----------------- 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]