On Apr 16, 2014, at 9:00 AM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > (Go to > http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/business/economy/tech-leaps-job-losses-and-rising-inequality.html > > for useful graphics.) > > NY Times, April 16 2014 > Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality > by Eduardo Porter > [Snip]
> But a growing pessimism has crept into our understanding of the impact > of such innovations. It’s an old fear, widely held since the time of Ned > Ludd, who destroyed two mechanical knitting machines in 19th-century > England and introduced the Luddite movement, humankind’s first organized > protest against technological change. ======== “Thus the injection of surplus noise into public discourse concerning the crisis is Phase One of the agnotological project… Phase Two materializes when economists openly struggle with the contradiction between beseeching the public to place their Trust in the Market and insisting the public trust the Economists.” [Mirowski, in a slightly different yet relevant context, “Never Let…” page 300] > > In its current incarnation, though, the fear is actually very new. It > strikes against bedrock propositions developed over more than half a > century of economic scholarship. It can be articulated succinctly: What > if technology has become a substitute for labor, rather than its complement? > > As J. Bradford Delong, a professor of economics at the University of > California, Berkeley, wrote recently, throughout most of human history > every new machine that took the job once performed by a person’s hands > and muscles increased the demand for complementary human skills — like > those performed by eyes, ears or brains. > > But, Mr. Delong pointed out, no law of nature ensures this will always > be the case. Some jobs — nannies, say, or waiting tables — may always > require lots of people. But as information technology creeps into > occupations that have historically relied mostly on brainpower, it > threatens to leave many fewer good jobs for people to do. > > These sorts of ideas still strike most mainstream economists as > heretical, an uncalled-for departure from a canon that states that > capital — from land and lathes to computers and cyclotrons — is > complementary to labor. > > It was a canon written by economists like Robert Solow, who won the > Nobel in economic science for his work on how labor, capital and > technological progress contribute to economic growth. He proposed more > than 50 years ago that the share of an economy’s rewards accruing to > labor and capital would be roughly stable over the long term. > Where’s Harry Frankfurt when you need him? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
