----------------- 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
------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]
|