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From:
Forstater (Forstater)
Date:
Fri Mar 31 17:18:31 2006
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----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
 
A classic but greatly overlooked article is Hans Neisser, "'Permanent' 
Technological Unemployment," American Economic Review, 32, 1942.  The 
article is 
sub-titled "Demand for commodities is not the demand for men" referring of 
course to J. S. Mill's famous statement. Neisser was part of the Kiel 
School/New 
School crowd (though I don't believe he was actually at Kiel, but the 
article 
reflects that group's concerns and others from that group were his later 
colleagues at the Graduate Faculty of the New School).  The Kiel School 
view has 
been admirably summarized in a number of articles by Harald Hagemann, and 
Hagemann also has an entry on technological unemployment in one of the 
Elgar 
Handbooks that discusses the Neisser article in history-of-thought context. 
 A 
longer version of that entry is in a ch. of an edited collection, possibly 
edited by Malcolm Sawyer (?) and almost definitely published by Elgar.  
Another 
Kiel School/New School figure, Adolph Lowe, also had a number of important 
pieces that fit the request, including one called "Technological 
Unemployment 
Reexamined," in G. Eisermann (ed.): Wirtschaft und Kultursystem, Eugen 
Rentsch 
Verlag, 1955 (article is in English).  A related book that surveys the 
history 
of thought on the topic is A. Gourvitch, Survey of Economic Theory on 
Technological Change and Employment, 1940, Kelley reprint.  These works 
will 
assist one greatly and present a greatly underexamined and underappreciated 
literature of both historical, theoretical, and contemporary policy 
relevance. 
Keynes did not examine technological change or income distribution in The 
General Theory, and although this crowd admired much about Keynes, they 
felt 
this was a major drawback of the work that did not consider how mass 
unemployment may be due not only to effective demand problems, but to 
technological change.  Even the two may be related, of course.  Once one 
relaxes 
these two key assumptions of Keynes, labor-displacing technical change 
causing a 
shift in income distribution away from wages toward profits may set off an 
effective demand crisis if there are differing marginal propensities to 
consumer 
between workers and capitalists. Finally, let me mention an article by 
Nathan 
Belfer from Social Research from the late forties or fifties called 
"Implications of Capital-saving inventions" that considers the possibility 
that 
capital-saving imporvements may have labor-saving effects. 
 
Mat Forstater 
 
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