption

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Brynjolfsson bring academic credibility to their book on AI automation, “The Second Machine Age”. They have helped to validate the discussion of the possibility of technological unemployment. Their book (and their argument) is in three parts. The first part (chapters 1 to 6 inclusive) describes the characteristics of what they call the

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an automatic share in the income from the intellectual property it protects.”[xlviii] 3.2 – Academic and consultancy studies Numerous reports have been written about technological unemployment by academic organisations, consultancies, and think tanks. I have described some of the better-known ones here. Sometimes they reserve judgement or sit on the

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most scientific approach they could devise, and made no attempt to hide its subjective elements. As well as sounding the alarm about the possibility of technological unemployment, the report suggests that the “hollowing out” of middle class jobs will stop. A 2003 paper by David Autor (of whom, more below) observed that

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timeline, which appears at the end of the report.[lii] McKinsey The world's most prestigious management consultancy firm weighed in on the subject of technological unemployment with an article published in its quarterly magazine in November 2015 entitled “Four fundamentals of workplace automation”[liii]. Billed as an interim report of an

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of competitive advantage. A swelling chorus The reports described above are a selection of the most prominent ones published so far on the subject of technological unemployment. They are not the only ones, and more are being produced every month – sometimes every week. There is no clear consensus about the likely impact

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convinced it is a myth. 3.3 – Crying wolf In this section we meet a selection of writers who are sceptical about the prospect of technological unemployment. They argue that it is all just a revival of the Luddite Fallacy. David Autor David Autor is a professor of economics at MIT. As

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it. To say that the impact will be dramatic is an understatement. Another thing to bear in mind is that to reach the point where technological unemployment forces dramatic change in the way we run our economies does not require everyone to be unemployed and unemployable. It does not even require a

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to think about the kinds of jobs which will be automated by these technologies. We’ll start with driving. 3.8 – The poster child for technological unemployment: self-driving vehicles Why? The case for introducing self-driving cars is simple and overwhelming: around the world, human drivers kill 1.2 million people

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will have a huge impact on society, sometimes in surprising ways. What impact will they have on employment? Are they indeed the poster child for technological unemployment? There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US alone[ccvii], 650,000 bus drivers[ccviii] and 230,000 taxi drivers[ccix]. How many

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back of a truck in front, they will get out and help. They are also often responsible for loading and unloading their vehicles. Sceptics about technological unemployment could point out that planes have been flying by wire for decades, with human pilots in control for only around three minutes of an average

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common occupation in 29 US states (57% of them).[ccxv] It will also have the effect of alerting everyone else to the prospect of widespread technological unemployment. 3.9 – Who's next? Low-income jobs The Frey and Osborne study we looked at in chapter 3.2 foresaw two waves of automation

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think. Gerald Huff is a software engineer working in Silicon Valley, ground zero of the developments we are talking about. Nervous about the prospect of technological unemployment, he carried out a comparative analysis of US occupations in 1914 and 2014. Using data from the US Department of Labour,[cclxxx] he discovered that

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well the learning process is going, and where extra support is needed.) Exciting and powerful as these techniques are, they won't protect us from technological unemployment. We have seen that machines are increasingly capable of performing many of the tasks currently carried out by highly educated, highly paid people. The machines

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thing for the rest of us. In any case, this is probably not an occupation that is going to save large numbers of people from technological unemployment. The other thing to remember about entrepreneurship as a career is that most startups fail. Artists After all these apparently gloomy prognostications, let's close

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in the form of a communication device. The way the economic singularity unfolds will probably be like that. Our attempts to forecast the impact of technological unemployment – assuming it arrives – will probably look absurd in hindsight. But when we get there, the outcome will seem not only natural, but perhaps even inevitable

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training wheels for accountants and lawyers (“ticking and bashing” for auditors and “discovery” for litigators) are increasingly being handled by machines. Optimists – and sceptics about technological unemployment – point out that the amount of work for trainee professionals has actually increased, as whole categories of previously uneconomic jobs have become possible, and the

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get most government “services” delivered online and cheaper. Awareness There is a great deal of discussion in the media about whether automation will lead to technological unemployment. A growing number of people think that it will, but they are outnumbered by those, including many prominent economists, who continue to deny it. 4

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] Nevertheless, if you are one of the lucky minority with substantial net assets, you might be wondering how you will be affected if and when technological unemployment takes hold. Will your house be worth more or less in the new economy? How about your vintage Aston Martin, or your collection of fine

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within which we find happiness and meaning. In summary, loss of meaning does not seem likely to be one of the biggest problems that widespread technological unemployment will create. 5.4 – Allocation The house on the beach In a world where the majority of people cannot get jobs and are therefore paid

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social and species fracture. As we saw in chapter 3.1, this conclusion is rejected by the two most popular books published so far about technological unemployment. I share their inclination, and it makes me extremely uncomfortable. I was in business for 30 years before becoming a full-time writer and speaker

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and losers. The losers may not take their losses calmly. The scenario of the gods and the useless is not the only possible outcome of technological unemployment. The next chapter explores half a dozen of the most plausible scenarios. By assessing the likelihood and utility of each scenario, and understanding how to

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much better information about our medical condition, and we will still need doctors to carry out the more significant tests. Creativity and caring Sceptics about technological unemployment also argue that human creativity will remain in demand, as will human empathy, which they see as a pre-requisite in caring professions like nursing

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believe that we can all become professional artists, nurses and therapists. 6.3 – Capitalism + UBI Martin Ford, author of not one but two books on technological unemployment, also believes that capitalism can survive the “rise of the robots”, as he calls it in the title of his second book. He thinks it

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the ingrained hostility to socialism there. But as we saw in the last chapter, there are reasons to suppose that this challenge may evaporate if technological unemployment bites severely. And as we also saw in the last chapter, it may be replaced by challenges which are much harder to overcome. 6.4

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not yet designed. Unless we are careful, there will be plenty of opportunities for mis-steps, misunderstandings, and downright mischief by populists and demagogues. If technological unemployment arrives in a rush, and we are not prepared, a lot of people will lose their incomes quickly, and governments may not move fast enough

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humanity posed by the potential arrival of superintelligence.[ccclii] There is only one that I know of which is studying the future of automation and technological unemployment.[cccliii] There should be more. In chapter 4 we explored how hard it is to make accurate forecasts, but failing to keep a lookout for

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at least plausible enough to be worth watching out for. We should be employing economists and others to monitor the available data for signs of technological unemployment, and devising new ways to detect it. The economist Robin Hanson thinks that machines will eventually render most humans unemployed, but that it will not

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee  · 20 Jan 2014  · 339pp  · 88,732 words

spread it generates, we are instead concerned about something close to the reverse: that the spread could actually reduce the bounty in years to come. Technological Unemployment We’ve seen that the overall pie of the economy is growing, but some people, even a majority of them, can be made worse off

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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

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eventually eased. Then came World War II and its insatiable demands for labor, both on the battlefield and the home front, and the threat of technological unemployment receded. After the war ended, the debate about technology’s impact on the labor force resumed and took on new life once computers appeared. A

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evidence. But both of these are less solid than they first appear. First, the theory. There are three economic mechanisms that are candidates for explaining technological unemployment: inelastic demand, rapid change, and severe inequality. If technology leads to more efficient use of labor, then as the economists on the National Academy of

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not just buying more of the existing goods, but also on newly invented products and services. This is the core of the economic argument that technological unemployment is impossible. KEYNES DISAGREED. He thought that in the long run, demand would not be perfectly inelastic. That is, ever lower (quality-adjusted) prices would

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and less labor was needed to produce all the goods and services that people demanded.23 However, it’s hard to see this type of technological unemployment as an economic problem. After all, in that scenario, by definition, people are working less because they are satiated. The “economic problem” of scarcity is

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full unemployment, so we can play.”24 Keynes was more concerned with short-term “maladjustments,” which brings us to the second, more serious argument for technological unemployment: the inability of our skills, organizations, and institutions to keep pace with technical change. When technology eliminates one type of job, or even the need

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workers and organizations to adjust to technical change, then it becomes apparent that accelerating technical change can lead to widening gaps and increasing possibilities for technological unemployment. Faster technological progress may ultimately bring greater wealth and longer lifespans, but it also requires faster adjustments by both people and institutions. With apologies to

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Keynes, in the long run we may not be dead, but we will still need jobs. The third argument for technological unemployment may be the most troubling of all. It goes beyond “temporary” maladjustments. As described in detail in chapters 8 and 9, recent advances in technology

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril

by Satyajit Das  · 9 Feb 2016  · 327pp  · 90,542 words

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

Give People Money

by Annie Lowrey  · 10 Jul 2018  · 242pp  · 73,728 words

to political philosophy to studies of work incentives to sociological work on racism. Perhaps the most prominent argument for a UBI has to do with technological unemployment—the prospect that robots will soon take all of our jobs. Economists at Oxford University estimate that about half of American jobs, including millions and

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country would lose the ingenuity and productivity of a large share of its greatest asset: its people. More than that, a UBI implemented to fight technological unemployment might mean giving up on American workers, paying them off rather than figuring out how to integrate them into a vibrant, tech-fueled economy. Economists

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. If you have recently heard of UBI, there is a good chance that it is because of these driverless cars and the intensifying concern about technological unemployment writ large. Elon Musk of Tesla, for instance, has argued that the large-scale automation of the transportation sector is imminent. “Twenty years is a

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man out of work. Man invents self-driving car; self-driving car puts truck driver out of work. The fancy economic term for this is “technological unemployment,” and it is a constant and a given. You did not need to go far from the auto show to see how the miracle of

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that technology is not creating jobs in the way it once did and is destroying jobs far faster. This is the same old story about technological unemployment, on steroids: Advancing tech might lead to improvements in living standards and cheaper goods and services. But what is so great about having a self

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. Mass unemployment would likely hit high-income countries first. But it could hit developing nations hardest. There is a more frightening story to tell about technological unemployment in the twenty-first century, though—one that implies that today’s changes are not just a juiced-up version of what has happened in

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good enough and regulatory reforms allowed it, education and health care—two giant and growing employment sectors commonly considered resistant to productivity improvements and to technological unemployment—might find themselves transformed. Cash-strapped state and local governments might allow students to go to school at home, learning and taking tests on smart

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one.” * * * Still, despite the creation of AI and the concern about the future of human labor, the arguments for implementing a UBI to ward off technological unemployment felt hyperbolic—or at least premature—to me. If technology were rapidly improving and putting workers out of their jobs, there would be an easy

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. I know my time has value. I know I have value.” In Santens’s mind, a UBI is not a salve for a world of technological unemployment, or a powerful antipoverty measure, or a form of social dividend, or a way to boost the earnings of the working poor. Rather, it is

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to repair the deep, deep damage that keeps black families poorer, less educated, and less wealthy than white families. All the talk about robots and technological unemployment and worlds without work distinguishes UBI from welfare—a distinction that has muted a conversation about race and universal benefits that seems so salient, vital

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systems for earnings coverage. I kept coming back to the fluid and creative potential of such technology-fueled systems as I wrote about UBI and technological unemployment for this book. On the one hand, they seemed to be little threat to the existing labor market—particularly with such strong growth in jobs

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dwells on the economic particulars, alas. But the famed British macroeconomist was imagining a future iteration of our capitalist society. In that world, facing mass technological unemployment, a permanently lowered demand for labor, and great material abundance, individuals might work fifteen hours a week, he wrote. How to ensure that those scant

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard

by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel  · 3 Oct 2016  · 504pp  · 126,835 words

tends to emerge when unemployment is exceptionally high – and now, when merged with the thesis of an innovation revolution, it has raised the fear of technological unemployment to new heights. The modern version of decoupling is specious, to say the least. It requires a considerable leap of the imagination to claim that

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, changes the composition of labor. Naturally, productivity growth and innovation can lead to capital substituting for labor, and it is generally acknowledged that economies have technological unemployment. Yet such employment tends to be short term. Productivity growth creates more output, and unless there are serious distortions in the economy, it leads to

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of raising welfare through industrialization. Martin Ford’s prediction seemed prescient: “The greatest risk is that we could face a ‘perfect storm’ – a situation where technological unemployment and environmental impact unfold roughly in parallel, reinforcing and perhaps even amplifying each other.”78 Gou was serious about Foxconn’s future in the world

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or highest salaries. Computerization has not changed the positive effects of innovation. As in the past, new technology will substitute for jobs. There is always technological unemployment. But new jobs are created to manage and develop new technology, to spread it in the economy, and to serve new demand that comes from

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and driverless cars debate (i) and regulation (i) tech entrepreneurs (i) tech incubators (i) technofeudal society (i) technological platforms, and regulation (i) technological singularity (i) technological unemployment (i), (ii) technology and capitalism (i) dystopian visions of (i) and economy (i), (ii), (iii) and employment (i) and French dirigisme (i) and innovation success

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predictability; regulatory complexity/uncertainty; volatility unemployment and decoupling (productivity/wages) thesis (i) and Great Recession (i) and New Machine Age hype (i) and productivity (i) technological unemployment (i), (ii) see also labor unicorns (firms) (i) United Kingdom (UK) “boom and bust” and Gordon Brown (i) business investment: declining trend (i); as a

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

by Derek S. Hoff  · 30 May 2012

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

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

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

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

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

by Erik Brynjolfsson  · 23 Jan 2012  · 72pp  · 21,361 words

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay

by Guy Standing  · 13 Jul 2016  · 443pp  · 98,113 words

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory

by Kariappa Bheemaiah  · 26 Feb 2017  · 492pp  · 118,882 words

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