The Infinite Desire for Growth by Daniel Cohen

Author:Daniel Cohen [Cohen, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400889495
Published: 2018-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Marx in Hollywood

Gordon’s pessimism follows in the great tradition of the classical economists, from Malthus to John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx, who announced the coming of a “stationary state,” where growth would come to an end. Marx did not accept the Malthusian demographic explanations of poverty, but he did adopt their main conclusions: “Whatever the level of wages,” he concludes, “the worker’s condition must deteriorate with the accumulation of capital.” For Marx, poverty is a social rather than a biological phenomenon. Machines are among the instruments that capitalists have at their disposal to keep wage earners in poverty. The leading classical economist David Ricardo added a chapter to his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), to show the ambiguous effect machines have on the remuneration of the labor force.

Fear of machines dates back a long time. Emperor Diocletian is said to have banned a machine that raised columns because he did not want to “deprive the people of their bread.” Much later, in 1811, the Luddites, a group of English textile workers, would smash the new power looms to protest against the threat the machines represented to their livelihood.1 These are merely two instances of many. In the second half of the twentieth century, economists sought to appease such fears. Led by the great growth theorist Robert Solow, they argued that machines make workers more productive and thus allow them to benefit from the fruits of growth. Between the years 1945 and 1975, unemployment was at its lowest even as mechanization reached a peak, a circumstance which illustrates the potential benefits of machines: by raising workers’ productivity, machines enabled their wages to rise as well.

The arguments of growth theorists rest therefore on the crucial hypothesis that machines “complement” labor. It is said that one good complements another if, like water and tea leaves, they are both necessary for the final product (tea). Conversely, they are substitutable if, like tea and coffee, a choice is made of one over the other. The question today, however, is less whether “machines replace workers” than specifically which tasks they replace, and which survive.

The economist David Autor emphasizes the uncertainty of this situation as follows: according to one survey, 63 percent of economists claim that “automation” is not responsible for unemployment, but 43 percent agree that the new information and communication technologies are responsible for the stagnation of wages in the United States (30 percent are undecided). As Brynjolfsson and McAfee also say, economists hide (from themselves) a “dirty little secret”: there is nothing to guarantee that everyone will benefit from technological progress.

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